Many military aviation buffs are familiar with Top Gun, both the fictitious film franchise and the real-life Navy fighter pilot training school. Likewise, several military aviation buffs are familiar with the story of the Tuskegee Airmen, the heroic African American fighter pilots of WWII who broke racial barriers within the US Armed Forces in addition to breaking ground and blasting Nazi German Luftwaffe fighter planes out of the sky by the bushel basket.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Many military aviation enthusiasts are familiar with Top Gun and the Tuskegee Airmen. This is the story of one heroic pilot who earned both labels.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[396,397,7190,3214,1699,1624,11249,12854,1328,1885],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-127469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aircraft","category-analysis","category-award","category-guns","category-korea","category-lockheed","category-republic-p-47-thunderbolt","category-top-gun","category-united-states-air-force","category-wwii"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=127469"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127469\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":127470,"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127469\/revisions\/127470"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=127469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=127469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=127469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}