Top Gun : 6-Year-Old Leukemia Victim Is the Man of the Hour at Navy Base

Three grueling years of chemotherapy treatments are over and, for at least a little while, everything Justin has wished for and his parents have wanted for him has come true.

His disease, acute lymphoblastic leukemia, is in remission and, although the next few months are critical and the prognosis has been grim, Justin has been doing well.

The excruciating therapy, one week on and one week off, is over, and that is a big relief for the Granada Hills family.

As far as 6-year-old Justin is concerned, however, the best thing to have happened of late came in early March, when he became a Top Gun.

There haven’t been many days in the last three years that the slight boy hasn’t been sick, but on one of them he went to see the movie “Top Gun.”

“He has always been interested in flying, talking about wanting to be a fighter pilot, and after he saw that movie, that was it,” said his mother, Arline, who asked that the family’s last name not be used. “He couldn’t talk about anything else but being a fighter pilot.”

Arline, who formed a support group for parents of children with cancer after Justin’s was diagnosed when he was 3 years old, had heard about the Make-A-Wish Foundation, which tries to fulfill the last wishes of dying children.

“I knew that what Justin would like more than anything would be to get up in the cockpit of a military fighter plane,” she said, “but I didn’t see how that could possibly happen.

“Another mother in my group told me that children were eligible to be helped by Make-A-Wish if they had a life-threatening disease, even if they weren’t actually on their last legs.

“I felt that if Justin was eligible for something like this, it would be so much better for him to have it now, when he is well enough to enjoy it, than maybe somewhere down the road when he might be too sick. I have seen a lot of children who at the end were really too sick to be able to get any joy out of what was being done for them.”

Arline contacted Justin’s social worker at the UCLA Medical Center, and wheels were set in motion to make Justin’s dream come true.

Volunteer Milinda McNeely, an attorney at Paramount Pictures, which produced “Top Gun,” was assigned to the case. She persuaded the Navy to invite Justin and his family to spend a day at the legendary training school for fighter pilots, where the movie was filmed.

A local television production company, “Two’s Company,” lent a Lear jet, and Cine Exec Helicopters donated the services of pilots Jeff Senour and Alan Austin.

A tiny flight suit emblazoned with military patches awaited Justin at Burbank Airport when he and his family arrived. His mother zipped him into it. A film technician hid a microphone in his breast pocket.

Justin’s adventure was taped by the crew of “Silver Linings,” an NBC show making its debut next month.

Justin, who had never been in an airplane before, was invited to ride in the cockpit on takeoff, but he was too scared. He sat next to his mother and held her hand until the plane was in flight.

Then, somewhere over Long Beach, at about 11,000 feet, Justin took over the controls.

“Welcome to Fightertown, U.S.A.” read a huge sign as the Lear Jet touched down at Miramar and taxied alongside an F-14.

Cmdr. Jay Yakeley greeted Justin and his brother, Jason, 11, and invited them to inspect the cockpit of the plane. The boys mounted a ladder and looked the craft over.

Then they were escorted by Jeep, followed by a caravan of vans carrying news media, to the flight simulation center.

As cameramen jockeyed for position, Justin sat on the lap of Lt. Cmdr. Rob Adamson and practiced simulated takeoffs and landings on the deck of an aircraft carrier.

Finally Jason got his turn. His father, Max, climbed aboard.

While Max was following the pilot’s instructions on which buttons to push and how to move the stick, Justin and Jason conspired at a control panel to cause him some trouble.

“We pushed buttons that made his engines burn out and made him crash,” Justin said gleefully.

After lunch in the Officers’ Club, Lt. Rick Brennan presented Justin with a Top Gun cap and a photograph signed by all the pilots in Squadron 124.

The inscription read, “To Justin, World’s Smallest Fighter Pilot.”