> No Air Force pilot is going to risk their career just to… show off, despite what you might have gleamed from watching Tom Cruise movies.

Military pilots do it all the time. Usually it's just drawing dicks in the sky with their flight patterns, but once in a (fortunately) long while it's actually something dangerous: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Cavalese_cable_car_crash

But you only ever heard about the times that it ends in disaster.