One thing that doesn't appear in Top Gun (neither in the first nor in the second) are Tom Cruise's diapers. Because neither in an F-14 (the original Top Gun) nor in an F-18 (the one from 2022) poor Maverick has a way to relieve himself. The F-22 and the F-35 may be radar invisible, but their pilots are not invisible to the laws of Mother Nature. So, if the flight lasts long, they must resort to the Freudian anal phase and use the diaper. In the skies, there are no gas stations for a technical stop.
For shorter operations, a "piddle pack" is enough. But they can be dangerous. In 1991, a U.S. pilot crashed his F-16 because he didn't program the autopilot correctly when he was urinating. More tragic was, 11 years later, the case of an A-10 tankbuster, whose pilot died because he hadn't properly reattached the parachute harness after loosening it to use the bag. The plane had a technical problem; the pilot used his ejection seat to jump, but the parachute went one way and he went another. As if these tragedies were not enough, the arrival of female pilots has further complicated urinating at high altitudes, because they can't simply aim at a bag.
The producers of Top Gun could have avoided this distortion of reality by putting Cruise in a B-2, which is not only the only aircraft capable of destroying the centrifuge plant of Fordow in Iran, but, along with the B-1, is the only U.S. military attack aircraft with a bathroom. For added luxury, the B-2 also has a small foldable bed. And a destructive capacity enough to make us all have to go to the bathroom.
The B-2 crews that bombed Fordow this morning certainly had to use the bathroom on their mission. The distance from Whiteman base in Missouri -where they are based- to the Iranian nuclear facility is about 11,000 kilometers, twice the distance from Galicia to New York. For now, it is not known if the six B-2s returned to Whiteman or made a stop at the British base of Diego Garcia in the Chagos archipelago in the Indian Ocean.
There are precedents for missions like this. In 2001, a B-2 named Spirit of Missouri flew from Whiteman base to Afghanistan, dropped its bombs, and then headed to Diego Garcia. It was a 44-hour and 18-minute flight. In Diego Garcia, it refueled, underwent a quick check, and took off back to the United States. The mission lasted a total of 70 hours.
The Spirit of Missouri is precisely the first B-2 ever built. It entered service on January 1, 1997. Its price, like that of its 19 siblings (one of them destroyed in an accident in Guam in 2008), is $2.2 billion. When the Spirit of Missouri entered service, it was worth more than two and a half times its weight in gold. Its 71 tons (without fuel and weapons) would have cost only $840 million if it had been solid gold. Now, with this mission, the record of the 2001 mission could have been broken.
The Fordow bombing also has a somewhat movie-like element, but more of spies than war. The United States deceived Iran by sending another group of between six and eight B-2s towards the U.S. Andersen base in Guam, while the six that carried out the bombing flew over the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East. Guam, along with Diego Garcia, is the only base outside the continental United States with hangars for these aircraft, which are so complex that they require specific humidity and temperature conditions. Guam is in the Marianas, which were a Spanish colony until Washington conquered them in the 1998 war. The other is Diego Garcia -in another former colony, in this case British and, as of this year, Mauritian-, which has four. Andersen only has one.
Making a stop on the return at Diego Garcia (named after a 16th-century navigator from Huelva) would make sense because the island is 5,200 kilometers from Fordow. Whiteman is twice that distance.
The B-2s are the only aircraft that can carry the weapon that could damage or destroy Fordow: the GBU-57 bomb, also known as the MOP (the acronym in English for Massive Ordnance Penetrator). Like the B-2, the MOP seems out of this world. It weighs about 13,600 kilograms and has never been used in combat until now. Manufactured by Boeing, it entered service in 2012. The United States has not disclosed how many it has since 2015 when it declared having 20 units, although it is known that the Joe Biden administration decided two years ago to increase production. Its cost per unit, $20 million, is almost half that of a European Eurofighter fighter-bomber.
Due to its complexity and lack of precedents, the Fordow bombing echoes that of Hiroshima. Not only was it about using a bomb that had never been used in combat but also attacking a target that had never before been the subject of a military action.
Each B-2 carries a maximum of two MOPs. Apparently, the bombing was carried out by six aircraft, which dropped 12 bombs. That should, in principle, be more than enough to damage or disable Fordow. According to available information, all aircraft dropped all their payloads. The United States probably used more MOPs than strictly necessary to ensure the facility's disablement.
It wasn't just B-2s involved. Bombers can fly fully loaded - which means carrying two MOPs - at least 11,000 kilometers without refueling, so they had to refuel several times in flight with the help of tanker aircraft. In the final phase of the attack, electronic warfare aircraft participated to distort Iran's air defenses and destroy its radars. There was almost certainly also a fighter escort. According to the Pentagon, a total of 125 aircraft participated in the mission.
Unlike some bombs designed to glide distances of 70 or 80 kilometers, the MOP is gravity-driven. In other words: it falls straight down. This forced the aircraft to position themselves directly above the Fordow plant to drop them. The targets in these types of attacks are usually ventilation ducts or any kind of opening that facilitates the entry of the explosive into the facility.
Fordow is not an easy target. It is about 70 meters deep and is a bunker reinforced with concrete inside a mountain. Satellite images from the U.S. company Maxar reveal that Israel bombed it in the early days of the war, but only caused damage to the buildings. The interior seemed intact. A curious detail is that the Iranians had hurried to cover the bomb craters with earth. Photos taken after the bombing show the holes from the GBU-57s, with clear signs of underground fires and explosions.
There are more unknowns. One is whether the Iranians will try - if they have the capability - to remove nuclear material from the plant. U.S. Special Forces have been preparing for that eventuality since the collapse of the Soviet Union, so it is possible that they were infiltrated on the ground beforehand. Given the U.S. doctrine of not leaving soldiers behind and rescuing those who fall prisoner, it is likely that there were also specialized teams in Iran for these tasks in case any aircraft were shot down (which was not the case).