Improbable Piloting Skills

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"They were spectacular. We recorded thirty-four kills out of a possible thirty-six with no losses. If I hadn't been there, I'd think it was propaganda." —Tycho Celchu, Rogue Squadron

"He can't be Human!" —Soon to be dead red-shirt enemy, Ace Combat Zero

A trope possessed by many an Ace Pilot, and sometimes their Wing Man too.

Heroes, as a rule, are supposed to be better than everyone else. However, if everyone is using similar (flying) machines to fight, it can be hard to make him stand out above his peers: enter Improbable Piloting Skills. If there’s ANY chance something can be done with a Cool Plane/Humongous Mecha/Hover Tank/Giant Flyer of choice (and indeed quite possibly even if there isn't), he can do it on the spur of the moment with a 100% success rate. And, of course, anything he climbs into basically gains an instant + 100 to all its stats.

Some of the most common Improbable Piloting skills are:

• If it flies...
  It doesn't matter what sort of machine it is - so long as it can fly, he can pilot it like a pro. Be it a glider, ultra light, single engine Cessna, mach 50 transforming super fighter, or alien spacecraft, just give him five minutes and he'll figure it out. This also applies to when the pilot receives their mid-series upgrade. There's never any mention of the months of retraining needed to fly it... At best he's maybe a little clumsy for one episode, or if not, just as likely to blast off in it to save the day against impossible odds five minutes after he first sees the thing.

• Aerody-whatsit?
  The hero's plane is not bothered by concepts such as drag, stall, or lack of thrust. He can throw his craft about the sky in an often physics-defying manner with no repercussions. This also applies to ships that are an aerodynamic nightmare which would, in reality, have trouble getting off the ground, never mind back flipping at mach 2.

• Gravity Shmavity!
  The hero is immune to G-Forces, or at least remarkably resistant to them. He can hold casual conversations while pulling 9Gs and executing moves that would probably kill a mere mortal.

• Reinforced Plot Armor.
  Planes and most flying things tend to be fragile: if an unnamed character’s craft is so much as nicked by a slingshot's pebble, it will explode in a fiery conflagration. Not so the hero's craft, of course. Once he climbs aboard, any Personal Plot Armor he happens to be wearing is transferred to it and indeed quite possibly boosted. His craft may be missing a wing, so full of holes it looks like a sieve, and with one engine out, and he’ll still manage to shoot down five enemies with it before making an emergency landing. (Note that the B-17, Zivi Nadivi and the Warthog are Truth in Television.)

• My Missiles are Better.
  The weapons on the hero's craft may be identical to the weapons used by other characters, but they will often function in a superior manner - fly faster, be harder to intercept, do more damage, and track better. This also applies to the defensive measures on the hero's craft: they will always distract the enemy missiles, while flares deployed by the enemy will never do a damn thing against the hero's own.

• The Eyes of An Eagle.
  The hero doesn’t just have good vision - he has wide angle telephoto vision with a super slow-mo shutter! He’ll always spot the enemy first and never lose track of him once sighted. He can clearly see and shoot down/dodge incoming missiles that would be nothing but a blur to a real human being as they are often moving faster than bullets.

• Three Times Faster than a Normal Zaku.
  Any craft the pilot climbs into is instantly rendered improbably faster and more maneuverable than others of its type (may coincide with Reinforced Plot Armor by increasing evasion skills). Sometimes this is "justified" with an Ace Custom or by painting it red (or both), but other times, the pilot is simply so awesome he can push his machine to an arbitrary speed, technical limitations be damned.

• White Hole Engines, Inc.
  The pilot will not run low on fuel. Magazines are bottomless, except for dramatic effect. As a corollary to Reinforced Plot Armor, electrical, hydraulic, motor, and other related systems do not show signs of wear or damage, regardless of how long the device is used, or in what conditions.

• Space Does Not Work That Way
  In science fiction a pilot will often fly his spacecraft as if it were a terrestrial airplane, especially using banking turns. In a vacuum, any controllable acceleration has to come from the ship's thrusters, so changing the ship's orientation alone won't do anything to the ship's speed or direction of movement.

While these powers, particularly "If it flies", can occur alone, they're normally part of a package deal that is free for any hero whose main mode of combat is aerial warfare of some kind. Less important characters may be allowed weaker versions of these, but the highest grades are the domain of the main protagonist (and probably his obligatory rival) alone.

Do keep in mind, though, that Tropes Are Not Bad--some of these can actually happen in Real Life (and very much have).

Examples of Improbable Piloting Skills include:

Anime and Manga

• Often enough used in all kinds of Gundam (except the unlimited ammo thing, which occasionally occurs). Interestingly enough the actual planes tend to be less impressive than or equal to contemporary Real Life designs apart from the occasional Energy Weapon unless piloted by a main character, to hammer home just how much of an advancement Mobile Suits are. The spaceship-like Mobile Armors are all over the performance scale with some being flying (as if someone just threw them) bricks and others matching the vaunted Gundams themselves in terms of mobility.
  • Two very similar examples of G-forces: the Tallgeese from Gundam Wing and Custom Flag from Mobile Suit Gundam 00, each used by their show's Char Clone (Zechs Merquise and Graham Akre respectively), boast incredible speed and acceleration, but do so at incredible risk to the pilot (for Tallgeese this is the reason it's a Super Prototype; the Custom Flag's mods were done on request of the pilot. Both men are shown to suffer effects like Blood From the Mouth, tunnel vision, near blackouts, and in Zechs' case a full-on heart attack as a result of the stresses they put on their bodies in order to fight the Gundams on an equal footing.
  • Taken to extremes in Mobile Suit Gundam SEED, though not by the numerous ace pilots as one might expect. Rather, the most improbable is Arnold Neumann, the helmsman of the Archangel, who isn't well known enough to be mentioned even once on the trope page of that series, and yet is responsible for some of the most insane maneuvers ever performed by a battleship in a Real Robot series. Doing a barrel roll to point the ship's guns down or circumvent an enemy battleship? No problem. Recovering from a botched atmospheric re-entry? Not even worth a mention. Dodging beams and guided missiles alike between the time they are fired and the time they reach his ship (many times maneuvering so quickly it looks like the crew would surely be turned to red paste against the walls)? All in a day's work. And the Archangel isn't a small ship. It's The Battlestar, and several times larger than the biggest modern aircraft carrier. It ought to break its wings, if not break in half, for doing such things.
• Suzaku from Code Geass is guilty of If it flies..., Gravity Smavity!, and Reinforced Plot Armor.
• The Macross franchise hosts several pilots of this kind, even if they're not always the main protagonists:
  • Shin Kudo, who did well against Variable Fighters while piloting an ordinary F-14 Tomcat. "Well" as in "was able to get a VF into gunsights before it transformed."
  • Maximilian Genius, the confirmed top ace of the UN Spacy (and a brilliant military tactician, to boot.)
    • Goes for his daughter Mylene, too, whose first flight in a Valkyrie is about as kick ass as Max's. This after every other candidate failed horribly at it.
  • Isamu Dyson and Guld Bowman, test pilot virtuosos whose Super Prototype Valkyries can barely keep up with them.
    • However, Gravity Shmavity is notably averted. During the Dog Fight sequence, both Isamu and Guld are noticeably straining to avoid blacking out. Also in the movie, Guld dies due to the very insanely extreme G's he goes under while fighting the Ghost X-9.
  • Alto Saotome, who, after a few weeks' training, was able to match and surpass seasoned SMS and NUNS veterans (and became equal to a cyborg flying a Super Prototype of his own.) However, it was noted that he had training to pilot before joining the SMS.
• While about 90% of Improbable Piloting Skills in Strike Witches can be attributed to the Strikers being magical, some of the feats are still improbable. Mainly, The Eyes of An Eagle and White Hole Engines, Inc.
• Sonic exhibited improbable piloting skills in a few episodes of Sonic X. Episode 63 "Station Break-In" in particular. His antics behind the controls of the X-Tornado are wild and dangerous and include dodging pipes at breakneck speed and using the plane itself as a weapon rather than the plane's ammunition, much to Knuckles' displeasure. However, he has enough aviating skill by far to pull off these stunts with incredible fortitude and grace.

Comic Books

• The Blackhawks exhibited just about every type of improbable flying over their long run, but White Hole Engines, Inc. is undoubtedly the most common. Typically, the Blackhawks are depicted as being able to reach any location in Europe (and sometimes outside Europe) and return to Blackhawk Island with little trouble - even when the location is deep within Axis territory, like Czechoslovakia in 1940.
• Ronto, a Rogue Squadron pilot in Star Wars Legacy, invokes the "If it flies..." variant when asked if he could fly an Imperial shuttle during a prison break. He responds with, "Lady, if you had wings, I could fly you."
• Ben Grimm is occasionally portrayed as having been an almost impossibly good pilot before becoming the Thing, being able to fly anything from normal planes to spaceships to whacked-out sci-fi vehichles. After his transformation he still has the skills, but is hampered by being too big to comfortably get into a normal pilot seat and strong enough that he's in danger of breaking "fragile" steering mechanisms unless he's very careful.
• Flamingo from the Golden Age Contact Comics who pulled such blatantly impossible stunts as landing on the side of forested mountain. And taking off again.
• Subverted in Cross Gen's Negation. The group of fugitives believed sigil-bearer Westin's ability was to pilot any alien spacecraft he could get his hands on, which was true, but he could actually look into the recent past and see how the ship's previous owner operated the ship. Westin would then copy their movements.
• Cyclops, leader of the X-Men, and one of the best pilots in the Marvel Universe. Remember, he's colour blind, but apparently his Improbable Aiming Skills, which are officially part of his power, allow him to maneuver better at the seat of a plane than a normal person. When he isn't leading the X-Men, he's usually working as a civilian pilot of some sort.
• The heroines of Jet Dream, who are particularly good at improvisation, such as (for example) disabling an enemy plane by dropping an empty external fuel tank on it.

Film

• In Apollo 13, one of the astronauts, Jim Lovell, is seen this way by his elderly mother, who states that if they could get a washing machine to fly, he could land it. Maybe she's right.
  • His piloting skills were hardly improbable, since he was a military test pilot.
  • Considering what happened in that flight, the crew of 13 is qualified to land a brick.
  • Normally, the Apollo capsules were flown with assistance from the flight computer with the main engine. After the accident, not enough power remained, so the flight computer was off. Also, the main engine was feared damaged, so the engines from the lunar lander were used. They lined up their target (reaching earth) with an optical sight (read: crosshairs in the window).
    • NASA had (and probably still has) its pick of the best pilots in the United States. Especially in the days of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, one needed to have Improbable Piloting Skills just to get an interview.
• In the movie Biggles: Adventures in Time, World War I flying ace Biggles is able to work out how to fly a late 20th century helicopter by experimenting with the controls for a few minutes. Definitely a case of "If it flies..."
  • The trope is actually lampshaded, with his American "Time Twin" (don't ask) telling him he can't fly it, he doesn't know how, to which Biggles just replies "If you can fly a Sopwith Camel, you can fly anything..."
• Top Gun is entirely based around this trope.
  • Subverted with the flat spins. Watch out for that jetwash, Maverick!
• Stealth was mostly based around the notion of introducing AI pilots who would be unaffected by the physical limitations of human pilots. At one point, the AI plane is ordered to pull off a maneuver which would be incredibly difficult for a human pilot to do and survive, in order to destroy a bunker full of terrorists. One of the human pilots disobeys orders and makes the run himself (apparently just to satisfy his ego) and suffers no lasting injury (or punishment). The human pilots manage to keep up with the robot plane for most of the film, except when the plot requires them to fail.
  • It's clear from the dogfight scene with the Su-37s that the animators either didn't know or didn't care about G-forces.
• Will Smith gets an If it flies in Independence Day with the alien space craft. Then he crashes.
  • The President orders anybody with piloting experience to fly F-15 Eagle fighters in the battle over Area 51. This includes a crop duster pilot.
    • Somewhat subverted in this case, as Russell Casse described flying combat missions in Vietnam before his crop dusting job, so his ability to handle a military airframe isn't exactly improbable.
• Hot Shots as it is mostly a parody of Top Gun parodies most versions of this trope. Topper's plane can cartwheel through the air, paddle enemy planes out of the sky with his wings, and fly through downtown traffic. He also loses both wings, his engines, his instruments and most of his hull but lands successfully on the aircraft using a perpendicular trajectory.
• The titular ship's pilot Wash in the movie Serenity. Flies his comparitively tiny ship through a titanic battle without a scratch and manages to crash land it somewhat safely even after getting hit by and EMP weapon.
  • "I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar!"
• The Italian Job helicopter pilot. What's crazy is that the director was surprised how well the actual pilot did during the ordeal. There's even a featurette, or part of a featurette on the DVD about it.
• The a Team had Murdoch do some impossible things with a helicopter and then culminated with him 'flying' a tank.
• Most of the subtropes can be justified by the Force, and we all know George Lucas is in hot, drooling love with Old School Dogfighting, but all that aside, Luke Skywalker (and to a lesser extent, Wedge Antilles) has massive Reinforced Plot Armor. He and his dad seem to have a healthy dose of "If It Flies..." as well.
  • Add both Han Solo and Lando Calrissian to this list. With no Force assistance they both make the Millenium Falcon perform some absurdly precise and extreme maneuvers.

Literature

• Almost everyone in the Liaden Universe. Though given the huge emphasis on breeding for pilot skills and reflexes, studying, flying, and ship owning, it might actually be reasonable for them to be able to fly any ship they end up in. Even Pat Rin (who ends up finally getting his license after having to fly his ship in an emergency) has studied a lot about ships and flying, even if he somehow freaked out and never passed any official exam.
• Force-Sensitive pilots in the Star Wars Expanded Universe are seen as possessing these. In Death Star, a decent Imperial pilot remembers flying in training, with low-powered lasers so that no one was killed, and how during one demonstration Darth Vader decided to join them. He toyed with the best of the trainers, a veteran that made the decent pilot feel like a child who could barely walk trying to keep up with a marathon runner, matched every move, did things that TIE fighters should not be able to do, and was later found to have shot everyone down with his targeting and navigation computers disabled before launch, which the decent pilot believed was flatly impossible. Said pilot concluded that if he got on Vader's bad side and was pursued, he'd just overload his engines and commit suicide.
  • A somewhat less dramatic example (usually): The pilots in Rogue Squadron are some of the best in the galaxy. They built up a reputation for being able to succeed at impossible missions.
    • Specifically... During the Vong war, there was that time when Wedge was slow to evacuate from a base, his escape shuttle was destroyed, the only ship functioning was a droidless X-Wing marked "Blackmoon Eleven". So he got in it. And destroyed an entire squadron of Vong coralskippers, which generally only happens through superior firepower or trickery. In certain parts of fandom this has lead to the very small, specific meme, "Blackmoon Eleven: the Greatest Pilot of All Time".
    • Wedge explicitly has a combination of nearly-inhuman reflexes, situation awareness, and experience that totals up to making him almost supernaturally good. More than once he's able to "stretch his senses" through and past his X-Wing into the cockpit of enemy craft, knowing how they'll react before they do. He claims that it has nothing to do with the Force. A variety of tests for Force sensitivity (which show him having none whatsoever) confirm this.
• Hawk Hunter of the Wingman series by Mack Maloney is this x50. He can fly any craft, even shooting down and outmaneuvering several MiG jet fighters with an A-1 Skyraider prop plane, a relic with nothing but cannons. He's also a certified genius and engineer, which lets him know every detail of every plane in the world (to the point of knowing the location of all the individual bolts and weld spots on his own F-16) and is in fact psychic, letting him tell the direction a plane is going and what speed/altitude it's traveling at before it's within visual range, or tell when his F-16 is approaching with another pilot at the stick.
• Harry Potter, as soon as he gets out one of the clumsy, old-as-sin school training brooms (without having touched a broom before), can catch an apple-sized (glass) sphere in his hand after a fifty-foot dive, and topple gently to the ground. Granted, it's magic, but dayum.
• The Michael Crichton novel Airframe involves a plane that went through a series of wild dives and climbs that nearly tore it apart, leaving everyone wondering how the pilot was able to get it under control and land. Subverted when it turns out the pilot was actually causing it due to not being familiar with the type of aircraft.

Live Action TV

• Dobbs from the German TV action show Der Clown. The movie Payday takes his badassness to the max as he flies multiple loops with his helicopter only a few hundred feet above ground while successfully evading heat-seeking missiles.
• "Howlin' Mad" Murdock from The A-Team is of the "If it flies" variety.

Face: Hey, I got us a Gulf Stream. Can you fly it? Murdock: Hey, brother, if it's got wings, you know I can fly it.

• • He once helped Hannibal land a large passenger jet at LAX with his eyes closed (Murdock had been temporarily blinded by a gun that discharged in his face). The air-traffic control workers acknowledged how implausible it was.
• Colonel Jack O'Neill from Stargate SG-1 pilots an F-302 on a couple of occasions, despite a conspicuous lack of pilot's wings on his uniform.
• Colonel John Sheppard from Stargate Atlantis claims he can fly anything. He proceeds to do so over the course of the series. He's flown or operated helicopters, Air Force fighters, human-alien hybrid F-302 interceptors, Daedalus-class warships, Wraith Darts (without knowing the language), Ancient Puddle Jumpers, Ancient Aurora-class battleships, the city of Atlantis, and an asteroid.
• Lieutenant Matthew Scott in Stargate Universe is able to fly the shuttle aboard Destiny.
• In Firefly, if it weren't for Wash's piloting skills the crew of Serenity would have been captured, dead or worse.
  • Mal even calls him a 'genius pilot' at one point, and it's noted several high profile people courted him before he signed on with the Serenity.
• One episode of the new Battlestar Galactica has Starbuck, stranded on an uninhabitable moon after crashing her Viper, have to get home in the Cylon Raider she shot down in the process. She makes some interesting observations about flying machines.

Starbuck: Every flying machine has four basic controls: Roll, pitch, yaw, and thrust. If you can figure those out, you can fly. Touches a control, and the guns fire. Starbuck: OK, don't touch that again.

• JAG had Harmon Rabb, Jr. - whether it's pushing a crippled F-14 with his plane, landing a 747 after the pilots have been shot by hijackers, landing a C-130 on the deck of an aircraft carrier, or flying his restored WWII-era Stearman he demonstrates time and again that as long as he's at the stick you're probably going to make it home in one piece. Whether or not the plane does is a matter of debate.

Tabletop Games

• Genius: The Transgression features the "if it flies" variant of this trope. Geniuses never take penalties when applying skills to unfamiliar situations. This means that a genius with high Drive skill is an ace pilot with everything that flies, from a crop duster to a space shuttle.
• GURPS has the wildcard skill Pilot! which allows the user to fly any plane or spaceship.
• Some ace pilots in Aeronautica Imperialis, who can use pilot skill checks to miraculously survive when their chosen maneuver would put their plane at below stall speed or at altitude 0 (otherwise known as 'the ground'). Especially awesome when a bomber pilot pulls off an insane maneuver.
  • One fan-created scenario based on Dr. Strangelove pits one ace-piloted Imperial Marauder, Space Marine Thunderhawk Gunship, or Tau Tiger Shark against an assortment of enemy interceptors and ground defenses in an attempt to maneuver through a series of canyons to reach a ground target. Needless to say, the bomber pilot has to be very, very good to pull it off.

Video Games

• The Super Robot Wars crank up the skill Amuro Ray displayed in the series to a rediculous degree, to the point where even the EldritchAbominations let alone every anime's cast recognize him as one of if not THE the most badass person in the universe (Which he shares with people like Ryouma, Kouji, and pretty much every sort of god-like Super Robot ever so that says A LOT while he's piloting a GUNDAM.) His stats reflect this.
  • To say nothing of Tetsuya Tsurugi who have been broken in several games, and being considered as The Ace of the group(and yes, this is the same group with several Badass from mecha anime on it).
• Along with Zeerust, this trope is pretty much what powers Crimson Skies.
• On a larger scale, Non-Action Guy Joker in Mass Effect claims to be able to make the Cool Starship Normandy sit up and dance. He proves he's not exaggerating when, among other accomplishments, he swoops down from orbit and drops a TANK in a narrow street, not 30 feet from the main villain without scratching it at all, while facing hostile fire and then swooping back up into orbit with no problems.
  • He is the best pilot in The Alliance, after all.
  • He pulls a Han Solo in the sequel when he flies through an entirely unmapped debris field close to a black hole (the ship had strong protection), ensuring the Normandy took barely any damage.
• Captain Keyes in Halo is guilty of this to the point of turning down Cortana's offer to figuring out the controls of the alien aircraft they're pirating in favor of doing it himself, he proceeds to take down two Hunters with it before flying off.
  • It's very possible that he's piloted alien craft before though, as he's had some adventures in the past (to say the least).
• Katana in Project Sylpheed for Xbox 360. At the beginning of the game, it's nigh-suicide to take on a trio of destroyers. If you, the player, actually manage to do it, you get a special conversation where Katana's commanding officer exclaims that it was one of the most awesomely psychotic things he's ever seen anyone do, but he doesn't want to see Katana do it again. By the end of the game, you're taking on ships a hundred times the size of your support ship, and it's all okay because, as one copilot puts it, "we've got Katana!"
• Ace Combat has this in spades. Beyond the Hyperspace Arsenal, your character is easily capable of taking down multiple squadrons at once, while attacking ground forces, and avoiding their combined fire. Hard turns at over 1000 mph? Check. Flying the A-10 and F-117 well beyond supersonic in level flight? Check. Being capable of surviving multiple missile strikes? Check. Hell, if you do it gently enough, you can fly into, and seemingly bounce off of, the ground and water.
• Freelancer. Let's begin the checklist, shall we?
  • If it flies...
    Oh yes. You can move from a Liberty Light Fighter to a Corsair Heavy Fighter instantly, without any prior knowledge. Add a mod or 2, and you could end up piloting a battleship or a prison ship. Possible justified, as humans have learnt how to harness wormholes, so how hard can it be to create ships that are linked to the owner telepathically?
    • Or have universal controls.
  • Reinforced Plot Armor.
    Then again, so are the enemy ships, so not really counted...
  • White Hole Engines, Inc.
    The ships run on fusion engines, with a special concoction of hydrogen, and its isotopes. Practically all the weapons are lasers, or variants of lasers. The few exceptions include missiles, mines, torpedoes and countermeasures.
• Sazh freakin' Katzroy. The first time he gets into a plane in-story, he does a High-Speed Missile Dodge before the bad guys hit him. And he's a civilian pilot, so it's anybody's guess how he learned to dodge anything in the first place. Also a mild offender of If It Flies.
• The Star Fox series picks and chooses which tropes to use. Most common are My Missiles Are Better, Eyes Of An Eagle and White Hole engines. Interestingly, some of the others are subverted - multiple times, especially in 64, you have to boost to catch up to enemies, or brake to avoid them.
  • 64 subverts the 3x Faster rule too in the Hard version of Venom: Team Star Wolf has ships that have about as much armour as the arwings, and are considerably faster, to the point where it's difficult to use the traditional manveuring tricks to get behind one that's tailing you, and even then, you only have a couple of seconds to get a shot off.
• The If It Flies rule is present in Tachyon the Fringe, as Jake cam go from a barely-fliable Mako to a top-of-the-line Archangel without any training.
• EVE Online is possibly the poster child for this trope. Although it does take time (lots and lots of time), you can fly any ship, from 747-sized frigates to Titans that are MILES long. And enhance their capabilities just by virtue of being that damn good. Make your weapons more damaging, faster firing, more accurate and longer ranged? Check. Make your ship tougher, faster, more agile and more powerful (in a literal, 'generate more power from the powerplant' way)? Check. And most importantly, do all of the above without actually adding anything to the ship? Big check. Particularly jarring when you consider that this can happen in the middle of a fight if a skill completes at the right time.
  • You hit the nail on the head though: While you CAN fly anything in the game, it takes weeks or even months (real time) to actually learn all of the necessary skills...and that's only to be able to pilot it with the efficiency of a drunken whale. Not to mention your ship is always a highly customized piece of equipment, and finishing a skill amounts to learning how to tweak something to get a tiny bit more performance out of it...ya know, kind of like how most people customize things in real life.
• Solatorobo has Chocolat, a thirteen-year-old girl who's capable of flying a huge, chunky airship (think "flying home base", not fighter plane) through a Beam Spam and drop her brother onto a relatively small target without so much as singeing the paint on her ship.

Western Animation

• Baloo. He possesses all the aforementioned skills sans one (the Seaduck isn't armed with missiles... unless you count thrown fruit. Which he never misses with, anyway.) He figured out the world's very first, prototype helicopter and Jet Pack in just a few minutes. His old and rusty cargo plane is faster and more maneuverable than the Air Pirates' zippy miniplanes. He can withstand the immense G-forces from said plane's Overdrive. He can catch small objects (and people) mid-fall, while flying at top speed, just by reaching out the window. He can fly through a skyscraper-filled city, under bridges, and into highway tunnels, the ends of his wings scratching against the walls, and fly out without incident even as the aforementioned miniplanes (about a tenth the size of the Seaduck) smash and crash. He can kamikaze into Wave Motion Guns as they fire at him AND glide the resulting wingless husk of a plane safely enough to save everyone on board. If a plane is missing the yoke, he can fly it by yanking the control cables directly. With his teeth. To top it all off, he once flew a prototype jet engine past the speed of sound. We say again: a jet engine, not a jet plane. As in, a turbine that wasn't attached to anything. And he flew it successfully just by hanging for dear life and tugging on it, proving that he doesn't even need wings to fly. Oh and he was the first person to break the sound barrier in his world, while riding on the engine. So even when he gloats, no one blames him for it. He has earned it:

Baloo: If you can't fly, don't mess with the eagles!

• Anakin Skywalker. Reportedly one of the best pilots in the movieverse, it's not till the CGI Clone Wars movie where we see him commandeer a flying bug and an Alleged Spaceship and pull it off both times.
• DuckTales (1987) has Launchpad Mc Quack who literally has the catch phrase "If it has wings I can crash it." He can fly anything, even live animals, with excellent skill. The only thing he can't do is land. He appears to have overcome this problem by Darkwing Duck, or else maybe the Thunderquack just has auto pilot landing skills, or a thoroughly reinforced hull.

Real Life

• As mentioned above, such things do happen in reality, though they are not usually by choice.
  • One such case was Aloha Airlines Flight 243. Pilots Robert Schornstheimer and Madeline "Mimi" Tompkins suddenly became test pilots when the roof of their 737 blew off, throwing off the aerodynamics of the plane. They now had to fly to an airport and land a plane that seemed on the verge of snapping in half. They managed to get the thing down, and the only fatality was a flight attendant who was blown out when the roof first came off.
  • Another incident was Air Canada Flight 143, a.k.a., "The Gimli Glider." This plane ran out of fuel over central Canada and had to be glided into land. They couldn't reach the main airport, so they diverted to a former air base, but as they approached they realized they were too high and fast. In order to quickly lose speed, the pilot, Bob Pearson, turned the plane sideways and used the fuselage itself as a giant airbrake.
  • The most well-known, of course, is Chesley B. "Sully" Sullenberger, the pilot of US Airways Flight 1549. On January 15, 2009, after losing both engines he pulled off one of the few water landings to not kill anyone, putting down his plane in the middle of the Hudson River.
• United Flight 232. A DC-10's rear engine blew its turbine and knocked out the hydraulic lines, which meant the plane had lost all the control surfaces. The pilot and copilot, assisted by a flight instructor who happened to be onbaord and was kneeling between the pilots, managed to control the plane just by varying thrust on the two remaining engines, and managed to crash land it in Sioux falls. Over half the passengers (185 out of 285) managed to survive, which is impressive given the circumstances.
  • A DHL Airbus A300 cargo plane also managed to safely land in Baghdad in 2003 after being struck with a surface-to-air missile in 2003, which knocked out all flying surfaces.
  • Though it ended with a crash that killed all but 4 passengers, the crew of Japan Airlines Flight 123 managed to keep their 747 aircraft aloft for just over half an hour after the entire vertical stabilizer tore off. None of the simulator crews (who knew all of the factors affecting the plane, unlike the actual aircrew) could come close to that amount of time.
  • The Speedbird 9 incident of 1982. British Airways flight 9 was cruising near Jakarta when it encountered a strange kind of St. Elmo's Fire which seemed to envelop the plane in white lights. Shortly thereafter, all the engines failed. The 747 was now a 800,000+ lb glider. With only so much time before they hit the ocean, the crew abbreviated the engine restart procedure to give them more chances. Finally, the engines started back up and the plane turned back to Jakarta. Not long after, however, one of the engines started backfiring and had to be shut down. As they approached the airport, the pilot noticed he could barely see out the windscreen, and, proving Finagle's Law is at work, the guidance equipment on the ground was not working. He had to land using only a tiny sliver of glass on one side that was clear enough to see through. The reason? They'd been flying through a volcanic ash cloud. The plane had literally been sand blasted at 500 miles an hour!
• The incident known as "Panic Over The Pacific": On 19 February 1985, China Airlines Flight 006 was approaching California coast when the No.4 engine flamed out. While this wasn't any threat to the flight - the 747 still had three fully operative engines - it triggered a series of misjudgments, omissions and errors on behalf of the pilots, resulting in the aircraft literally falling from the sky: the 747 was diving through thick clouds at a rate of 150 meters/second, resulting in a 5g forces experienced by the people on board and the aircraft performing maneuvers that vastly exceeded its operational limits, which resulted in a vast damage to its horizontal stabilizers, main landing gear doors being ripped off, one of the hydraulic systems destroyed and the wings being permanently bent slightly upwards. The 747 fell from 41000 to 11000 feet in less than two and a half minutes. It came out of the clouds slightly under 11000 feet; half a minute later, at 9600 feet, the captain had his aircraft in fully controlled, leveled and stable flight. The NTSB experts described the recovery of the aircraft as "a masterpiece of flying". The 747 landed safely in San Francisco with no loss of life - 24 of 251 people on board were injured (2 seriously). The errors of the flight crew that triggered the incident were found to be caused by a severe jet lag - a factor whose influence on the flight crews was not studied before.
• United 811: While cruising from Honolulu to Auckland, a short circuit in an 18-year-old 747 caused the front cargo bay door to open in mid-flight 16 minutes after take-off. The resulting explosive decompression caused a large chunk of the fuselage to be torn off, resulting in 9 passengers being sucked out of the plane. Engine no.3 (inner right) was destroyed by the debris and at least one of the ejected passengers being sucked inside; engine no.4 soon after started burning and had to be shut down. The pilots, having only 2 operational engines on a massive 747 with 346 people on board (both of them on the left wing, which caused the aircraft to roll heavily to the right) and with damaged horizontal stabilizers and wings, managed to turn the Boeing around and return to Honolulu, performing a smooth touchdown. When the simulator crews attempted to repeat the emergency landing, not one succeeded - all pilots crashed the aircraft in the Pacific soon after the explosive decompression, even when some of the factors affecting the actual Flight 811 crew were eliminated from the simulation.
• The real life epitome of "If It Flies..." would have to be Captain Eric Brown, RN. He's officially credited with having flown 487 different aircraft types in his career as a test pilot (and that's only counting basic models), including everything from Mach 2 jets to gliders and from helicopters to airliners, often hopping between up five separate types in a single day's testing. He even taught himself to fly helicopters with nothing but the instruction manual, mere hours after first seeing one.
• An Israeli F-15 pilot refused to bail out after crashing with another plane during a training exercise, claiming he could still return his plane safely to base and land it. When he climed out of the cockpit on the runway, he said he would not have hesitated to eject for a single second if he had know that he had lost an entire wing. When American technicans arrived to evaluate the damage, they assumed a truck had crashed into it while on the ground.