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Ever since I watched Top Gun: Maverick for the first time, I have wanted to know more about these characters that we get to know in the movie. I’ve wanted to know their backstories. When did they join the Navy? What kind of things have they been doing before the mission? Do they know each other from before? Those kinds of things. But since there is very little information available, I decided to do some research myself. I’ve spent hours upon hours on Wikipedia, reading about strike fighter squadrons, aircraft carriers, and medal ribbons. Essentially, I took the smallest of details from the movie and extracted every bit of information I could from that, to build a backstory for these characters.
Disclaimer 1: I’m not American. Almost everything I know about the U.S. Military and the U.S. Navy is based on Wikipedia. It is very likely that I have missed or misunderstood things. Please let me know if you see something that is wrong.
Disclaimer 2: Everything stated as facts in this essay can either be seen in the movie or read on Wikipedia or Fandom Wiki (those two sites are lifesavers).
Disclaimer 3: As you’ll find out, there are things that doesn’t make sense and things that doesn’t add up from the movie to reality. At the end of the day, this movie is a fictional story and not everything has to line up with reality.
Disclaimer 4: I’ll try to be clear on what is facts and what is conclusions I have reached based on those facts. There could be things I’ve interpreted wrongly or just reached a different conclusion than what others might. I will include a chapter with the “raw data” I’ve based all of this on in case you want to do some research of your own.
Anyways, I’ll use this first chapter to explain what I’ve based things on and how I figured out the things I’ll present in the next chapters. If you don’t want to read this background information you can go straight to the chapters about the different characters. I wouldn’t recommend it though as you won’t know where the information is coming from, and some things won’t make sense unless you know my reasoning behind it. If you want to read the background information, thank you. Let’s get started now!
The first thing I had to do was figure out when the movie is set. This is important to know so I know what real-life events happened before the special detachment and what events happened after. In the scene where Maverick is introduced to the mission and the aviators, Cyclone pulls up Rooster’s file on the screen. (A higher quality picture of this file can be found on Fandom Wiki.) If you squint, you can read that his date of birth is June 27th, 1984, and that he’s currently 35 years old. This would mean that the movie is set in the second half of 2019, and everything from here on will be based on that fact.
The next thing I needed to know was when the aviators might have joined the Navy. I started with Rooster since I now knew his age. His file conveniently also states that he became an ensign (the first rank of a prospecting naval aviator in the U.S. Navy) on May 22nd, 2011. However, I wanted to do the math myself as well. Now, this could be wrong since I don’t know the American school system 100%, but, having been born in 1984, Rooster would have graduated from high school in 2002. Had Maverick not pulled his papers, he would have started at the Naval Academy that same year. The Naval Academy is four years, and when you graduate you join the Navy as an ensign. This would have been in 2006 for Rooster. Add the four years Maverick set him back to that and it becomes 2010. (It’s one year off what his file states but I’m not going to get too caught up in the details here.) Furthermore, after that follows 12-18 months of flight training and then 6-9 months of training in a Fleet Replacement Squadron, which is a squadron with the purpose of training new aviators as well as aviators transitioning to a new type of aircraft. After that, the pilot is assigned to a strike fighter squadron, which is a deployable squadron made up of fighter pilots. For Rooster, this would have been somewhere around 2012-2013. This gives him 6-7 years of experience in the movie.
Now, since Rooster is the only one with a confirmed age, everyone else’s age is just a guess. But I think it’s safe to assume that everyone picked for the special detachment would have had at least a few years of experience. This is also confirmed by the fact that they are all lieutenants. To be promoted to lieutenant, you need at least 3.5-4 years of service. The next rank, lieutenant commander, would see them need 9-11 years of service.
Based on this, and the actor’s ages at the time of filming, I’m going to assume all the pilots are about the same age (give or take) and would have most likely been done with their flight training somewhere between 2008 and 2015 (with most of them probably towards the middle of this interval).
Now that I knew roughly when their careers in the Navy had started, I could start looking at what they might have done in that time. The biggest clue to this is looking at what squadron they’re normally part of. This can be seen on the patch on the right side of their flight suit. (Or it can be read on Fandom Wiki.) All these squadrons exist in real life (except for Bob’s but we’ll get to that) and knowing what squadron they’re part of tells us what carrier air wing and aircraft carrier they’re assigned to, which then tells us when and where they would have been deployed. A carrier air wing is a unit made up of multiple squadrons. Whenever an aircraft carrier deploys, a carrier air wing will be onboard. Normally, carrier air wings deploy on the aircraft carrier they’re currently assigned to.
Of course, this information only tells us what squadron they were part of at the time of the special detachment, and it’s very likely that at least a few of them would have moved between squadrons at some point in their career. But for the purpose of this, as I have nothing else to go on, I’m going to assume they’ve all been part of their current squadron for their whole career, unless there’s good reason to assume something else.
After deep-diving in the system of squadrons, carrier air wings and aircraft carriers for a couple hours, I also looked at the ribbons each pilot was wearing. The ribbons show what awards they have received and tells us a bit about what they have accomplished. The ribbons can be seen on the left side of their khakis. (But can also, for some of the characters, be read on Fandom Wiki.) We never see Rooster wearing the khakis though but at least some of his awards are stated on his file, which we see. However, I can’t squint enough to read it, so I am going to go with what it says on Fandom Wiki and trust whoever wrote that.
As I go through the awards, I’ll briefly explain what they’re awarded for, but I’ve also included a list with explanations about the different medals and what they’re awarded for in the “raw data” chapter at the end.
One ribbon that all of them have is the Sea Service Deployment Ribbon. This is awarded after being stationed on an overseas (in this case) naval vessel for at least 90 consecutive days. With each additional time this is awarded, a bronze star is added to the ribbon and with the fifth time, the bronze stars are traded for a silver star. All the twelve aviators in the movie have this ribbon with two bronze stars, indicating that they’ve been awarded this three times, which would equal three overseas deployments. It might not make a lot of sense that they all have the same number of deployments, but I’m going to use this as a help in figuring out when they might have joined the Navy, since I don’t have much else to go on.
Based on all these things, I’ve done my best to figure out how it all goes together, what they’ve done so far in their career, and who might have run into who before the special detachment. This will all be presented in individual chapters for each person and then a chapter connecting everything and discussing my discoveries will follow.