The US Navy lent Tom Cruise F/A-18 Super Hornets for the new “Top Gun” movie. The only catches: The studio paid as much as $11,374 an hour to use the advanced fighter planes -- and Cruise couldn’t touch the controls.
The “Mission Impossible” star, famous for performing his own stunts, insisted that all the actors portraying pilots on the long-delayed “Top Gun: Maverick” film fly in one of the fighter jets built by Boeing Co. so they could understand what it feels like to be a pilot operating under the strain of immense gravitational forces. Cruise, 59, had also flown in a jet for the original “Top Gun,” a smash hit in 1986.
