Summary and Key Points: Top Gun: Maverick, the highest-grossing film of 2022, delighted aviation enthusiasts with its depiction of advanced aircraft. The film's opening sequence features Tom Cruise's character piloting a craft resembling Lockheed Martin's secretive SR-72 project, the "Son of Blackbird."

-While the film hints at real hypersonic capabilities, details about the SR-72 remain scarce.

-The SR-72, a hypersonic UAV designed for intelligence and reconnaissance, is expected to surpass Mach 6 speeds using a scramjet engine.

Top Gun: Maverick's Darkstar: A Glimpse of Lockheed Martin's SR-72?

Lockheed aims to have it airborne by 2025. The film may offer a glimpse of this cutting-edge technology, though its full reality remains uncertain.

The highest grossing film of 2022, to the delight of aviation enthusiasts, was Top Gun: Maverick, a sequel to the highest grossing film of 1986, Top Gun. The series follows naval aviator Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (played by Tom Cruise) a pilot of, mostly, fighter aircraft.

Yet, in the opening sequence of Top Gun: Maverick, Mitchell is piloting something foreign but familiar. Allegedly, the craft, designed with the assistance of Lockheed Martin, is very similar to the real-life, secretive SR-72 project, known as the “Son of Blackbird.”

In the SR-72-like aircraft, known as the Darkstar, Mitchell attempts to break Mach 10 speeds. Spoiler alert: when Mitchell does hit Mach 10, he chooses to keep pushing, rather than easing off the throttle as the flight manifest called for. Mitchell loses the aircraft, in an incident that underscores the character’s irreverent, and daredevilish, attitude.

Mitchell moved on, to spend the rest of the film chasing Penny Benjamin (played by Jennifer Connelly) and piloting the F/A-18 (with a cameo from the F-14). But keen aviation watchers were left wondering about the aircraft from the beginning of the flick. The SR-72-like aircraft that Lockheed Martin had helped designed. Was it real? Was it similar to the real SR-72 reportedly under development? Or was it just Hollywood smoke and mirrors?

What is the SR-72?

“We partnered with the Top Gun: Maverick film’s creative team to collaborate on bringing our expertise in hypersonic capabilities and aircraft design to the big screen,” Lockheed Martin’s website says, teasing at whether the Darkstar, or it’s features, were real. “With the Skunk Works expertise in developing the fastest known aircraft combined with a passion and energy for defining the future of aerospace, Darkstar’s capabilities could be more than mere fiction. They could be reality…”

Lockheed’s marketing jargon fails to answer our questions, of course, and really just confounds our uncertainty. Is the Darkstar a preview of the SR-72 Son of Blackbird? Possibly. But we don’t know, given how little is known about the program.

The “super-cool Mach 6 wonder is still in the testing phases but should be rolled out for initial flight demonstrations by no later than 2023, Jeff Spry reported. “But with a tight lid on its stealthy creation, it actually might have already taken to the air without the general public being aware… The so-called “Son of Blackbird’s” developmental program has been cloaked in secrecy since whispers of its genesis swirled around the aviation industry 10 years ago.”

It's possible that through Top Gun: Maverick, Lockheed gave us a glimpse at the real SR-72. What we know so far is that the SR-72 will be a hypersonic UAV, built for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) operations. The project was first proposed in 2013, to fill the coverage gap that the SR-71’s retirement left between surveillance satellites, aircraft, and UAVs.

To power the SR-72 past the Mach 6 threshold, Lockheed has teamed with Aerojet Rocketdyne to develop a scramjet-powered HV-3x. In all likelihood, the SR-72 will include an air-breathing hypersonic propulsion system, which could power the SR-72 in all phases of flight, from subsonic, through supersonic, and beyond hypersonic speeds.

Lockheed intends to have the SR-72 in the air before 2025, and in service sometime during the 2030s.

Will it happen? Who knows. And maybe they’ve already offered us a glimpse of what the aircraft could look like.

About the Author: Harrison Kass

Harrison Kass is a defense and national security writer with over 1,000 total pieces on issues involving global affairs. An attorney, pilot, guitarist, and minor pro hockey player, Harrison joined the US Air Force as a Pilot Trainee but was medically discharged. Harrison holds a BA from Lake Forest College, a JD from the University of Oregon, and an MA from New York University. Harrison listens to Dokken.

All images are Creative Commons.