I had the Nintendo game. I played Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone” in my grandfather’s New Yorker many, many times over. Sure, the song was on the cassette that came with the Infinity sound system as a way of showcasing the capabilities of the uprated noise maker, but for me, it was all about two afterburners and some radical action in the air. In 1988, five-year-old me thought that outside of riding a rocket into space, this was the ultimate thrill ride. Thirty years on, that’s pretty much fact. I’ve been lucky to work around Air Force and Navy pilots and when you get them chatting, every last one recounts their time as a throttle jockey or RIO with a sense of wonder, like “…and I don’t know how the hell they let me do the things I’ve done over the years, but I got away with it.”

With the upcoming release of Top Gun: Maverick for next year, and the fact that I’m 95% sure that Chad watched the original the second after he finished up with the teaser trailer, I figured that it wouldn’t hurt to go back and look (and listen) to the sound and fury that the Tomcat was. Let’s face facts: I could care less about Tom Cruise’s acting, and I was too young for Kelly McGillis back in the day. I was hooked on the action. I wanted to see the jet trails streaming out of the back. I wanted to see steam catapult launches off of the deck. I wanted to see rolls, chandelles, and a pissed-off Commander with coffee running down the front of his uniform after a not-so-approved fly-by. In person, Tomcats shriek and scream. The noise sounds like two GE F110s trying to rip the sky apart and with afterburner on, you’d start looking for the rip in the stars.

The F-14 was retired in 2006 and the aircraft that weren’t taken up as museum displays were shredded. Iran, the only other country to get the F-14 (they had a deal with the United States before the fall of the Shah in 1979) still use them.