Air Duels With Disco-Era Planes

How Iran’s repurposed American military jets have weathered the MidEast war.

Paul David Young, Paul Jarod Young | July 5, 2026

Forty years ago this summer, the big screen blockbuster film that catapulted Tom Cruise to stardom—Top Gun—was generating geysers of profits for Paramount Pictures and ginning up the popularity of Naval Aviation beyond anything seen before or since.

Amazingly, the air assets featured at Fightertown USA, or Top Gun School, and in the fictionally troubled waters off of San Diego that, in the movie, were serving as contested anchorage in the Indian Ocean, live on! Where? Iran!

No matter which war paint one prefers, anyone with an interest in military aviation and who appreciates history minus the confines of scripted narratives must marvel at how what should be museum relics remain active and engaged. 

Iran’s time warp fighter jets—proudly made in the U.S.A. during the 1970s—have been and likely will continue to be deployed against an array of cutting edge fly-by-wire, or fly-by-satellite, aircraft that create an incontestably non-level playing field.

In 1983, Chartwell Books, whose imprimatur faded some time ago, published a tally of the inventories that comprise The Air Forces of the World. One of those was the Islamic Republic of Iran, and as the editors then noted, “assessment of Iranian air power is somewhat problematical … especially as the effects of political purging (following the overthrow of Shah Reza Pahlavi by the Ayatollah and his loyalists) are difficult to assess.”

The Shah’s generous purchases of U.S.-made air assets shaped up thusly: 75 Grumman F-14A Tomcats; 32 McDonnell Douglas F-4D Phantom IIs; 174 F-4Es; 138 Northrop F-5E Tiger IIs; and 28 F-5Fs.

There were........

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