I was in Air Force Junior ROTC when the movie came out and one of the pilots, CDR Denny Broska, came to the local airshow we were working at Tallahassee, Florida, with one of the F-14s supposedly he used in the movie. I reemmber asking about the "canopy to canopy" shot, and he swore they'd actually filmed it and got that close, but they couldn't keep up that distance for more than a few seconds and the camera geeks could never get a good shot of them doing it. After a few tries, they gave up and used the split screen. He said he was pretty ticked because his pilot buddies gave him crap about he couldn't really do it, when he knew he
could, and
had, several times.
mustangdriver wrote:
The actors actually flew in the F-14's for some time.
Maybe
some of them got to go up, but I know for a fact Tom Cruise did not. He wanted to, and the Navy would have likely been fine with it, but the producers said heck no, because if something had gone wrong, their movie would have crashed (pun intended). I got that
personally from Tom Cruise himself a few years ago!
Moonlight wrote:
Another quick fact associated with the flat spin scene where Goose is killed: Art Scholl, the famed aerobatic performer, was flying his Pitts w/ a camera mounted on it when he entered an inverted flat spin in order to get that footage for the movie, and wasn't able to recover from it. He crashed into the Pacific, and his body was never recovered.

I never knew that. I found more data on that here:
http://www.check-six.com/lib/Famous_Missing/Scholl.htm