Top Gun Over Moscow (1996) (review)

The title Top Gun Over Moscow is, in a sense, misleading. This one-hour installment of the PBS series Nova deals not with elite Russian fighter pilots, but with Russian fighter-pilot culture in general. The great aces of the past and the top pilots of the present get their due, but most of the hour is focused on—to the extent that such a thing exists—"ordinary" fighter pilots. The title is accurate, however, in another sense. Top Gun Over Moscow reaches for the same audience, and uses the same kinds of images, as its starring-Tom-Cruise namesake. It is aimed squarely at aviation buffs, but also has something to offer historians.

The central theme of Top Gun Over Moscow is that Russian and American fighter pilots, though united by a shared love of flying and mutual respect for each other's skills, are divided by national differences in fighter-pilot culture. The film is at its most interesting when it catalogues and analyzes these differences. American airbases are searched, every day, for debris that might be sucked into an air intake and damage an engine. Russian bases are visibly scruffier, but the fighters that fly from them have screens and bypasses to keep debris out of their engines. American fighters achieve high performance through cutting-edge design and sophisticated electronic control systems, while Russian ones emphasize raw power and robust structures. American fighter doctrine emphasizes kills made at long range using high-tech weapons, but Russian doctrine presumes that air combat will always come down to close-in maneuvering and gunfire. The film uses pilots, designers, analysts, and historians from both countries to elaborate on the differences, and allows their voices, rather than the narrator's, to carry the story.

The film is less successful at explaining the historical roots of these differences. Its historical survey of Russian military aviation, is too limited in its coverage and too scattershot in its approach to provide the necessary context. It begins in World War I, but ends—a half-century short of the present—in Korea. Its coverage of the intervening four decades, though anchored by noted aviation historian Von Hardesty, spends most of its time on spectacular-but-peripheral subjects: the giant Maxim Gorky propaganda aircraft, deliberate ramming as a combat tactic, and the exploits of all-female "Night Witch" squadrons that harassed German troops with raids in obsolete biplane bombers. Topics like the capabilities of Soviet industry and the effects of Stalin's purges—meatier, but less photogenic—are brushed off in a few sentences or ignored altogether.

Historians of technology have long argued that machines are shaped by the environment from which they emerge, as well as by the demands of the job they are designed to do. Russian and American jet fighters reflect the very different efforts of two very different societies to solve the same basic technological problem. Top Gun Over Moscow is an engaging overview of the differences, if not of the multitude of factors, that underlie them.