Watching “Top Gun: Maverick” must be an experience that hits close to home for alumni of the U.S. Navy Strike Fighter Tactics Instructor Program.

That’s the formal name what usually is called TOPGUN, the Navy’s school for flight officers in Fallon, Nev.

Crafton native Evan Werner has been there and done that, in both cases.

“I did see it in Tunisia, in French with English subtitles,” he told a group of people who had just viewed the film for themselves at the Phoenix Theatre in Collier.

The 2018 TOPGUN graduate attended an early July event organized by Todd DePastino of Mt. Lebanon, executive director of the Veterans Breakfast Club, during which retired military pilots compared what they witnessed in Tom Cruise’s latest starring role to what they experienced in real life.

“From my perspective, it was incredibly accurate, from the startup sequence to the F/A-18,” Werner said about the type of aircraft he flew for 11 years, “to intricacies of flight.”

In general, his opinion was shared by “Maverick” movie watchers who served as pilots during the Vietnam War.

“I think they did a heck of a good job,” Navy veteran Rick Novosel said, with particular praise for director Joseph Kosinski’s depictions of occurrences aboard an aircraft carrier.

“If something happened, everyone had a responsibility for something. No one was playing around,” Novosel said. “You have planes landing. You have planes launching, planes moving on elevators. It’s chaos, but it’s controlled.”

Air Force veteran Larry Googins admitted to initial skepticism.

“I’m one of the biggest critics of movies that have airplanes in them, because I always wonder why they didn’t make it accurate,” he said. “I think the story is just as well done if it’s done correctly. But Hollywood has to add something to it.”

Cruise’s latest turn as primo pilot Pete Mitchell impressed him, though.

“I thought it was a really good movie,” Googins said. “The action shots they had were amazing. How they do that, I don’t think any of us knows.”

He did notice some not-quite-accurate sequences as far as friction that develops between certain characters.

“When you put two fighter pilots together, you pick on each other, like all veterans do with each other. I pick on the Navy. They pick on the Air Force. But they don’t do it exactly the way Hollywood, in either this movie or the first movie,” he said about the 1986 original, “depicts it. You don’t actually get in each other’s face. If you do something like that, it’s jokingly.”

And so it’s supposed to go in the U.S. military.

“You have to depend on your buddies. And in flying, it’s the same way,” Googins said. “You see some of that in this movie. You have to depend on your wingman, and the wingman has to depend on the flight lead. So you’re not going to criticize someone who might be out there who’s going to save your butt.”

Another Navy veteran, Jim McStay, complimented the technical authenticity of “Top Gun: Maverick.”

“I think we thank Tom Cruise, first of all, for insisting that they don’t do any CGI,” he said, referencing the type of computer-generated imagery that often strays from accurate portrayals. “All those cockpit pictures were done with real cameras.”

Speaking of the lead actor, he was on site for filming at Lemoore Naval Air Station in California while Werner happened to be stationed there.

“Every day, Tom Cruise would actually fly up to our base from Van Nuys, which is a small airport in Los Angeles, in the P-51 Mustang at the end of the movie,” Werner said, with not too much of a spoiler alert. “That’s actually his plane.

While Cruise was working, he’d allow certain service people to fly in the aircraft with his mechanic, Werner not included.

“It was a lottery for the entire base, thousands of people,” he said. “But he was very generous in that aspect. He’s a very genuine person, a very nice man, and that is all real footage. We’d see the plane leave the flight line just decked out with cameras in the cockpit.”

Werner agreed that scenes of overt conflict between pilots may qualify as a reach.

“In Naval aviation, we do a very good job of squashing that type of mentality early on,” he said. “Even at TOPGUN, the moment you showed any signs of an ego or elitism, you were shut down immediately. So a lot of us have learned to be very, very humble.

“We’ve found that by being very humble and approachable, the next generation of Naval aviator that we’re training is going to be much more receptive to the teaching that we’re going to be giving to them.”

The Veterans Breakfast Club’s mission is to create communities of listening around veterans and their stories to ensure that this living history never will be forgotten. For more information, visit veteransbreakfastclub.org.

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