To a generation of fighter pilots and the millions who wanted to be one, he will always be Viper: the calm, moustached commanding officer of the Navy Fighter Weapons School in Top Gun, the man who told Maverick the truth about his father. Tom Skerritt, who played him, died on Wednesday 21 October 2026 at the age of 93.

His family said he died of natural causes. The news broke the following day and quickly spread from Hollywood to the military world, because the screen’s most famous naval aviation instructor had worn a real uniform long before he wore a costume one: Skerritt was a US Air Force veteran.

In a career of more than 170 film and television roles, he was Captain Dallas in Alien, Duke Forrest in M*A*S*H and an Emmy-winning sheriff in Picket Fences. But for the aviation world, one role towers over the rest.

From Detroit to Bergstrom Field

Thomas Roy Skerritt was born in Detroit on 25 August 1933 and grew up in a city hit hard by the Depression. After graduating from Mackenzie High School in 1951, he enlisted in the Air Force and served a four-year tour as a classifications specialist, most of it at Bergstrom Field near Austin, Texas.

He did not fly. But flying was the dream that pulled him in. In a 2020 interview with We Are The Mighty, Skerritt said his older brother had flown the P-51 Mustang in the Second World War, and that at 17 he thought he could learn to fly too. The Air Force offered him a promotion to re-enlist; instead he took the GI Bill to college, ending up at UCLA.

UCLA is where he drifted from English towards directing, and then acting. His film debut came in 1962 in War Hunt, a Korean War drama in which he appeared alongside a young Robert Redford.

Viper, the commanding officer

Among his early television jobs were five episodes of Twelve O’Clock High, the 1960s series about an American B-17 bomber group in wartime England. Two decades later, director Tony Scott cast him as Commander Mike “Viper” Metcalf in Top Gun, released in the United States on 16 May 1986.

Viper is the film’s steady centre. He reprimands Maverick and Goose for buzzing the tower, beats Maverick in a training hop to teach him the value of a wingman, and, after Goose’s death, tells the shaken pilot that he flew with Maverick’s father in Vietnam and that the official story about his death was wrong.

Viper and Maverick in “A Confidence Problem”, the scene where Skerritt’s character tells Maverick what really happened to his father (Movieclips).

The flying in the film was real Navy flying. Paramount worked with the Navy and filmed F-14 Tomcats of Carrier Air Wing 15, including VF-51 “Screaming Eagles”, the squadron Viper mentions in the scene at his home. The adversary jets that played the TOPGUN instructors included the nimble A-4 Skyhawk, flown at the real school at NAS Miramar.

The same year he also starred in SpaceCamp, about teenagers accidentally launched into orbit aboard the Space Shuttle. For a man who had once hoped to fly, 1986 put him in both a fighter squadron and a spaceship, at least on screen.

“Hollywood knew him as Viper”

The tributes came quickly, and many of them came from the military. Secretary of Veterans Affairs Doug Collins posted on X that the country should remember Skerritt first as a veteran.

In its statement, his family said he cared deeply about imagination, storytelling, service, veterans and the natural world. Skerritt himself had put it more simply in 2020, describing his four years in uniform as a frame of reference that shaped how he looked at life.

Good Morning America looks back at the life and career of Tom Skerritt.

Very few actors become the face of a profession they never practised. Skerritt managed it twice over: an Air Force enlisted man who taught a generation what a Navy fighter school commander looks like. Somewhere, the tower is getting one last fly-by.

Telling Veterans’ Stories

In 2012 Skerritt co-founded the Red Badge Project with Evan Bailey, a former US Army captain and his neighbour. The programme helps wounded and transitioning soldiers, many dealing with post-traumatic stress, to tell their own stories through writing and storytelling workshops. It began with the Warrior Transition Battalion at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state and later ran programmes at several Veterans Affairs centres.

Top Gun’s Departed Crew

Skerritt’s death comes seven months after that of James Tolkan, who played Commander Tom “Stinger” Jardian, the carrier officer who sends Maverick and Goose to Top Gun. Tolkan died in March 2026 at 94 in Saranac Lake, New York. He had served briefly in the Navy during the Korean War, until a heart problem found after basic training led to his medical discharge.

Val Kilmer, the film’s Iceman, died in April 2025 at 65. Throat cancer had taken much of his voice, and his return in Top Gun: Maverick in 2022 was written around it, in a single scene with Tom Cruise that became his final screen appearance. Clarence Gilyard Jr., who played Sundown, died in November 2022 at 66; after Die Hard and Walker, Texas Ranger he became a professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Sources: Military Times (Reuters), Deadline, NPR, We Are The Mighty, Wikipedia (Tom Skerritt; Top Gun); Henry Ford College (2018); University of Washington College of Arts and Sciences (2015); Stars and Stripes (28 March 2026)