Tedfoldol everything you have heard about this movie is true.

Konterr Brilliant and touching

Beystiman It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

StyleSk8r At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

SnoopyStyle U.S. Air Force pilot Col. Ted Masters is shot down by enemy MiGs from the Arab state of Bilya over the Mediterranean. He is captured and sentenced to hang. Meanwhile, his restless son Doug Masters (Jason Gedrick) is rejected by the Air Force Academy. With the government unwilling to mount a rescue, Doug plans his own rescue mission with his young friends from the Eagles Flying Club. He convinces Vietnam vet Col. Charles 'Chappy' Sinclair (Louis Gossett Jr.) to train him and join him on the mission.I probably saw this after 'Top Gun'. Despite coming out a few months earlier, I doubt that many people saw this in the theaters. It was always a step down but seeing it now, the silly unrealistic story cannot be ignored. The action is inferior to 'Top Gun' but it's still functional. There are nice planes flying around. The miniature models being used are obvious. The explosions are static. This was good fun back in the day but it is not more than 80's cheese today.

jimakros I just saw this movie 24 years after its release,even though i was around when it was released,i had heard its so bad,i never got around to watch it. Actually,its a pretty decent aviator movie,if you like fighter planes movies you will enjoy it.It has extensive use of the F-16 Fighting Falcon airplane and also has an amusing chase scene with a Cessna trainer plane. The plot is a little far-fetched,a kid flying the Falcon to the middle east to save his father,i read its the reason the US Airforce refused to help the producers.But,the action scenes are pretty decent and even the plot is funny and not terribly unrealistic,considering this kid supposedly was trained by his pilot father.What i found incredibly cheesy and annoying is the use of the tape player every time he gets n the plane seat. Anyway,they did something right considering this movie made enough money to deserve four sequels! I enjoyed it and again its another instance where i shouldn't have listened to the buzz about this movie.

pyyinstaller as a retired USAF MSG (aircraft maint. spec), this has got to be one of the worst movies i have ever seen. the fact that a teenager could ever get on the flight-line, much less get into an f-16 is ludicrous. the military spends millions on each pilot to make them the best in the world and this movie makes the air force and all its members seem stupid at best. yes, i know it is only a movie but it conveys a message to the younger folks that we are all idiots, and believe me, we are not. the logistics involved in setting up any type of mission are highly involved, even in the eighties, military computers were too secure to hack by any teenager, and the other flaws in this movie make peter pan more believable. sorry, to me, this movie has no entertainment value at all.

Horrorible_Horror_Films ...But it definitely still only deserves 4/10 stars and no more. A moronic dumb kid's father is a fighter pilot who gets shot down by some Arab country. They never name the country in the movie, its really ridiculous, they just vaguely refer to some Arab nation, this movie is really ignorant like that. But Lamar from Revenge of the Nerds is in here, he is friends with the main character Doug Masters. Well, Doug Masters, who lives on an Air Force base, his father is an air force pilot, yet he fails to get into the air force academy, conceives of a plot (with help from his retarded friends) to steal two jets and go rescue his father. Yea, exactly - this is One of the Greatest Films Ever Made!!! Louis Gossett Jr is fantastic in his role. You can tell he basically wanted to smack the hell out of Doug Masters the whole movie. Well anyway, you can probably guess how the plot ends, I can't believe they made 3 sequels to this movie.