Two pilots, five crew chiefs and other team members participate

“it’s real flying” – Randy Howell, Patriots Jet Team owner and one of two CineJet pilots

By Allen D. Payton

Planes, aerobatic pilots, crew chiefs and other members of the Patriots Jet Team based at the Byron Airport in Contra Costa County helped make the new movie Top Gun: Maverick, starring Tom Cruise, now in theaters. As in the original Top Gun film, the sequel features a variety of jet training and combat scenes in which the team provided their L-39 CineJet™ to film the high-speed, in-air shots.

According to their website, the Patriots Jet Team is the largest civilian-owned aerobatic jet team in the western hemisphere. The team was started in 2002 by founder and owner Randy “Howler” Howell, a Discovery Bay resident, who also helps pilot the special jet. Howell has more than 26,000 hours of flight time and over 30 years of flying experience with United Airlines. He has been an advanced instructor in aerobatics, formation, UPRT (upset prevention and recovery training) as well as a Check Airman and Simulator Instructor in a multitude of aircraft.

The CineJet™ high-speed, cinematography platform was launched in 2017 when the Patriots Jet Team partnered with Helinet.

In a March 2 post on the team’s Facebook page it shows a brief video during filming of the movie from the CineJet™ Facebook page asking, “Recognize the jet?”

In another Facebook post on April 1 it reads, “The Patriots are so excited to finally see Top Gun Maverick come out. The #cinejet was key to many of the aerial scenes, can’t wait to see them on the big screen.”

Then on April 18 the team posted, “Lots of Patriots L-39’s in the latest #topgunmaverick Trailer. https://twitter.com/tomcruise/status/1516039183332216838…”

A June 6 post on their Facebook post reads, “If you haven’t already seen Top Gun: Maverick, you won’t want to miss our Helinet CineJet aerials on the big screen! #TopGun #TopGunMaverick #TGM #CineJet #PatriotsJetTeam” and includes a brief trailer from the movie.

At the Top Gun-themed, Patriots Jet Team Foundation annual fundraiser last September, the Guest of Honor and speaker was American actor, writer and producer Glen Powell, who is co-starring in Top Gun: Maverick. He plays the part of pilot, Lt. Jake ‘Hangman’ Seresin. The evening’s program also included a special behind the scenes look at the involvement the Patriots Jet Team pilots had in the aerial shooting of the new movie.

Howell Provides Details of His Team, CineJet, Filming and Training Cruise and the Other Actors

According to Howell quite a few members from the team participated in the making of the film, which includes two pilots, Howell and Scott “Intake” Kartvedt, and five crew chiefs to mention a few.

He provided more details about his organization and the filming of the movie.

The team provides three services, “one is flying a six-ship airshow similar to the Blue Angels or the Thunderbirds,” he shared. “We also provide upset training, teaching corporate and airline pilots how to recover from an unusual attitude or an upset due to wake turbulence, weather, or mechanical failures, flight controls.”

The third piece of the puzzle, is “the CineJet operation for filming,” he stated. “We partnered up with Helinet, a company in Southern California. They own the Shotover F1 which is a large, gyro-stabilized platform which can hold many different types of cameras for filming.”

“We designed, engineered and mounted it to the front of a highly modified L-39 Albatross jet.”

“This all started when my good friend, Kevin LaRosa, Jr., who I have shot commercials and movies with, in the past, came to me and said, ‘hey, would you be interested on partnering up on putting a big, Shotover F1 system on the front of an L-39?’” Howell explained. “My first question was that’s usually used on helicopters with a maximum speed of 150 knots. We need to go a lot faster if we’re going to start doing aerial filming of Top Gun and the likes.”

LaRosa has worked in the film industry for over 16 years as a stunt pilot and aerial coordinator. He and Howell are the pilots for the CineJet.

“So, we worked with the company Shotover based in New Zealand and they then started doing modifications to the six-axis, gyro-stabilized system that can be controlled, to look straight up, straight down, behind you, right and left,” Howell stated. “We needed to do 350 knots and sustain three G’s for maneuvering with the Super Hornets in the movie. So, they modified the arms, gears, motors and other items within the unit. They would then send it to us, and we’d test it up to the next speed, and the next until we reached 350 knots and 3.5 G’s. They did a lot of studies in the wind tunnel and a lot of engineering prior to this.”

“Once it was ready to go, we started launching every jet that every friend had, corporate jets.  I flew the Mig-17, the Saberliners, as well as multiple L39’s intermixed with the Mig-17 and we created an exciting, one-minute sizzle reel,” Howell continued. “We sent that to Paramount, and they contacted us and said, ‘we like it. We want to talk.’ So, that’s how it all started.”

Work on Top Gun: Maverick

“We were then contracted to work on three different areas for the movie over about a year-and-a-half period,” he shared. “First was filming the Super Hornets in flight and the majority of the tactics that you see in the movie. The second was training all of the actors and actress, Monica (Barbaro) is the only actress who portrayed a pilot in the movie. We flew with every single one of the actors including Tom. He then wanted to get checked out in the airplane because he loved the L-39 so much. I flew with Tom many times getting him up to speed in the airplane.”

“The purpose for training all the actors and Tom was the Super Hornet was going to be pulling up to seven-and-a-half G’s,” Howell explained. “So, we went up in the L-39 which is stressed to eight G’s and we flew over, and over and over again at eight G’s. We flew up to 18,000 feet, we’d get a lot of energy up and we would put it into a spiral and sit at eight G’s for long periods of time. That was to get all of them into a mindset that they could act, which is a lot of energy. Acting, you can’t be putting energy into getting sick and nauseas, throwing up and all of that, and acting. So, we flew a lot with all of them.”

“Then Tom loved the airplane so much, and Tom is an awesome pilot, a really, really good pilot, and a really good formation pilot, as well, which is a whole different skill set from normal aviating” Howell shared. “I trained him, and he took a check ride with the FAA. Now, he’s qualified to fly by himself in the L-39 or with other people.”

He then mentioned a video of Cruise in which he flew TV talk show host James Corden in the L-39.

“The other piece of the puzzle was to paint two of our L-39’s in movie grey, sort of a flat, grey color and then put targets on both sides of the tail, both sides of the nose, top and bottom of each wing,” Howell explained. “Production was not able to get a flying F-14 because they don’t fly anymore, they’re all retired and they couldn’t get a Russian Sukhoi 57, either. We did the flying for that.”

“So, it’s real flying,” he added.

“They blocked off 40 miles of the Feather River for us up near Chico,” Howell continued. “Then one of our pilots, Scott ‘Intake’ Kartvedt a former Hornet and Blue Angel pilot in the Navy and I flew all the two-ship stuff with the two Su-57’s and the F-14 through the Feather River. When we did that, it was about a six-week project, and we flew two to three times every day. We also flew off the coast of Point Mugu for the over water, ocean scenes with the two airplanes along with the CineJet filming us.”

“The first time we flew, we scouted the river in a helicopter,” he explained. “There’s a lot of hairpin turns, reversals, with granite walls, a thousand, two thousand feet high on both sides of you. So, as you come up on these switchbacks, come back the other way, you need to know you’re going to be able to come around there and some of them you can’t, they’re too tight. So, now you’ve got to come up over top of the mountain, roll inverted, pull down the other side of the mountain and roll out. All while being filmed by a helicopter or the CineJet with Shotover systems on them.”

“After we flew the first one in the L-39’s and spending several days scouting the area, taking notes, memorizing exactly which turns you were going to make all the way around, which turns you had to come over the top in,” Howell shared. “And we were down in the dirt, we were down 10 feet off the trees through a lot of that and the first time we landed the two of us were visibly, our hands were shaking. We walked toward each other and hugged, ‘Intake’ backed up and said, ‘I have 153 combat missions under my belt. I’ve never been under such high stress flying, before.’”

“So, it was definitely high-risk, but very calculated in the way we executed with all the scouting ahead of time,” he continued. “We started flying up higher, first. Then we came down as we got more comfortable and then we started filming once we got really comfortable down low.”

Asked how many times they flew the canyon route Howell responded, “many, many, many times.”

“You know to get one second of film, you’re gonna film an hour,” he said with a chuckle.

“Every last, little detail in the Super Hornets, everything, everything is the real deal,” Howell stated. “All the internal cameras they would mount inside one of our L-39’s for proof of concept to show what it would look like to the producers, to the director, and what angles they wanted. Then they could go the Navy and say, ‘we’ve already tested all these cameras in the airplane now, we need to mount them inside your airplane’.”

“That’s the whole story of Top Gun. A year-and-a-half involvement, but we were not filming for a year-and-a-half,” Howell shared. “We might film for six weeks, then have a month or two off. Then we’d go back and film for a month or two months, and then we’d have time off. So, it was just over a period of a year-and-a-half.”

They started filming in 2018 and finished up in 2019.

Filmed Another Movie Set During Korean War

Howell then shared about another movie they filmed, “which is going to be spectacular. It’s based on a true story, during the Korean War era where there’s an African American and a white pilot in flight school. The African American was a sharecropper’s son. He was homeschooled. He only wore shoes on Sunday. The white pilot’s dad was a prominent attorney, he belonged to the country club. The two of them became best friends in flight training.”

“They finished flight training and started flying in combat. They were assigned to F-4U Corsairs, the gullwing Corsair, and they went into battle,” he continued.

“I won’t ruin the rest of the story for you,” Howell stated. “There’s a book out called ‘Devotion’ by Adam Makos. You can order it on Amazon. It’s a really, really good story and it’s a true story. I love true stories. It’s going to be a great movie.”

The aerial scenes were filmed in 2021, January to March in Wenachee and Pasco, Washington and then Savannah, Georgia.

The name of the movie is the same as the book, “Devotion” and will be in theaters Thanksgiving weekend beginning Wednesday, Nov. 23.

“Our good friend, Glen Powell, who starred in Top Gun and others, and who was our speaker at our fundraiser is one of the two stars, he plays the pilot/character ‘Tom Hudner’,” Howell shared.

He also played John Glenn in the movie Hidden Figures, “and he’s starred in other movies, as well,” Howell added.

Q&A

Asked how many members from the team participated in the filming of Top Gun: Maverick he said, “There was probably seven of us at different times. We took different crew chiefs who would maintain the airplanes. We have a big hauler, an 18-wheeler and it carries spare everything for the L-39’s. Then we took Jet 7 and Jet 8 which are both set up with the Shotover wiring. There’s a lot of mods to the airplane before mounting the camera. So, we had both airplanes at every event. We had other airplanes there too for doing other training, as well.”

Asked how many pilots the team has Howell said, “we have six airshow pilots.”

According to the Patriots Jet Team website, “they have logged over 105,000 hours of flight time and performed in more than 1500 air shows.” Most recently, they performed over Venice and Mandeville Islands in the Delta prior to the fireworks show on Sunday evening, July 3.

The Patriots Jet Team Foundation

Lastly, the accomplishment that Randy is most proud of is the Patriots Jet Team Foundation, a separate non-profit 501 (c) (3) corporation which he founded in 2011.

“The Foundation educates and mentors youth in America in aviation/aerospace and STEM career paths. The Foundation has partnered with other STEM based Foundations, as well as public, private, charter and University school programs.” Howell shared. “We cater to nearly 10,000 kids a year with rocket launch competitions, high-altitude balloons, introduction to aviation classes, aerodynamic classes and many more that we do, right here, at our facility as well as in the public schools system.”

Be sure to attend the PJT Foundation Benefit Gala on September 17th. You can register at PJTF.ORG.

To learn more about the Patriots Jet Team visit www.patriotsjetteam.com.

By Angely Levis

There will be a candlelight vigil on Thursday, July 21 at 4:30pm honoring the life of 13-year-old Justin Nartea who was hit and killed by a minivan in Antioch on June 11, 2022.

The fatal crash happened in the area of Dallas Ranch Road and Prewett Ranch Drive. According to the Antioch Police Department, the minivan was traveling in the northbound lanes of Dallas Ranch Road when Nartea, crossed the roadway at a crosswalk. The teen devastatingly died despite the life-saving efforts of medics.

Since the accident, the Nartea family has gathered for prayers and will conclude the 40-day memorial with a celebration-of-life reception on Thursday July 21 at 4:30pm at 1804 Crown Peak Way in Antioch. The candlelight vigil will follow, commencing at 8pm at the Dallas Ranch Park.

Free for boys and girls ages 7-17

Learn more about the program in this video.

Visit: antiochca.gov/recreation or email hpacheco@antiochca.gov.

Will wait for November vote on referendum of statewide ban; approves six-year contract extension for city attorney on 5-0 vote

By Allen D. Payton

After much outcry from tobacco retailers in Antioch, the city council on Tuesday night April 26, 2022, agreed to suspend their previously approved ban on the sale of some tobacco and vaping products through December 1. No vote was taken, so the ban remains in place, but city staff was directed to suspend enforcement.

In addition, the council voted unanimously to approve an unusual six-year extension to the contract with Smith. Normal contracts with city attorneys and managers are three-to-five years in length. City Attorney contract extension ACC042622

Tobacco Retail Ban Grace Period

The ban was approved on a 3-2 vote on Feb. 22, with Mayor Pro Tem Mike Barbanica and District 1 Councilwoman Tamisha Torres-Walker opposing. Tobacco Retail Sales Ban ACC022222

It was in response to an effort by Antioch youth seeking to keep flavored tobacco products from being sold to and used by young people. The Council previously considered this topic at its May 25, 2021, meeting during a detailed presentation of a survey by the Youth Tobacco Advocacy Policy Project (YTAPP). The ban went into effect on April 7, this year. YTAPP Presentation ACC052521

According to the city staff report for the April 26 council meeting agenda item, “Since passing the ordinance, the City Council has heard public comment from tobacco retailers and businesses selling tobacco products expressing the desire for a grace period temporarily suspending the implementation of new restrictions on sales of tobacco or tobacco products with characterizing flavor, electronic cigarettes, cigars, and little cigars to enable businesses to sell their existing inventory and transition into compliance with the new ordinance.”

One of the complaints from the retailers was that the city ordinance didn’t create a level playing field with those in neighboring cities. The council was asked to wait until after a November vote on a referendum on the state law passed in 2020 banning flavored tobacco products. According to the L.A. Times the statewide ban was suspended in January 2021 after the referendum by the tobacco industry qualified for the ballot.

Another complaint was that the ordinance didn’t give the retailers time to sell the products they already had in stock. A third complaint was that the retailers weren’t notified by the City of the impending ban or suspension of enforcement prior to either council meeting.

According to a report by the FDA, “Flavors are added to tobacco products to improve flavor and taste by reducing the harshness, bitterness, and astringency. However, the use of flavors in tobacco products raises important public health questions. For example, FDA is aware of early reports that some flavors could help adult cigarette smokers switch to potentially less harmful tobacco products. On the flip side, research has shown that sweet-tasting flavors are particularly appealing to youth and young adults.

In 2020, non-Hispanic Black high school students reported past 30-day cigar smoking at levels twice as high as their White counterparts. Nearly 74% of youth aged 12-17 who use cigars say they smoke cigars because they come in flavors they enjoy. Among youth who have ever tried a cigar, 68% of cigarillo users and 56% of filtered cigar users report that their first cigar was a flavored product. Moreover, in 2020, more young people tried a cigar every day than tried a cigarette.”

During the April 26 meeting the council gave direction to City Attorney Thomas L. Smith to prepare an amendment to the tobacco ordinance implementing a grace period until December 1, to focus on community education and suspend enforcement until the passage of the amendment to the ordinance.

Council Comments

District 3 Councilwoman Lori Ogorchock spoke in favor of the grace period to applause from the audience saying, “I’m looking for the businesses to make a real, concerted effort to make sure none of these flavored, menthol cigarettes get into the hands of kids. I hope there’s something you can do education-wise.”

“I was not in for this from the start,” Barbanica stated. “I didn’t support it. I think it harms our local businesses. Please continue to police yourself. But I’m in support of staying this until at least Dec. 1st until we see what the state does. I think this was an overreach on our part and we need to be consistent with state law and not harm our local businesses.”

While Mayor Lamar Thorpe said he could support the grace period he also stated, “But I will not be changing my mind irrespective of what the voters of California do. I’m sticking to what I originally did.”

District 4 Councilwoman Monica Wilson said she could also support the grace period but wanted to focus on a community education component. “Not sure about Dec. 1, but I can support the grace period.”

“I heard people say, ‘Big Tobacco, Big Tobacco’,” Torres-Walker said, speaking in support of the grace period. “This is not Big Tobacco sitting out here. They’re family-owned businesses.”

Advisory Notice Sent April 25

The following notice was sent by the City to businesses via email on Monday, April 25 providing details on the ban:

“ADVISORY NOTICE:

FOR BUSINESSES ENGAGED IN RETAIL SALES OF TOBACCO AND
VAPING PRODUCTS FOR USE WITH TOBACCO

This notice is to inform local businesses of recent changes to City ordinances impacting retail sales within the City of Antioch. The intent of the referenced policies is to provide a healthy, safe environment for all City residents by reducing the adverse effects of cigarettes and related tobacco products, especially as it relates to youth.

As of April 7, 2022, the following changes to the City of Antioch Municipal Code will become effective:
1. The number of new tobacco retailers shall be restricted.

2. Tobacco retailers are prohibited from selling or possessing tobacco products with the characteristic of being “flavored”, including but not limited to mint, menthol or chocolate.
3. New businesses with tobacco sales and vaping products for use with tobacco shall maintain a minimum distance of at least 1,000 feet from schools and similar uses.
4. Electronic smoking devices and e-cigarettes for sale for use with tobacco or tobacco sales are banned in all retail establishments.
5. A minimum package size for little cigars (cigarillos) is restricted to twenty and cigars is restricted to six.
6. A minimum price of $10 per package, including applicable fees and taxes, is set for tobacco products, including cigarettes, little cigars (cigarillos) or cigars.

The City respectfully requests your cooperation. On a going forward basis, City of Antioch’s Code Enforcement Division will address compliance matters.

For additional background information, see items F and G at https://www.antiochca.gov/fc/government/agendas/CityCouncil/2022/agendas/030822/030822.pdf
Should you have questions regarding retail sales of tobacco and vaping products for use with tobacco, please contact the City of Antioch Community Development Department, Code Enforcement Division at 925.779.7042.”

Retailers who sell the products complained about the impact on their businesses and asked the council to wait until the vote on a November ballot measure was decided, that would create a statewide ban. The retailers wanted a level playing field. The council members agreed.”

The enforcement of the ordinance is currently suspended. The council is expected to vote on the grace period during their next meeting on Tuesday, May 10.

Baseball training available for players ages 7-15 & featuring a low player to coach ratio.

Golden State Grind is hosting a four-day summer baseball camp June 27-30. Bill Duby will direct the program in conjunction with U.S. Baseball Academy. Registration has begun and will continue until all spots are filled.

The four-day skills camp will feature instruction during the morning, with a focus on hitting and defense. The afternoon session will focus on situational baseball games, competition drills, and a Wiffle Ball World Series.

HIGHLIGHTS INCLUDE:

• Low Player-Coach Ratio
• Skill Development
• Situational Baseball Games
• Competition Drills
• Wiffle Ball World Series
• Camp T-shirt & Certificate
• Nike Prizes for winning teams
• and more!

Space is limited. Registration is now under way. For more information, visit Summer Baseball Camp in Antioch, California (ussportscamps.com), or call toll-free 866-622-4487.