Top Gun: Maverick, Tom Cruise

Details of the plane are, indeed, taken out of real experimental aircraft built by Lockheed Martin's super-secret Skunk Works.

“For me, just being kind of an aviation buff, and always loving that world, the idea to give people a peek behind the curtain of secret projects…I worked with Skunk Works, which is the division of Lockheed, that actually makes these type of aircraft because I wanted it to feel as real as possible,” he told Comic Book Movie.com this week. The plane was housed outside over night, but under a “temporary hanger,” likely frustrating interested parties overseas. Yeah, I just wanted to show the audience that the first few minutes definitely feels like a Top Gun movie, but once he gets in that jet, I do also want you to know that we’re telling a whole new story, and that sequence kind of helped set that tone up for the movie.” One other big difference is that the Darkstar, being Tom Cruise’s plane, goes to Mach 10. The short answer is likely “No.” A flash of the scene in an early behind-the-scenes trailer set the aviation blogosphere aflutter — and not just because of the mind-blowing visual. Some reports have maintained the SR-72 could be “rolled out for initial flight demonstrations by no later than 2023.” Lockheed, in its original announcement, claimed the game-changer could be operational by 2030. That’s how real it looks.” In a half-second, the flyby literally blows the roof off the shack. Not much more was heard about the so-called “Son of Blackbird” until Lockheed confirmed engine tests in 2017. They thought it was real. SPOILER ALERT – This story contains Top Gun: Maverick plot points: In the opening moments of Top Gun: Maverick, Tom Cruise’s Capt. Pete Mitchell takes an an experimental hypersonic plane called “The Darkstar” on an unauthorized test run.