Six new photos have been released by Paramount Pictures from “Top Gun: Maverick,” director Joseph Kosinski’s sequel to Tony Scott’s 1986 hit, as part of a feature piece in Entertainment Weekly.

The photos showcase the young pilots that will join Tom Cruise’s Maverick in the air in the follow-up. These include Danny Ramirez as “Fanboy,” Glen Powell as “Hangman,” Jay Ellis as “Payback,” Miles Teller as Lt. Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw, Monica Barbaro as “Phoenix,” and Lewis Pullman as “BOB.”

However they aren’t the new recruits this time, rather they are all previous graduates of the U.S. Navy Strike Fighter Tactics Instructor program. Kosinski explains:

“Those pilots [in the first film] were entering the Top Gun school for the first time. In our film, these are all Top Gun graduates who are coming back for a special training detachment – which is another aspect of Top Gun where they can go back for specialized training after they’ve already graduated. They’re at a different level of experience than in the first film.”

F-18 Super Hornets were specially outfitted with up to six IMAX-quality cameras to capture the actors as they pretended to pilot the planes (planes actually operated by a Navy pilot in the other seat). The maneuvers they were put through were very physically gruelling, so all the actors had to go through months of aerial training and were part of a training course that Cruise actually designed himself.

Kosinski also spoke about the film’s most extreme sequence which sees Maverick flying across the desert at an incredibly low altitude:

“For the sequence where Tom got to do some extreme low-altitude flying in this film, we had to get special permission from the Navy to do it. It was one of the most extreme aerial sequences that we could come up with. Also, getting to do a real launch off a carrier and a real landing on a carrier – no one else has been able to ever do that in a movie before. Tom got to fulfill every kind of aviation dream that he had.”

Kosinski says the relationship between Cruise’s Maverick and Miles Teller’s ‘Rooster’, son of the original film’s ill-fated ‘Goose’, is the biggest driver in the film and forms its “emotional core and spine”. “Top Gun: Maverick” will be released June 26th 2020.