Top Gun producer Jerry Bruckheimer has revealed a jet used in the new film looked so realistic that it caught the attention of a Chinese spy satellite, Emily Brown reports in Unilad.
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Top Gun Maverick's "Darkstar" fake secret stealth jet was co-designed by Skunk Works, hence the misleading of the Chinese spy satellite. (Picture source: screenshot from "Top Gun Maverick" by Paramount Pictures, via Unilad)
Jerry Bruckheimer said Tom Cruise(Pete Michell, in the movie) can really be seen in the film flying a World War 2 North American P-51D Mustang fighter plane (his own, that he bought for USD 4 million in 2001?) as well as some helicopters, but there was one aircraft creators had to fake onset: Tom Cruise's secret hypersonic stealth jet Darkstar. Both Bruckheimer and director Joseph Kosinski have revealed they worked with engineers from Lockheed Martin’s legendary Skunk Works to come up with the design and to build a full-scale model of Darkstar, with the collaboration resulting in a prop so realistic it managed to dupe those in charge of a Chinese satellite, Emily Brown reports. In an interview with Sandboxx News, Bruckheimer said: “The Navy told us that a Chinese satellite turned and headed on a different route to photograph that plane. They thought it was real. That’s how real it looks."
Kosinski credited Skunk Works with making the Darkstar mockup plane look as convincing as it does, explaining the reason he approached the manufacturer in the first place was that he wanted to make the 'most realistic hypersonic aircraft we possibly could'. "We built it full-scale in cooperation with them”, Kosinski told Sandboxx News, adding: "But the reason it looks so real is that it was the engineers from Skunk Works who helped us design it. So those are the same people who are working on real aircraft who helped us design Darkstar for this film.
Skunk Works is an official pseudonym for Lockheed Martin's Advanced Development Programs (ADP), formerly called Lockheed Advanced Development Projects. It is responsible for a number of aircraft designs, beginning with the P-38 Lightning in 1939 and the P-80 Shooting Star in 1943. Skunk Works engineers subsequently developed the U-2, SR-71 Blackbird, F-117 Nighthawk, F-22 Raptor, and F-35 Lightning II. The Skunk Works name was taken from the moonshine factory in the comic strip Li'l Abner. The designation "Skunk Works" or "Skunkworks" is widely used in business, engineering, and technical fields to describe a group within an organization given a high degree of autonomy and unhampered by bureaucracy, with the task of working on advanced or secret projects.
Tom Cruise on his own North American P-51D Mustang (serial nr. 44-12840) at Marana Regional Airport (Picture source: Twitter account Town of Marana)
