Former Air Force Thunderbirds pilots praised a new Netflix documentary about the branch’s premier aerial demonstration team, saying it captured the highs and lows of life in an air show where extraordinary is the norm, and anything less can put lives at risk.
“Watching it brought back all of those wonderful feelings of being on point with five other jets tucked in neatly right underneath my wings,” said retired Col. John “JV” Venable, who commanded the team from 2000 to 2001. Venable is now a senior resident fellow for airpower studies at the Air and Space Forces Association’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.
Released on Memorial Day, the film follows the 2023 Thunderbirds team through winter training at Spaceport America, deep in the desert of southern New Mexico. Over the course of 91 minutes, viewers watch a group of six F-16 pilots, including three newcomers, come together to put on a demo that goes against nearly every safety instinct drilled into them as tactical fighter pilots.
“Flying aerobatics is just not something we train for,” said Lt. Col. Justin “Astro” Elliott, the team commander at the time. “You have to divorce yourself from your survival instincts to fly this demonstration.”
To bring that to life, the film focuses on Maj. Jake “Primo” Impellizzeri, who flew the right wing as Thunderbird 3. Impellizzeri had previously flown on the single-jet Pacific Air Forces F-16 demonstration team, but much of the film centers on his struggle to master the Thunderbirds’ “high bomb burst” maneuver.
The jet on the right wing has to rejoin the four-ship formation after the upward “burst,” a punishing move that requires pinpoint precision at almost seven times the force of gravity and high speeds.
“It’s the most frustrating thing I’ve ever done,” Impellizzeri said in the movie after missing the rejoin again. It’s a feeling retired Maj. Michelle “Mace” Curran, who from 2019 to 2021 flew as the opposing solo pilot and then lead solo pilot, could relate to.
“Everyone who shows up is really excited that they were chosen to be part of this amazing organization, and then they go through their own struggle trying to learn their new job in this new place with new standards that are very high,” she told Air & Space Forces Magazine. “Those feelings that Primo had of ‘am I the right person for this job,’ and feeling like a bit of an impostor, every person on the team goes through that in a different way.”
The feeling doesn’t go away overnight. Curran recalled her first time flying the show in the back of the two-seat F-16.
“I was flinching left and right, like, ‘That jet is so close to us, we’re about to hit him, this is it, this is how I die,’” she said.
The documentary highlights that sensation with breathtaking cockpit footage, which often shows the Earth rising to meet viewers at high speed. To get used to it, the team flies twice a day, five days a week, for most of the winter training season. The pilots progressively build their skills, starting far from the ground and in pairs before switching to a looser diamond. They gradually move closer to each other and to the ground.
By the end of the season, “it becomes almost like a flow state that you’re in. It just feels like second nature,” Curran said. “It’s really cool to experience that, and you trust each other at such an extreme level.”
Overseeing it all is Thunderbird 1, who—depending on the season—must learn in parallel not only how to fly an air show, but also how to command it. The story’s second main character is Elliott, who the rest of the formation will follow into the ground if he isn’t careful.
“The wingmen don’t know where the ground and the sky are. They only know where the boss is,” air show announcer Rob Reider told Netflix. “They trust him without reservation.”
It was the same way when Venable commanded the team in the early 2000s.
“Any time the formation was tucked underneath my wing . . . the guys are so fixated on my aircraft that they really can’t check their peripherals in time to save their own lives,” he said. “It’s up to me and the trust that I built, just like it was in the movie with Astro.”
The risk is real. The documentary crew interviewed the parents of Maj. Stephen “Cajun” Del Bagno, who died in training on April 4, 2018 after experiencing G-induced loss of consciousness during the same rejoin Primo struggled with five years later.
“I cannot overemphasize how much that crash shook the team,” said Curran, who had been stationed with Del Bagno in a prior assignment and who got to know his parents well during her show seasons.
“I can’t imagine [Netflix] doing this documentary without telling his story, because he was really an exceptional person,” she said.
Del Bagno’s death, plus the cancellation of many shows during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, gave then-Thunderbird 1 Lt. Col. John “Brick” Caldwell the time and focus to rethink the demonstration. The new demonstration brought jets closer to each other, which counterintuitively made the show look better and fly safer by focusing the pilots’ attention, experts said in the documentary. But Caldwell needed someone special to follow through after he left in 2021.
“Somebody who’s got the tactical sense of like, a weapons school graduate, the physics and the aerodynamics sense of a test pilot school graduate,” then-Air Combat Command boss Gen. Mark Kelly told Netflix. “Those people don’t exist. Well, one existed.”
That person was Elliott, who sacrificed his childhood dream of becoming an astronaut to complete the Thunderbirds’ transformation. His family would also bear the burden of him being gone nearly every weekend for two years straight.
“I think anyone in this position would question, ‘Am I doing damage here that I can’t recover from?’” Elliott said of not seeing his family. “I hope I’m right, when I say, ‘No, we’re gonna be just fine.’”
Elliott’s sacrifice, the impact of Del Bagno’s death, and Primo’s journey makes “Air Force Elite: Thunderbirds” more than just a series of beautiful airplane images: It is also a compelling human story.
Curran only wished the film could have spent more time with the rest of the team.
“They mentioned several times that the team is 135 people, and each of them is on their own version of Primo’s journey,” she said.
The maintainers get a brief shout-out in the documentary, where they describe working all night in the cold desert to fix a broken servo on an F-16’s right horizontal stabilizer.
“You’re tired, you’re cold, you’re hungry, you just want to go home and go to bed,” said crew chief Staff Sgt. Xavier Knapp. “But if we want that jet to fly tomorrow, it’s gonna fly tomorrow.”
Curran knew that from experience after hitting a vulture during a Friday practice in Colombia. The bird, which boasted a 6-foot wingspan, blew two holes through the jet’s intake—a fix that would take weeks or months at a normal squadron. But the Thunderbirds maintainers sourced sheet metal from the Colombian air force and had the F-16 ready to fly home that Monday.
“There’s always other stuff that [Netflix] could have added, but you have limited time and resources, and I think they did a great job,” Curran said.
Venable and Curran were excited for a platform as popular as Netflix to put the Thunderbirds and, by extension, the U.S. Air Force, in the limelight in a compelling, emotional way.
“I’ve watched it once and I’ll watch it several more times,” Venable said. “It is wonderful and well worth the time to see and see again.”