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Their first office was an abandoned trailer moved by a crane operator he paid for with a bag of Scotch.
Top Gun Mira Mesa
Since fly-by-nights began 50 years ago, it has become the most famous aviation training program in military history: Topgun.
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Not "Top Gun," the 1986 film starring Tom Cruise, which is slated for a sequel next summer. Topgun, Graduate School for Navy Pilots. People outside the military have a hard time separating the two, even now, because they have a hard time remembering that the program is no longer in San Diego. He moved to Fallon, Nevada, 20 years ago, where he teaches new generations of men and women in the deadly dance of aerial combat.
The success and public acclaim surrounding the Topgun belies the failures of the 1960s that spawned it. But the men who were there originally, known as the "Original Brothers," have not been forgotten, and sometimes worry that the mistakes that led to the school's founding are now being repeated.
At that time, American aviation was attacking Vietnam at an alarming rate. For every two enemy ships they lost one of their own. This was a far cry from the World War II kill rate, when Hellcat pilots took down about 20 Japanese planes for every American lost.
Many factors contributed to the change in fortunes, but the main one was the Pentagon's fascination with new technologies. And the defense industry is happy to sell them.
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Carl Zingheim, USS Midway Museum historian, said, “The Navy did everything in the missile era. This meant that the aircraft, the Phantom F-4, was built to engage long-range bombers and interceptors. Designed to fire air-to-air missiles. It didn't even come with an automatic.
"They saw dogfighting as an old-fashioned way," Zingheim said, "something like the era of silk scarves and open cockpits."
The pilots were trained accordingly, but on arrival in Vietnam they were given rules of engagement to follow before firing on enemy aircraft. No problem if the rockets worked. More often they miss the mark.
And these rules of engagement brought the pilots closer to their North Vietnamese counterparts, who were flying smarter Soviet-made fighters and trained in dogfighting.
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"We were fighting the wrong war with the wrong equipment, the wrong training," said Darrell Gary, a Navy aviator at the time.
In 1968, the Navy commissioned a study called the Ault Report, which detailed the problems and recommended several improvements. One of them was the establishment of the "Advanced Combat Weapons School" at Naval Air Station Miramar.
Lieutenant Cmdr. Dan Pedersen, a veteran pilot and novice tactics instructor, was in charge. You will have free reign, they said, but you will have no funds. Neither an office nor a classroom. Your planes will be on loan.
Pedersen is now 83, retired from the Navy and the Air Force. He lives in Palm Springs. His memoir, Topgun: An American Story, was published in March. It details a military career that spanned nearly 40 years and included combat tours in Vietnam and assignments in command of the replenishment ship Wichita and the aircraft carrier Ranger.
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He had been in the Navy for 16 years when he led the program, and had plenty of time to hear stories and meet former combat pilots. The first squadron to join it was in the North Island in 1957 and was commanded by Eugene Valencia, who shot down 23 Japanese aircraft during World War II, including six aircraft carriers.
However, as he began his career, the Pentagon was moving away from close-range tactics and relying on air-to-air missiles. Schools where dogfighting was taught were closed and any pilots caught practicing what was known informally as a "hustle" would be disciplined, possibly forced out of the job. He will also be dismissed from the job.
The pilots did it anyway, including Pederson, congregating in restricted airspace near San Clemente Island. One after the other, the pilots would "flip the bird" to accept the challenge and then go through tight turns and steep dives until one of them yelled uncle and spat out his wings.
"When you develop your strategies, you have to test them against somebody else, and this was the place to do that," Pedersen said in a recent telephone interview. "You have to check yourself and you have to check your plane."
Marine Corps Air Station Miramar
All of this shaped his thinking when he started Topgun. From the Israeli Air Force, which had previously put together a training program on short notice, he selected eight pilots as instructors in the first class, each specializing in specific skills: aerodynamics, tactics, situational awareness, radar, weapons placement and more.
Steve Smith, chosen for his ability to do certain things, went looking for office space on base. Near the operations center, he found a 10-by-40-foot trailer, damaged and abandoned, and offered the crane operator a Scotch case to move it into the hangar. Smith also undid the office furniture for some reason.
Instructors spent a weekend installing flooring in the trailer, painting it with red trim and hanging a sign out front: Naval Weapons School. But it was still known as Topgun, a name borrowed from an annual air gun competition in the 1950s.
They developed a four-week curriculum, testing each of their teaching skills in brutal sessions known as "kill boards." They perfected training ideas in desert and sea flights, particularly a vertical maneuver they called the "egg," an elevated parabola that allowed them to lift an enemy plane up and then descend to attack it.
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The first class of eight - four pilots and four rear seaters, known as RIOs, Radar Interference Officers - was called up on 3 March 1969. Finding students was not easy.
"Top Gun was not well received at first," said Gary, who was one of the original instructors. "Squadron commanders would look at us and say, 'I'm the best, my guys are the best, who are you in the funny trailer with the red trim telling us what to do?'
But the first group returned to their squadron with new knowledge of tactics and missile systems and taught other pilots, and enthusiasm for the training spread. Soon there was a waiting list to get in.
In March 1970, for the first time in two years, a Navy Phantom destroyed a MiG in combat over Vietnam. Back at Miramar, the instructors worked on contacts to get the pilot's name. He was Jerry Beaulieu. And he was in Topgun's inaugural class.
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Other graduates returned to their squadrons, from Vietnam to aircraft carriers, back to the skies where the Navy's kill rate against MiGs was 24 to 1 by the end of the war. What started in the Miramar trailer has changed a lot. Flying was taught and influenced the design of aircraft and weapon systems. However, almost no one outside the military has heard of the rifle.
Then, in 1983, California magazine published an article about the program by journalist Ehud Yon. Hollywood producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson read it and decided to make a film.
It starred Cruise as Lt. Pete "Maverick" Mitchell; Val Kilmer as his rival, Lt. Tom "Iceman" Kazansky; and Kelly McGillis as her love interest, Charlie Blackwood. When it was released in May 1986, it was an instant hit with audiences – less so with critics – and became the highest-grossing film of the year. It won the Academy Award for Best Original Song.
San Diego also played in the movie. Cruise spent months filming in and around San Diego. They used the Coast Guard houses at the bottom of Point Loma for the scene where Maverick learns how his father, a military pilot, died. They used the dressing room for the Plunge in Mission Bay scene, where Maverick and Iceman cling to each other on the field. Maverick and his soon-to-be-dead sidekick, Nick "Gus" Bradshaw (played by Anthony Edwards), belt out "Big Balls of Fire" at the Kansas City Barbeque Center.
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When the filmmakers needed a shot of Maverick following Charlie's house on his motorcycle, they went to Oceanside and used an 1887 Victorian cottage on Pacific Street.
All of this gave the region the kind of golden glow that only the big screen could, which only intensified as the film became a pop culture staple—record-breaking home video sales, a multi-platinum soundtrack, an in-demand blockbuster. Jacket and Ray-Bans. The film, the school that inspired it, and San Diego are intertwined. Cards and letters from all over the world, addressed
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