A new film about the Thunderbirds coming to Netflix this week has everything you’d expect from a movie about the prestigious U.S. Air Force Air Demonstration Squadron, including incredible shots of the pilots performing intricate, aerial maneuvers over Nellis Air Force Base and clips of their greatest stunts being performed across the country.
But the film’s director Matt Wilcox says if you’re expecting a Thunderbirds highlight reel, look elsewhere.
“Very early on, we knew this was not going to be a jet movie,” Wilcox said. “I think there’s an incredible draw there to bring an audience into the high octane, but where the real story was … was with the pilots and with the team members.”
“Air Force Elite: Thunderbirds,” available to stream on Netflix beginning Friday, shows a side of the squadron that you can’t see from the sky: the emotional obstacles and resiliency required to train on a first-class demonstration team, as well as the challenges pilots and their families face as team members devote two years of their life to performing on the squadron.
The film centers around Thunderbirds leader Lt. Col. Justin “Astro” Elliott as he guides the team through its intense 2023 Air Combat Command certification before show season — all while being away from his wife and two young sons.
“I think they would tell you, this is the hardest assignment assignment out of their career,” Wilcox said. “They are traveling and on the road over 300 days a year, and so it’s very tough on the families.”
Blind trust
Because the squadron changes 50 percent of its team members every year, the leader of the squad must “build a team from nothing,” Elliot says in the film, and turn skilled combat pilots, and complete strangers, into a precise air demonstration team.
The squad succeeds, Wilcox said, under its motto: Blind trust.
“(The squadron) relies on every single person to do their job extraordinarily well, and only worry about their job and trust that everybody else is doing their job,” Wilcox said. “So, a lot of the pilots are not looking at the ground, they’re not looking at their instruments, they’re just looking at their wingman.”
Just as the squad worked to build trust with each other on film, Wilcox said, the film’s crew had to establish trust. That started with meeting Col. John “Brick” Caldwell, who commanded the Thunderbirds before Elliot in 2021, to be able to tell an authentic story on the high-security Nellis Air Force Base.
Taylor Kavanaugh, a producer on the film, said the crew, particulartly aerial coordinator Kevin LaRosa, took time to build a rapport and trust with the base to make filming the squadron’s dangerous stunts up close possible.
“There’s 99-plus reasons for you, as the Thunderbirds or the Air Force, to not let people on your base with cameras, and they did it anyway with the right sort of trust” Kavanaugh said.
Wilcox said he worked to “make the cameras go away” and have honest conversations with the team to ensure the film told an authentic story.
“When you build that trust with somebody over time, you can speak to them as a friend, and we were on the ground rooting for them as much as they were for each other, so we almost became a part of the team,” he said.
Real Thunderbirds react
Tech. Sgt. Brendon Johnson, who works with the current Thunderbirds squadron and worked with the group depicted in the documentary, said the film is “very accurate” in showing how the team comes together to pass its rigorous training.
“(The crew) would come around with the cameras … but they blended into the environment very well to where it wasn’t overwhelming,” he said. “People weren’t overacting in front of the camera — we were encouraged to be ourselves.”
Johnson said he hopes the film will change people’s negative opinions about the military.
“It shows a beacon of excellence across the board for what our Air Force represents.” he said.
Contact Taylor Lane at [email protected].