Friday I finally got around to taking out our birthday boys (2 in July). One stop was to see the fairly new Imax film Fighter Pilot. We saw it in a 2-D theatre; I don’t know if it’s also in 3-D or not. It’s about the U.S. Air Force’s Red Flag exercises, which are based at Nellis AFB in Nevada and similar to the Navy’s better-known Top Gun school.
I was impressed with how many aircraft they managed to fit in roughly a 48-minute film. Of course there were F-15s, -16s, and -18s, but the A-10 also got a lot of coverage, as well as an E-? AWACS aircraft. The AWACS displays were really impressive, but it still looked like it would be hard to keep track of all those aircraft in the sky.
Apparently Red Flag is a substantially larger-scale wargaming operation than Top Gun, or maybe the film just didn’t distinguish that from the training. There were quite a few other aircraft shown briefly. Some of my favorites were of the B-1, the F-117 (I like its looks more and more over time!), and of course the cockpit views.
One thing I couldn’t help notice is how many flares are used nowadays, to counter potential IR missile threats. I wonder whether all that is controlled by software or just the pilot. One thing they were trying hard to convey was the sense of how much firepower these machines carry, but I don’t really think they succeeded there.
Helicopter gunships and A-10s are awesome fighting machines, though now increasingly vulnerable to ground attack. I have seen A-10s doing a lot of low-level maneuvering in Louisiana, near Ft. Polk (perhaps the aircraft were from Barksdale). Those aircraft can make a run, turn and come right back. It must be truly awful to be attacked by A-10s or some of the big helicopters such as the Russians used in Afghanistan. After going through that I don’t doubt that a lot of those fighters (some now our enemies) really are tough.
It’s hard to complain much about what wasn’t covered because of the film’s length. Overall, I liked it quite a bit. The best parts were definitely scenes of aircraft in flight. If you like aerospace, and have been working too long lately, it might just be the something different you need for a break. I definitely would like to see it again if in 3-D.
