California Magazine’s article describes a crew from F-14 training at Top Gun consisting of Lieutenants Alex (“Yogi”) Hnarakis, the pilot or stick man up front, and Dave (“Possum”) Cully, the navigator and radar intercept officer who sits behind him. The author describes Yogi as a handsome, John Travolta-like man in his mid-20s with black hair and a broad smile, while he describes Possum as a much more average everyday man with brown hair and mustache. It is hard not to read the story of these two pilots going out on a “hop” or exercise that feels pulled straight from the movie and not see Maverick and Goose in your mind’s eye.

The article goes on to describe the maneuvers they are learning and how they can keep themselves alive when school is out and they are called to the unfriendly skies. Any “Top Gun” fan will stop scrolling near the bottom when they land on a photo of two fighter planes flying together, one inverted over the other. The image seems to have been pulled straight from the page to the screen when Maverick and Goose were “‘keeping up foreign relations,’ you know, the finger?” Even though the movie may have been written with fictitious characters, the school and the things that happen there are not so unreal.

One other aspect of the film that is not real is the trophy. According to Tim “Ain’t” Myers (covered by Task & Purpose), the real-life opposite of “Jester” (Michael Ironside), the school doesn’t have a trophy and never will. It isn’t about standing out; it’s about working together.