This weekend, Tom Cruise will be feeling the need for speed again when Top Gun: Maverick hits theaters. The stunt-packed sequel to 1986’s Top Gun sees Cruise reprising his role as Pete “Maverick” Mitchell. This time around, he finds himself training a special detachment of recruits who have already graduated from TOPGUN flight school. As you might have guessed, that means the aerial stunts are even more advanced – so much so that Cruise needed special clearance from the U.S. Navy to perform a few particular scenes.

Cruise has a history of being a real-life adrenaline junkie, doing the vast majority of his own stunts over his long career and shaking off injuries and brushes with death like the rest of us shake off a stubbed toe. Even though he’s a few years shy of 60 now, he’s still pushing himself and still going strong, always willing to pull off ever-more eye-popping feats for the sake of an excellent action scene. To remind you of just how much he’s dared over the years, we’re rounding up all the best aerial stunts of his career.

In no particular order, here are all the adrenaline-inducing aerial scenes that have cemented Tom Cruise as arguably the world’s greatest action star.

Pretty Much Every Aerial Scene In ‘Top Gun: Maverick’

Tom Cruise learned how to fly a helicopter for Mission: Impossible – Fallout, so of course, his next feat was–why not?–to learn how to fly a fighter jet for Maverick. Specifically, an F-18. Along with Cruise, the entire cast underwent months of flight training to be able to withstand the forces in the jets. Because why not go up in a fighter jet and be hit by all those G-forces and potentially pass out and puke when you could, you know, just have actual fighter pilots paired up. But no. One of Cruise’s flight sequences happened at such a low altitude that, as mentioned above, the production had to get special clearance from the U.S. Navy to film it. Because clearly, learning how to fly a fighter jet wasn’t challenging enough. It’s definitely a step up from the first Top Gun, before Cruise was the veteran stuntman he is today, when they tried to shoot in actual F-14s and everyone on the cast, including Cruise, threw up.

Hanging Onto A Plane Taking Off For ‘Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation’

This is the one stunt that Cruise himself admitted had him “scared shitless.” For Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, his character, Ethan Hunt, has to get into a plane before it takes off, while Benji (played by Simon Pegg) manipulated the controls to open one of the doors to let him inside. The stunt was real and Cruise did all of it. Yes, that’s really a real-life cargo plane taking off and yes, that’s really Cruise hanging onto the side in a pair of dress shoes and yes, that’s really Cruise running up the wing of the plane with nothing more than a few guidelines tethering him, likely questioning all his choices that led him to that moment.

Helicopter Chase Sequence In ‘Mission: Impossible – Fallout’

The entire helicopter scene in Fallout is impressive, and I’m not even talking about the fact that just to get into the helicopter, Cruise insisted on climbing a rope as it took off and then crawling inside the helicopter while it was in the air. No, what’s even more impressive is that it’s Cruise doing all this own flying in the helicopter chase, which had moments where the rotors from the other helicopter or the walls from the canyons were just a few feet away. To accomplish it, Cruise underwent helicopter flight training and got his pilot certification in just six weeks. Normally, a certification like that takes a full three months to complete but Cruise worked with two different crews for an exhausting 16 hours a day so he could learn to fly it double-time and cut his training time in half. And of course, he did, and of course, he nailed the certification tests.

The HALO Jump For ‘M:I – Fallout’

It really feels like the Mission: Impossible franchise, which I love with all my heart, is just Tom Cruise jumping from an increasingly higher series of things. But the HALO jump that Cruise, a stunt double for Henry Cavill, and a skydiver-turned-cameraman did was, according to director Christopher McQuarrie, the most technically difficult one they ever did. As with the helicopter, Cruise had to get certified to do a HALO jump – that is, a high altitude, low opening jump – and then they had to find a country that would even let them shoot it in the first place. Further complicating the stunt, the sequence in the script takes place at dusk, so they only had a few minutes of available light to shoot every day and they had to shoot three separate parts of the jump. For the jump, which only takes about 2 1/2 minutes in the movie, they shot a whopping 106 takes to get all the pieces together. Take about dedication – and maybe a teeny bit of insanity.

Zero-Gravity Plane Crash Scene – ‘The Mummy’

Despite The Mummy not being that well-received, one of the movie’s most eye-popping sequences was the zero-gravity plane crash scene. If you thought Tom Cruise would be content filming it on a green screen and gymbals, you clearly have not read the rest of this article. No, he decided to actually crash a plane in order to experience that feeling of no gravity. At least, that was his original plan. Luckily, the production team managed to borrow the plane that NASA uses to train its astronauts, decking it out to look like a cargo plane. Once the plane was at an altitude of 25,000 feet, it would free-fall for 22 seconds. They did it sixty-four times. Because if at first you don’t succeed, do it sixty-three more times and pray you don’t puke on your co-star or accidentally knock her out.

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Top Gun: Maverick is in theaters this Friday.

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