Neil DeGrasse Tyson Says ‘Top Gun’ Stunt Would Splatter Tom Cruise

Neil deGrasse Tyson said Tom Cruise’s pilot shouldn’t survive the “Top Gun: Maverick” opening stunt.
The scientist took to Twitter to explain how the supersonic speeds would’ve killed him.
Tyson also suggested an interesting change to the movie’s climactic scenes.
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Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has become a reliable source of scientific facts and knowledge about the universe, so much so that he’s hosted a number of documentaries and shows about topics like black holes, time, and the wider cosmos.
But he occasionally applies real science to movies and TV shows to explain how they wouldn’t work, recently taking aim at Tom Cruise’s “Top Gun: Maverick.”
The hugely successful movie sees Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Tom Cruise) come back to the Top Gun Academy to train a new cohort of fighter pilots to undertake a near-impossible mission to preemptively stop a foreign power from getting its hands on nuclear weapons. But according to Tyson, Cruise’s iconic character wouldn’t have made it past the opening plane stunt.
Before Maverick goes back to Top Gun, he makes a living flying experimental planes, and pushes himself to hit Mach 10.5 in a last-ditch effort to prove his superiors wrong — and ends up having to eject. But according to Tyson, the ace pilot should’ve faced a grisly death as soon as he exited the plane.
The scientist tweeted on Sunday: “Maverick ejects from a hyper sonic plane at Mach 10.5, before it crashed. He survived with no injuries. At that air speed, his body would splatter like a chainmail glove swatting a worm.”
—Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) October 9, 2022
Tyson added: “At supersonic speeds, air cannot smoothly part for you. You must pierce it, which largely accounts for the difference in fuselage designs between subsonic and supersonic planes. For this reason, the air on your body, if ejecting at these speeds, might as well be a brick wall.”
Basically, the film would’ve been over before it had even really begun.
—Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) October 9, 2022
The scientist explained the situation in much more detail in another tweet, saying: “When Maverick ejected at Mach 10.5, he was going 7,000 mph, giving him 400 million joules of kinetic energy — the explosive power of 100 kg of TNT. A situation that human physiology is not designed to survive.” He added: “So, no. Maverick does not walk away from this. He be dead. Very dead.”
—Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) October 9, 2022
Well, it’s a good job director Joseph Kosinski didn’t take the real-world approach to the hugely successful sequel, since it raked in $1.48 billion worldwide, according to Box Office Mojo.
But Tyson’s criticisms didn’t stop with the film’s opening, as he pointed out there might’ve been an easier solution to the mountainside climax, in which the pilots have to fly low to avoid the enemy’s radar.
He explained: “they dangerously fly under the radar, through a narrow, winding canyon to destroy a target, avoiding multiple banks of surface-to-air missiles. But why not first take out the missile banks? Could then fly without daredevil maneuvers. Just sayin’.”
—Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) October 9, 2022