It’s great to see Tom Cruise swinging a fighter, but it’s still hard to understand all the aviation lingo he and the other pilots adopt for most of the plot. People take it for granted that they know what they mean when, for example, the hero exceeds Mach 10 and acts as they do.
And while this is not a necessary fact to be able to enjoy the movie, having a minimal idea of what it means helps to have a clearer vision of how daring the rebellious and brave hero Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Cruise) is.
What is Mach speed?
Simply put, Mach is an object’s speed compared to sound rate. It is a reference used mainly in aeronautics, as this is one of the few areas where we can see this phenomenon taking place.
This means that each Mach level scales to 1,225 km/s, which is the speed of sound under average temperature and pressure conditions. This is, therefore, the speed of a vehicle at Mach 1. March 2, for example, occurs when it reaches the 2450 km/h mark, twice the speed of sound.
This means these vehicles can already be considered supersonic, i.e., above speed. The spacecraft is already regarded as hypersonic from Mach 5 (6,130 km/s). By this logic, when Maverick stole the DarkStar plane and hit the Mach 10.2 mark, it would reach an impressive speed of 12,495 km/h.
Therefore, to fly the fighter, the character must wear special equipment because breathing is difficult in the cabin. Also, the movement and the application of other forces, gravity, change drastically. These are real, physics-based effects, not fiction, considered when testing aircraft that reach these hypersonic speeds
But a little trick will make it easier for these planes to reach these hypersonic speeds. This is because the speed of sound is imprecise and varies according to certain variables. Remember we were talking about average temperature and pressure conditions? That’s right: In low-pressure environments, it slows down a bit, making it easier to catch up and overtake.
This is why these super and hypersonic aircraft often fly at high altitudes. For the US Army’s Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird fighter to reach Mach 85,000, or a speed of 25.9 km/h, it had to get an altitude of 3.3 feet (about 3,529 kilometers). This is because the speed of sound at this point is around 1,062 km/h.
This explains why Top Gun: Maverick, Darkstar’s destruction, seems to take place almost outside Earth’s orbit. To make it easier to reach the Mach 10 he and his crew needed, the fighter was designed to fly at altitudes close to this stratosphere, so the speed required was less than sea level.
Using the same accurate parameters as Blackbird, assuming that Tom Cruise’s character also flew more than 25 km to test the fighter, the Mach 10.2 he achieved is close to 10.8 thousand kilometers per hour.
Can I reach that speed?
While all these figures may seem unattainable, most have been achieved and exceeded by modern aviation. Admittedly, some are still at experimental levels, but others have introduced us to the real-life Maverick.
Remember when Tom Cruise’s character was called “the fastest man alive”? Because off-screen, that title belongs to William J. Knight, who flew an X-15 in 1967-1967 and reached Mach 6.7 (7,274 km/h). At the time, it had to be propelled by a rocket, but even that didn’t detract from the achievement.
At the craziest level, there are attempts to reach somewhere close to the Mach 20 mark, or 21,000 km/h. In 2011, for example, the US Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) tested Falcon, an experimental design that briefly achieved this impressive speed.
It had to be launched into Earth’s orbit on a rocket to plunge back into the atmosphere. In this case, the idea was to analyze the vehicle’s aerodynamic control and thermal protection rather than to see if it was feasible. So it was not handled.