“Top Guns: The Next Generation”—A Review
If you come to this series expecting the Top Gun movies series, yes, you’ll get a taste of that. From exciting and interesting fighter jet shots to the pilots playing beach volleyball, it’s there. But so much more contributes to the human experience in pilot training.
Top Guns: The Next Generation plants you in the crucible where Navy and Marine student aviators either learn to fly precisely under pressure or go home. It feels like a reality show contest at first, but the real reality sets in fast. What makes it land is how it treats procedures and parameters as the “drama.”
Each pilot they follow has a goal and life path that’s interesting to follow. I was rooting for them all. I did have the chance to interview Captain Austin Claggett (see image below), one of the pilots with a particularly relatable experience in the show.
Does this mean Captain Claggett got his wings? I will not say one way or the other; you’ll have to watch the show. But he did give me tons of insight.
The Simulator
Right off the bat, I wanted to know about whether the simulators are an accurate training tool. He’s refreshingly blunt: The training sims try to give you a “seat-of-the-pants feeling,” but “nothing compares to what it’s going to feel like until you’re in the jet, throwing it around.” That tracks perfectly with what we see in the series.
The cameras put you inside the cockpit long enough to feel when the airplane is content versus when it’s being manhandled. You can see the micro-inputs, stick throttle, trim used to keep the angle of attack (AoA) honest, and energy from bleeding away at the wrong moment.
The show gives you a ton of cockpit time, but the sim is where lots of the wiring gets done. Sims are excellent for procedures, switchology, scan discipline, and task loading. They’re the place to rehearse flows, practice chair-flying at full speed, and get your eyes used to HUD/symbology without burning gas.
What’s missing are vestibular cues, G-onset, and that faint buffet telling you you’re spending energy you won’t get back. That’s why the pipeline pairs the two — the sim teaches the sequence and the jet teaches the consequences.
Big-Muscle Maneuvering
The show’s smartest rhythm is its constant flip between big-muscle maneuvering (BFM setups, high-G transitions) and fine-motor precision (pattern work and approach profiles that punish slop). Claggett helped me articulate that mental gear change.
In the fights, pilots are expected to track a flood of information. “Who is everyone targeting,” “different types of weapons you can employ,” while still flying “a very specific wire.” In other words, stacked cognitive load without losing the numbers. The series makes that real on screen; Claggett gives it the insider caption.
He also describes how instructors deliberately layer task saturation to force precision under pressure. If they brief “come in for a join at five knots fast,” that means exactly five knots fast, no more no less. In his words, your job is to “manage this airspeed… if you’re off, identify, assess, correct. Immediately.”
The theme of tight tolerances and zero ambiguity runs through the series. Every “almost right” quickly dominoes into extra workload, and the edit lets you see the error chain forming before the debrief circles it in red.
He also walked me through a strike-bombing setup the sim helps burn in. Dragging the aimpoint “X” while staying on airspeed, on altitude, and holding a dive-depression angle so that the release sits inside the envelope — it’s all interconnected. Fix airspeed and you’ve changed energy and timing; trim for attitude and you nudge AoA. Every nudge moves something else. It’s a “super dynamic” situation with as little as eight to 13 seconds to clean it up. Watch the show after hearing that and you start noticing the tiny, on-time corrections made by the good pilots before problems blossom.
Debrief Loop
Back to the flying. Where the show really earns its credibility is in the debrief loop. The replays aren’t there for TV color; they’re surgical. You watch instructors map tiny deviations to real consequences: an impatient pull that taxes energy you won’t get back; a fix applied out of order that makes the outcome worse; an AoA cue ignored because attention was stuck on closure.
Claggett’s on-camera arc shows a confident pilot getting humbled, but it also shows him recalibrate. Off-camera, he described the training is to task the pilot to the edge, then demand “minute perfection” while still flying by the book. That’s how the show treats the cockpit — not as a throne, but as a lab bench.
The fly-by-wire portrayal is low-key but accurate. The HUD cues help, and the airplane has opinions about how it wants to be flown. Claggett treats automation as a teammate, not a cheat code. The art is in listening to what the jet wants — keep AoA centered, keep trim where the airplane stops complaining, don’t chase the vertical when an energy fix is the real ask.
On final, the best sequences aren’t that exciting because they’re book-correct. In a way, I felt that boring flying was the goal. Like anything we do, predictability is important.
Workload is where the series could’ve gone showy and didn’t. It lets the cockpit speak. You can tell when the pilot is behind the jet. Claggett talked about how the pipeline is designed to teach you to simplify under pressure: Dump what’s nonessential, fix the right thing in the right order, and then widen the scan back out. Once you hear him say it, you notice the moment he actually does it on screen.
Coattails
As for the Golden Stick culture and evaluation carrots, the series uses them as a narrative hook, but the real reward is consistency. Claggett’s own evolution makes that clear. Early in the season, his confidence leaks into his flying and you see the cost in the debriefs. Later, he’s investing that same confidence into repeatable technique.
Top Guns: The Next Generation earns its thrills by respecting the arithmetic of flight. It makes procedure, parameters, and corrections the protagonists and lets pilots show what real human growth looks like. The series is refreshing in that sense, it’s real.
Claggett told me that every new class of pilots is small, very small. In some cases, less than 10 people. A world so exclusive they made two Hollywood films out of it, and we all still want more. This series is a true glimpse into the best of the best flying engineering works of art.
Check out the trailer:
