‘Top Gun’ is an icon of the eighties, also for real Mavericks, the fighter pilots of the Royal Netherlands Air Force. The Air Force took full advantage of the ‘Top Gun’ effect when recruiting new pilots and could use such a boost from the sequel to the hit film.
Commander Joost ‘Niki’ Luijsterburg did not know what he saw when he got off the train at Gilze-Rijen station in the mid-1980s for his inspection. The platform was chock-full of mostly male aspiring fighter pilots. Many looked exactly like protagonist Tom Cruise from Top Gun † With Ray Ban aviator glasses casually on the nose and a leather aviator jacket full of patches around the shoulders. Luijsterburg was scared to death, he says in the book Mission F-16 † Did he make it through the selection with more competition than he could have ever imagined? In clothes of the Wibra, without aviator glasses.
The answer was yes. The boy from Brabant succeeded where Maverick’s likenesses remarkably often did not survive, and he is now the Netherlands’ most experienced F-16 pilot. As commander of the training unit in Tucson (USA), he prepares the next generation of fighter pilots for missions.
Air Force benefited from hero epic for years
What Luijsterburg saw, it was Top Gun -effect. In the United States, the film about the elite training for pilots for pilots of the US Navy acted as a magnet for young people who had to make a career choice. The number of applications for US Navy pilot training increased fivefold after the film’s release. Thanks also to a recruitment campaign in which the navy set up stalls in cinemas where interested parties could register while the closing notes of Harald Faltermeyer’s roaring synthesizer soundtrack still reverberated. The Royal Netherlands Air Force did not go that far, but according to spokesman Niels Vredegoor also benefited fully. Even years after the epic’s release.
“I was in the Royal Military Academy in the late 1990s and I had classmates whose seed to join the Air Force had been sown by Top Gun ”, says Vredegoor. “There were cadets who largely knew the film by heart, including lyrics and songs. Some of our pilots still think it’s a great movie, even though they know it’s not realistic. It remains a film, not a documentary. For that reason, another part of the kite community wants nothing to do with it.”
Tom Cruise was so cool
One of the moviegoers for whom Top Gun A life-changing experience was Annemiek ‘Miep’ Macco, who became an F-16 pilot. As the daughter of the legendary fighter pilot Major General Berry Macco, she dreamed of becoming an aviator, but it was only after Tom Cruise that she decided to join the Air Force. “I was very proud of my father, but Cruise was so cool as a teenager. I too was captivated by the Hollywood quality. Top Gun made fighter jets glamourous †
“I stuck to my choice. If Tom and my father can do that, then I should be able to too, I thought as a teenager. It turned out to be a bit more complex, at seventeen I didn’t pass the psychological assessment because I wasn’t strong enough yet. But in the end I succeeded.”
Not a big campaign
Macco is really looking forward to seeing Maverick in the cinema. “I will probably come out with the idea: this was not right and that was not right. But that doesn’t really matter,” says the pilot, who currently works at KLM. “The images are flashy and I expect that typical humor again. I hope for the old magic and hopefully young visitors feel it too. I saw a lady in the trailer, so who knows, maybe Maverick will deliver new female Dutch fighter pilots. I stopped eighteen years ago, so it might be about time again.”
Although Defense is struggling with enormous staff shortages and the film is a proven success in terms of recruitment, no major campaign is planned. It is only attempted to profit from the film through expressions on social media. According to Vredegoor, because there is no shortage of aspiring pilots. “We have enough interested people. Our personnel problem is in retaining experienced pilots and getting specialized technical personnel. The latter category is especially difficult. Other solutions are needed for those personnel problems.”