You probably think you have some idea of what it means to be a fighter pilot. The slow walk out across a vast, shimmering runway, helmet in hand. The flashy callsigns and the radio jargon, the confident flipping of countless switches – perhaps unleashing a missile at an unfortunate foe – and the death-defying manoeuvres occasionally required to ensure a safe return to base before lighting the obligatory cigar. For more than 50 years, we’ve been seduced by this image – and by the accompanying clothes, sunglasses and watches. It’s a vision of individual heroism in an age that has seen military conflict automated and anonymised.

But how much of this is even remotely based on reality? The world of elite pilots is so removed from most of our experiences that, let’s face it, we take what we think we know almost exclusively from TV shows and Hollywood movies.

The on-screen shenanigans of cocky, livewire young pilots often seemed outlandish at the tail end of the Cold War, never mind in the era of drone strikes and cyber warfare. And yet the real-life TOPGUN school – or US Navy Strike Fighter Tactics Instructor Program, to give it its proper title – still plays an indispensable role in training US pilots.

For some help filtering fact from fiction, we spoke to Commander Chad “Coochie” Mingo, now retired, who flew for the “TOPGUN” Adversary Squadron at Naval Air Station Fallon, Nevada, from 2002 to 2019 and continues to do so today for Tactical Air Support, a private defence contractor based in Reno, Nevada, which flies the Red Air Adversary mission with the US Navy and Air Force, as well as others around the world. As an adversary instructor, Mingo has spent his life playing the role of potential enemies in high-pressure training scenarios. Prior to his time with TOPGUN, he flew two tours of duty in the Middle East. In other words, there are few people better placed to tell us what it’s really like to fly at the highest level.

Mingo was born into a family of aviators. His grandfather was a Navy pilot in WWII, seeing action in both the Atlantic and Pacific; his father an Air Force mechanic, serving in Vietnam. Mingo recalls one of his earliest memories as the moment he decided to follow in their footsteps.

“I was probably six years old and there was an air show at Rochester International Airport,” he says. “We were stuck in traffic, trying to get there, and one of the lead solos for the Blue Angels display team, a Skyhawk jet, came over our car at about 200ft, 500mph. It was unlike anything I had ever seen before – it changed me. I thought that I had just witnessed the coolest thing that had ever happened on the planet.”

With matter-of-fact modesty, Mingo makes the journey from boyhood fantasy to earning a place at TOPGUN sound routine. But from the ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps) college scholarship, through every stage of his career, he was in an ever-dwindling percentage of successful applicants, estimating that of his original flight school intake, less than one in 100 would have made it into the F-14 he flew in the Persian Gulf, and far fewer again would be selected for TOPGUN.

“Only a few people have the requisite skills to do the work, and I don't know what percentage of them actually want to be Navy pilots,” he says. “But the skills you need have changed quite a bit. In the 1970s and earlier, it was a lot of the athlete-type, who possessed the hand eye coordination to fly well. As the airplanes have gotten more complex and as the tactical picture that we’re trying to analyse gets more convoluted, we’re seeing fewer of the knuckle-dragging football-player jock type and a lot more of the of the engineer-type guy, a guy who is able to process a lot of information.”

The Hollywood trope of the “fly-boy” pilot is one aspect Mingo singles out as particularly unrealistic – and speaking to him, it’s borne out by his own manner, too. “There is this kind of cocky image, and that may have been present at one point, but I don’t believe that it’s very common right now,” he says. “Most of the guys are fairly humble about what they do. They’re proud of it, but they work really hard and they’re able to keep that in perspective. It’s just a job – but we’re really lucky to be able to do it.”

The technology at the pilot’s fingertips may have improved, but there’s one thing that still makes it onto the essential checklist, no matter how advanced the plane: a mechanical watch. “GPS time was introduced when I first started flying,” says Mingo, “but it was buried in a computer menu. So, a watch that could present Zulu time, minutes and seconds, instantly, was critical. I still look at my watch more than 10 times an hour.

“Obviously, the ability to keep accurate time is paramount to success. But there’s also the style that goes along with it. I mean, we are fighter pilots, and we do like to have a ‘fighter pilots watch’.” Today, Mingo wears IWC SCHAFFHAUSEN’s Big Pilot’s Watch Top Gun “Mojave Desert” Edition. Since 2007, IWC has had a Top Gun watch line under license from the US Navy. Since 2018, IWC is additionally licensed to work on watches for the entire US Navy and Marine Corps aviation units.

“When I started collecting watches, it was either because I liked them or I thought that they would help me in the cockpit. But there’s an element of the heirloom to it as well. Knowing that I would someday pass these timepieces on to my three kids or their spouses, the memory of owning the watch and flying with the watch would become important to my kids, too, as they assume possession of it.”

It’s no surprise to hear that modern warfare, and modern planes, call for a more sophisticated temperament in the pilot’s seat. But it begs the question: why do we still need to train pilots in adversarial combat at all? No US aircraft has been shot down in air-to-air combat since the Gulf War (globally, the number is less than 50), and increasingly their number includes unmanned drones.

“American fighting forces haven’t had to contend with an enemy with air superiority since WWII,” agrees Mingo. “But outside of America’s immediate sphere of influence, the first people to the fight are going to be naval aviators and Marines. They sweep the skies of enemy airplanes to ensure the safety of our troops on the ground, and that is still going to be a requirement in theatres all over the world.

“We still practice dogfights, to make sure that we can manoeuvre our planes. But the big 10-vs-10 swirling battles that happened even as recently as Vietnam, they are a thing of the past. Today, the missiles are faster, they go farther: things are just as lethal, they just happen a little bit farther away.”

It’s that manoeuvrability that captures the public imagination most of all: a roaring, twisting, diving jet, being pushed to its limits. And Mingo says this is one area that forthcoming films may finally depict as accurately as possible.

“Trying to manoeuvre for position against another plane is hard on the body,” Mingo says. “The turns are up to 9G and that’s not just sitting upright, you’re twisting around and looking over your shoulder and trying to maintain sight. In older movies, they did a pretty good job showing the speed and how much movement there can be in the cockpit, but they didn't really go into the G-force because sitting on a film set, they weren’t really able to. But what they can do these days has let them film a lot of in-cockpit shots of the of the actors actually under G.”

One thing that comes across most keenly – and something that will never be felt by any drone pilot – is Mingo’s love of flying and the sheer physical thrill it delivers. And perhaps unsurprisingly, it harks right back to that first memory of fast jets.

“In flight school, we did what’s called low-level navigation,” he says. “You’re trying to navigate visually from point to point along a route, as accurately and quickly as you can. The sights, the adrenaline and the exposure to G in that environment, down low, 200ft flying 500mph and watching the world go by – sometimes right side up, sometimes upside down – became one of my favourite elements of flying fighters. You’re close to the Earth with a mutual respect between you. ‘I’m not going to hit you and you don’t hit me!’ And the adrenaline of seeing that is so different from things that most people get to experience.”