Synopsis for
Les chevaliers du ciel (2005) More at IMDbPro »

This is the French "Top Gun" circa 2005, and the title would be better translated "The Knights of the Sky".

"Walk'n" Marchelli (Benoît Magimel) and "Fahrenheit" Vallois (Clovis Cornillac) are given an assignment to shoot down a rogue Mirage 2000 that has been hijacked by a secret French agency to test preparedness in a post-9/11 France during a Farnborough Air Show. Walk'n shoots down the plane after it locks onto his wing-man, and they are promptly side-lined and ostracised by the French air Force authorities and 'forced' to train two female pilots from the USA. Stopped from flying with a commercial airline, 'Walk'n" and "Fahrenheit" sign on to that "Special Missions" organisation, that then gets them into a series of situations in which their expertise and moral fibre are tested further.

Notably, they fly a race against a flight of F-16s. The flight of three Mirage in which they are flying is forced to the ground and taken captive by mercenaries after an air-to-air refuelling plane is hijacked. They watch one of their fellow pilots be killed, and a female pilot is carried off. They escape: while Walk'n is giving a lesson to a renegade pilot, he disables that man and then activates the ejection seat, lands and picks up Fahrenheit. They straff and destroy one of the other planes before escaping. Meanwhile, one aircraft is disassembled and returned to the Paris region. It then takes off from a disused airfield to join a fly-over of Bastille Day celebrations at which there is also a major European meeting of heads of state.

The two heroes work out what is happening, return to the flight line, and join the fly-past to find the rogue aircraft. The 'lost' female pilot is in it, now revealed as a terror sympathiser all along. She ejects, and Walk'n shoots down the plane after waiting for it to leave the built-up area and go over an area of forest within the Paris metropolitan area.

Walk'n gets the girl: the "Special Missions" operative.

The pace is 'fast', and the characters and the air-to-air photography is 'authentic'.