Top Gun: Maverick’s actors really did go up in those F/A-18s – and it was just as brutal as you’d imagine

gamesradar.com:

In abstract, Tom Cruise bootcamp sounds fun, right? We’re imagining lectures on scaling buildings, advice on a long Hollywood career, and time for anecdotes of working with everyone from Ridley Scott to Steven Spielberg. Well, think again. For Top Gun: Maverick, bootcamp meant a four-month-long training process to get the cast ready to tackle a feat previously unachieved on screen – filming in the Navy’s F/A-18s.

"It was very intense," Jay Ellis, who plays Payback explains to Total Film. "I mean, training for it was crazy. It was nonstop." 

The cast started off in a prop plane before graduating to real jets as they built up their g-force resistance. All the while, they were working on their fitness, swimming strength, and the ability to not puke every time the jets took a turn. "We were thrown into like hours of flight training, 40 hours of flight training across three different aircraft," Ellis continues. "We were doing swim training along the way with the US open water Olympic swim coach because there was this big swim fitness test that we had to take in order to be able to fly in the F/A-18s."

"We started in the same procedure that you would go through if you were trying to get your pilot's license," Miles Teller, who plays Rooster, continues. "We would fly in a specimen and then move our way up. And yeah, I mean, it was a lot. We were flying at one point every day and certainly multiple times a week pretty much for about a year."

And this isn’t to mention some of the exercises they had to go through, including an underwater endurance test that has had a lingering effect on some of the cast. "Water only belongs in a bathtub," jokes Greg 'Tarzan' Davies, who plays Coyote. "It was a traumatic experience. Imagine being