Just in time for air show season, Air Force Elite: Thunderbirds lands on Netflix with an up close and personal look at the assembling, training, and precision flying of the Thunderbirds, the aerial demonstration squadron of the United States Air Force. Directed by Matt Wilcox, the documentary uses onboard cameras, computer models, and some really thrilling air-to-air footage to explore the mechanics of making the 2023 Thunderbirds go. There are actually 135 members of the team, from ground-based evaluators and flight surgeons to maintenance techs who operate with the precision of a NASCAR pit crew. But it’s the six F-16 pilots who are the focus of everything. In their dangerous, high-speed workplace, hopping on a zoom call means a whole different thing.
The Gist: “It’s not unheard of to get through a full assignment without a major accident. But it’s rare.” The pressure’s on from the moment we meet Lt. Col. Justin “Astro” Elliott, Commander/Leader of the Thunderbirds. As the 2023 training season begins at a facility in New Mexico, it’s with anticipation – and a lot of professional anxiety – over their all-important certification, where a supervising Air Force general will say “yay” or “nay” to their participation in the upcoming air show season. Astro, together with veteran instructor pilot Maj. Lauren “Threat” Schlichting, are also welcoming and training up two new members of the team, Maj. Eric “Miami” Tise and Maj. Jake “Primo” Impellizzeri. Experienced combat pilots both, Miami and Primo are thrust into an aerobatics training regimen where the courses take place at nearly 1000 miles per hour. Did we mention the pressure’s on?
“Blind Trust.” That’s the core motto of the Thunderbirds, and it’s seen in action throughout Air Force Elite as the team trains in the classroom and the cockpit. In the “diamond” aerial formation, where the canopies and wingtips of four F-16s at speed are only inches apart, the left and right-side pilots only look at their wingman, not the ground below or even Astro as the flight leader. (In our head, we hear Tom Skerritt as Commander Mike “Viper” Metcalf in the OG Top Gun: “You never leave your wingman.”) Every miniscule movement of the stick, every tiny correction of airspeed – in the Thunderbirds, it’s all conducted with total belief in another pilot’s skill. That’s blind trust, Threat tells us. “And it takes training to earn it.”
The doc delves into its profiled pilots’ biographies, what inspired them to fly, and the perspective of their loved ones on their very dangerous job. It details the accidents and fatalities that have occurred in the squadron’s over 70-year history, including the 2018 death of Maj. Stephen “Cajun” Del Bagno, a Thunderbirds pilot. And even as it travels to the Daytona 500 with the team – nailing the timing on a national anthem flyby is not easy, and Astro and his pilots are ten seconds late – training continues for certification, and the air show season that will follow.
Practice #19, #21, #23, #26 – as the preparation flights tick off, Primo encounters frustration. It’s his F-16 holding back the seamlessness of the rejoin for the “High Bomb Burst,” a centerpiece maneuver of the Thunderbirds’ aerobatic demonstration. “We’re a few days from certification, and I feel like I’m still not at the point where I need to be for the High BB. You don’t wanna be the guy that is the reason the team fails.”
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Air Force Elite: Thunderbirds arrives exactly one year after The Blue Angels, a very similar documentary, produced in part by Glen Powell, about the US Navy’s flight demonstration squadron. And if you wanna catch Powell as “Hangman” in Top Gun: Maverick, these days it’s streaming on Paramount+.
Performance Worth Watching: Maj. [Dr.] Travis “Angry” Grindstaff is the flight surgeon for the Thunderbirds team, and his segments in Air Force Elite are full of insane fast facts about the physical rigors of flying fighter aircraft. “The ejector seat is an incredible safety feature,” Grindstaff says. “But it’s an incredibly violent way to leave an airplane, pulling a handle that is lighting a rocket motor underneath you that can get upwards of 20 to 25 times the force of gravity.” He notes that after Miami experienced an ejection on a previous assignment, the Thunderbirds pilot lost an entire inch of height.
Memorable Dialogue: Lt. Col. Justin “Astro” Elliott: “Combat pilots are used to flying combat. Well off the ground, in a fight, focused on targeting, focused on the enemy. Flying aerobatics is just not something we train for. You have to divorce yourself from your survival instincts to fly this demonstration. It’s 45 minutes of total chaos.”
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: At times during Air Force Elite: Thunderbirds, you might have to stop and consider whether Michael Bay directed this thing. Lots of splashy daylight shots of enormous American flags hung on white walls in gleaming airplane hangars. Pilots and ground crew walking and saluting in slow-motion. Camera sweeps from an ant’s eye view as the red white and blue Thunderbird aircraft trundle to the flightline. So, so many people wearing aviator sunglasses. Pair all of this with a different form of blind trust – “to represent excellence as something greater than ourselves,” as Lt. Col. Elliott puts it during a speech to the squadron – and Air Force Elite can begin to feel like a military recruitment film instead of a documentary.
Since we have no plans to join the Air Force, it’s the care the doc takes in revealing the inner workings of an aerobatic flight squadron that we found most compelling. These people are truly dedicated to their incredibly dangerous work, and we were struck by how matter-of-fact their meetings are on the ground. Tossing around jargon and mil-spec acronyms, playing back tape of training flights like they’re at-bats or football plays, describing gravity-defying aerial moves with the offhand dryness of industry professionals. For example, over computer modeling visuals, Astro’s description of a particular maneuver makes total sense of complete insanity. “I’ll hold that velocity vector without flinching, with an aim point that is going to hit the ground, and the only reason it doesn’t is because number two slides into position, creates enough lift under my left wing that it actually rolls my jet slightly, and corrects that vector.” When it’s not leaning heavily on the patriotism angle, Air Force Elite: Thunderbirds offers a fascinating breakdown of how highly-skilled people work together and build trust. They’re just dedicated folks, with a vocation that happens to exert 8 or 9 g’s of force on the human body.
Our Call: Stream It. Air Force Elite: Thunderbirds can overdo it a bit at the Yay America buffet, but otherwise the doc offers real insight into the hard work that goes into a dangerous job like flying a fighter jet, really really fast, in a four-way formation, while you may or not be totally blind or mostly upside down.
Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.