Chinese air force drill looks awfully similar to ‘Top Gun’

On Jan. 23, China's state broadcaster, CCTV, ran a story about an air force training exercise that contained some suspicious footage.

Around the segment's one minute 12 seconds mark (see below), as the China-U.S.-oriented blog Ministry of Tofu pointed out, "the way a target was hit by the air-to-air missile fired by a J-10 fighter aircraft and exploded looks almost identical to a cinema scene from the Hollywood film Top Gun."

Viewers were led to believe that what they were seeing was a live fire exercise. But according to Ministry of Tofu: "A net user who went by the name "刘毅" (Liu Yi) pointed out that the jet that the J-10 'hit' is an F-5, a US fighter jet. In Top Gun, what the leading actor Tom Cruise pilots an F-14 to bring down is exactly an F-5. Looking at the screenshots juxtaposition, one cannot fail to find that even flame, smoke and the way the splinters fly look the same."