Finance Chair, Georgia State Senate Legislative Session

TOPGUN Rome Aviators

Navy's Elite Fighter Pilots

November 2, 2024

When Darlington graduates, Bill Kelly (Class of 71) and Robert Hortman (Class of 99) have the occasion to get together, and an aura of mutual respect and admiration permeates the room. There’s a good reason. Both are graduates of the U.S. Naval Academy, both were U.S. Navy fighter pilots, and each went through the Navy’s elite Flights Weapons School, better known as TOPGUN.

A third Darlington graduate, Roger Sheppard (Class of 72), attended the unique Adversary School. In this TOPGUN course, he learned to simulate an enemy combatant who helps train pilots like Kelly and Hortman. Sheppard was also a U.S. Naval Academy graduate and a member of the same F-14 Squadron as Kelly for one day.

There are few cities the size of Rome that can claim to be home to such a trio of distinguished pilots. It is probably even more remarkable that they hail from the same hometown as Admiral John Henry Towers, the father of naval aviation.

Kelly and Hortman have become close over the years, but their experiences came at different times and places. Kelly attended TOPGUN in 1979 when the program was based at Naval Air Station Miramar near San Diego. Hortman’s experience came three decades after TOPGUN relocated to Naval Air Station Fallon, outside Reno, Nevada. Sheppard did his stint at TOPGUN in the late 1980s.

Kelly credits his interest in being a pilot to his father, who worked on airplanes in the South Pacific during World War II. Hortman said that, as he was growing up, becoming a pilot always seemed interesting. “When I was in middle school, Bill moved to town, and I realized that it was a possibility, and I thought landing on aircraft carriers sounded like the most fun thing you could ever possibly do,” Hortman said.

Back in the 70s, Kelly said each squadron sought to send one pilot to TOPGUN with the idea that they would be a pilot training officer when they returned to the squadron. He attended the school in September 1979 and had only been flying F-14s for a few months. “It was a fiveweek course back then but it’s a lot longer now,” Kelly said.

Hortman explained that the school was restructured extensively around 1996 during the Base Realignment and Closure Commission. “Now what they do is wait until you’re finished with your first tour,” Hortman detailed. Usually, one person from each class is asked to stay on as an instructor. That was the case for Hortman, who stayed on at Fallon for three years, 2010-2013. “That’s the primo job in the Navy, to be an instructor at TOPGUN,” Kelly said.

“Once you get on staff, it’s a pretty hard training syllabus to be able to teach students,” Hortman said. “You start out being an Adversary Instructor and work your way up to finally be a BFM and Dog Fight Instructor.” Hortman said the goal was not to prove that a pilot was the best of the best but to teach the students to the level where they could return to the fleet and be teachers.

He explained that from the instructor’s standpoint, he was taking aviators who probably had never failed at any point in their careers and failed them. “It was a very humbling experience for very successful people to be able to improve,” Hortman said.

Kelly recalled an old Navy training video explaining that no second place points were given. “These guys are trying to teach people that if you’re second in combat, that’s not good. You need to win – the stakes are too high.”

“It’s a knife fight in a phone booth,” Hortman said. “Nobody’s walking out finishing second.”

One of the primary objectives at TOPGUN is to train decision-makers. The pilots are put in different scenarios and must think quickly in very chaotic situations. Hortman said that skill came in very handy when he was deployed in Afghanistan and put into situations he had never seen in training.

Kelly trained on F-14s, largely air-to-air combat against Soviet MiG aircraft. He was fortunate not to have been required to put his knowledge to the test during combat situations but recalled being deployed in waters off the coast of the Middle East for eight months with contingency plans related to the Iranian Hostage Crisis in 1980. While deployed to the Middle East, Kelly was facing the possibility of facing American-made aircraft that had been sold to Iran before the overthrow of the Shah.

Sheppard said the MiG-21, 23, and 25 aircraft were “nowhere near as good as the F-14 was at that time.” Sheppard also said there was a learning curve to pick up the way the Soviet-era pilots flew their aircraft so that the F-14 pilots would be able to recognize that.

How did we learn to fly like the Russians? In 1976, elite Russian pilot Viktor Belenko defected to Japan in a MiG- 25 Foxbat, a high-altitude interceptor. Sheppard also said that the experiences of Navy pilots in Vietnam were a huge part of the ability to fly like a Russian.

Regarding technology changes, Hortman said a big challenge over the course of a deployment today is that it would not be unusual to face a scenario that the pilot had never seen before. Missions could change with the snap of a finger.

TOPGUN training, particularly tactics-related training, is based on current techniques. Still, everyone on staff is charged with looking for what might be needed in five, ten, or even 20 years. “We’re constantly changing, testing, and evolving to determine if this is successful now. Our tactics absolutely evolve a lot.”

Hortman explained that after TOPGUN moved to Nevada, the Navy started developing many of the air-to-ground systems with pinpoint munitions that people see on the news today.

“The quality of professionalism of him (Hortman and other instructors) is second to none,” Kelly said. “Better than any instructor that I ever had in the Naval Academy, better than anyone I’ve ever seen give a talk, from preachers to whatever.”

It would be nearly impossible to talk about TOPGUN for half an hour without references to the movies. “Being on staff there is very different from how the movies portrayed it,” Hortman said. “Being on staff was the most family-oriented work environment I think I’ve ever been around. The wives were involved in a lot of stuff, the security guards knew the names of my wife and kid. It was very much a humble, quiet family-oriented place was the experience I had.” Definitely not what was portrayed in the movies!