As a child, Jonathan Spano had one dream: to be a military pilot. It was swiftly shattered when he learned the U.S. Navy required near-perfect eyesight to fly—a standard he could never meet. So he launched his own business instead. And it’s done so well that decades later, he’s been able to splash out millions on flying lessons and his own aircraft to fulfill his childhood dream. Now, he’s the stunt pilot behind some of Top Gun: Maverick‘s most acclaimed aerial sequences.
“I was just fascinated with airplanes; I would build little models of them, hang them from the ceiling with a fishing line in my room. And like many, many young boys, when the Top Gun movie came out, I was obsessed and wanted to fly planes in the Navy and land on aircraft carriers,” Spano told Fortune.
As he got older, the now 48-year-old CEO realized that no amount of passion, pining, or studying would set him on that career course. “I learned that you had to have better than perfect eyesight, really—20/20 is kind of the minimum standard,” he said. “I didn’t meet that criteria, so that took that off the table for me … My eyesight was just not that good. I wore glasses as a kid.”
So Spano worked toward a new dream: Growing up in a “very blue-collar” family in California, he and his brother started doing traffic control work as teenagers—setting out cones and barricades for a crane company their father worked for.
