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The fake hypersonic plane in 'Top Gun: Maverick' looked so real that China moved a satellite to see it |
2022-05-06 |
[BusinessInsider] The long-awaited "Top Gun: Maverick" will fly into theaters later this month, and while most of the movie features very real US Navy aircraft, there's one exotic platform aviation buffs might not recognize: the hypersonic Darkstar. Darkstar may not be a real airplane, but it certainly looks the part — so much so that the Navy apparently told Top Gun's producer, legendary filmmaker Jerry Bruckheimer, that China re-oriented spy satellites to get a glimpse of the full-size mock-up they built for filming. "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," Bruckheimer told Sandboxx News. According to Bruckheimer and Joseph Kosinski, the film's director, they actually worked with engineers out of Lockheed Martin's famed Skunk Works on the design. "Joe worked with Skunk Works and Lockheed [Martin] to design the plane that's in there. So they had a lot of fun doing Darkstar," Bruckheimer said. The finished product looked awfully believable, which the director credits to support the film received from Skunk Works. "The reason we approached Skunk Works is because I wanted to make the most realistic hypersonic aircraft we possibly could. In fact, as you saw, we built it full-scale in cooperation with them," Kosinski told Sandboxx News. "But the reason it looks so real is because 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." If any firm could make a fake aircraft seem real enough to fool the Chinese military into re-orienting a spy satellite to snap pictures of it, it would be Lockheed Martin's legendary Skunk Works. The firm has specialized in designing groundbreaking classified military aircraft for literally decades. |
Posted by:DarthVader |
#5 It's not so much satellite coverage of a fake plane, as they wanted to see if it actually moved. 'Cause then it's not a fake. |
Posted by: ed in texas 2022-05-06 12:41 |
#4 And Fang Fang. |
Posted by: swksvolFF 2022-05-06 11:52 |
#3 Seems likely to me the US used 'fake plane for a movie' disinformation more than once as cover for a real plane. They'd be fools to not check it out. That is what the satellites are for. |
Posted by: ruprecht 2022-05-06 10:31 |
#2 It's easy to make fun of this. It could also be looked at as erring on the side of caution. See: dummy tanks in Britain during WW II. |
Posted by: M. Murcek 2022-05-06 07:21 |
#1 ...This has actually happened twice before - with the Hammerhead fighter mockups from Space: Above And Beyond and then with the Eddie mockup from the film Stealth. Mike |
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski 2022-05-06 06:32 |