China's state broadcaster CCTV has been left looking a bit daft after local netizens spotted it had swiped a choice snippet of footage from Top Gun.

The outrage featured in a 23 November broadcast about an air force training exercise, in which "a target was hit by the air-to-air missile fired by a J-10 fighter aircraft".

In fact, the victim of this piece of airborne unfriendliness is the US F-5 seen being blasted from the skies at the end of Hollywood's 1986 testoterone-fuelled homage to navy fliers.

According to the Wall Street Journal, CCTV has removed the clip featuring this shameless piece of "repurposing" from its website, but it's too late to hide from the interwebs' all-seeing eye: