Tom Cruise’s fighter jet rides paid U.S. Navy up to $11,374 an hour

The U.S. 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.

Cruise ended up flying more than a dozen sorties for the new movie, but a Pentagon regulation bars nonmilitary personnel from controlling a Defense Department asset other than small arms in training scenarios, according to Glen Roberts, the chief of the Pentagon’s entertainment media office. Instead, the actors rode behind F/A18 pilots after completing required training on how to eject from the plane in an emergency and how to survive at sea.

Roberts said the Navy allowed the production to use planes, aircraft carriers and military bases even though he said the real Top Gun pilots aren’t the cocky rule-benders portrayed in the film, people who“would never exist in naval aviation.”instead, they’re studious air nerds who toil away for hours in the classroom and participate in intense training flights at Naval Air Station Fallon in Nevada, the site of the actual Top Gun school.