History Main / DangerDeadpan

** And then there's the ComingInHot scene from ''Film/RevengeOfTheSith'', with Anakin as the calm AcePilot and Obi-Wan in full DeadpanSnarker mode: "Not to worry, we are still flying ''half'' a ship."

* During the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_storming_of_the_United_States_Capitol 2021 storming of the U.S. Capitol]], the evacuation order for the House of Representatives was delivered in this fashion.

* In StarTrekTheNextGeneration Starfleet captains seem to have this attitude. Admiral Hanson who commanded the fleet in their first engagement with the Borg deserves special mention. While in the middle of the largest defeat Starfleet had faced in generations, he transmitted a simple "The fight does not go well, Enterprise" before being cut off by his ship being destroyed.

* In Film/ZeroDarkThirty, en route to Usama Bin Laden's compound, the helicopter shakes alarmingly. One of the SEAL team members asks, mildly, "Anyone here been in a Helo crash?" Several hands are raised without further comment.

-->'''Shepard''': You okay?
-->'''Aria''': Never better.
-->'''Nyreen''': That makes two of us. You brought all your skill to bear and accomplished the task without sacrificing lives. I applaud you.
-->'''Aria''': Shepard remains cool under pressure. Mind clear, shit together.
-->''*Aria looks at Nyreen*''
-->'''Aria''': Take a long, hard look; '''that's''' what fearlessness looks like.

** Taken to the logical extreme in the level "DeathFromAbove", where you are the gunner of an AC-130 gunship. The crew responds to you disintegrating both infantry and vehicles alike with less emotion than a guy watching sports on TV; the only guy who speaks above a normal, conversational tone of voice is the loader for the plane's 105mm cannon whose only dialogue is "Gun Ready!".
** Similarly with any of Glenn Morshower's characters: most of the pilots, as well as 'Overlord', 'Warlord' and the NORAD HQ controller in ''VideoGame/ModernWarfare2''. The latter gets a disturbingly subtle hint of malice if you kill more than ten people in a single Predator Missile strike, though.

* Quagmire from ''WesternAnimation/FamilyGuy'', on the one occasion where we see him actually doing his job as an airline captain, uses this voice, a severe contrast to his catchphrase-laden normal speech. He throws in one "giggity"[[note]]"headwind"[[/note]] in the last sentence.
** Of course, when things start going to hell a little later, he starts freaking out.

** His collected persona on the radio was demonstrated profoundly in an incident mentioned in his autobiography and (sort of) shown in the movie version of ''Film/TheRightStuff''. While testing the X-1A, the airplane broke into an abrupt spin at just over Mach 2 -- in an airplane that was impossible to escape from. When he finally manages to break out of the spin, he's just barely got enough altitude to make it back to base (the X-1 series was designed to use up all of its fuel on the way out and come back unpowered). Next thing you know, he's making a wisecrack to the carrier aircraft about not needing a structural integrity demonstration. Probably a RealLife SugarWiki/MomentOfAwesome for a man whose life was ''full'' of them.

-->"Now, folks, uh… this is the captain... ummmm... We've got a little ol' red light up here on the control panel that's tryin' to tell us that the ''lan''din' gears're not... uh... ''loc''kin' into position when we lower 'em... Now... I don't believe that little ol' red light knows what it's ''talkin''' about—I believe it's that little ol' red light that iddn' workin' right (faint chuckle, long pause as if to say, ''I'm not even sure all this is really worth going into... still, it may amuse you...'' ''But''... I guess to play it by the rules, we oughta ''humor'' that little ol' light… so we're gonna take her down to about, oh, two or three hundred feet over the runway at Kennedy, and the folks down there on the ground are gonna see if they caint give us a ''vis''ual inspection of those ol' landin' gears and if I'm right... they're gonna tell us everything is copa''cet''ic all the way aroun' an' we'll jes take her on in. (And after a couple of low passes over the field, the voice returns:)

--> '''Co-pilot to ATC:''' ''[Flat voice]'' Going down, going down, going down, copy, going down.
--> '''ATC (the tower of which oversees Amsterdam) to the Arrival Controller (which can't see outside):''' [[WhamLine ''It's over''.]]
--> '''Arrival Controller to Pilots:''' El Al 1862 your heading?
--> '''ATC to Arrival Controller:''' No. It's over. It has crashed.
--> '''Arrival Controller to ATC:''' What did you see?
--> '''ATC to Arrival Controller:''' [There's] One big cloud of smoke over the city.

-->'''Commander:''' "Target tank, 11 o'clock, Sabot."
-->'''Gunner:''' "Sabot. Loaded."
-->'''Commander:''' "Fire. Wait for impact. Hit. Traverse, target BMP with radio mount, 12 o'clock, HE." etc

** His second report was that his situation was "a bit sticky" and he needed urgent reinforcement. By "a bit sticky" he meant "catastrophically outnumbered and near overrun, [[GuileHero throwing our ration cans at the Chinese in the hope that they mistake them for grenades."]] Unfortunately, the American commander didn't speak StiffUpperLip and told him to hang in there.

* Military snipers tend to have this persona as well, communicating with their spotters and delivering long-range fire after a calm "Send it."

** The infamous, understated, oft-repeated line "[[BeamMeUpScotty Houston, we have a problem]]", as delivered in the film , owes at least a little to the Chuck Yeager spirit.

** Uncle Hoole in ''Literature/GalaxyOfFear'' [[OOCIsSeriousBusiness almost always]] keeps to DissonantSerenity during stressful situations. Several of these involve ComingInHot; on one such occasion his [[{{Nephewism}} niece]] exclaimed "We're going to make it!" (as in, land fine) and he told her "I'm afraid not."

** Brand new Air Hostess Tegan Jovanka too: "Ladies and Gentlemen, your flight is ready, please begin boarding." This would be after the air crew has managed to repair their Concorde which has crash landed in the Cretaceous. They call it ''Time-Flight'' for a reason.
* [[DeconstructedTrope Deconstructed to Hell and Back]] in the Season 2 finale of ''Series/BreakingBad'', though with an Air Traffic Controller rather than a pilot. Jane Margolis' father David works as an Air Traffic Controller in his day job, and uses the trademark deadpan "mission control" voice in all of his conversations with pilots. Because of his job, he's even forced to maintain his cool composure [[spoiler: the day after his daughter dies of a heroin overdose]], so the people around him have absolutely zero clue that there's anything wrong with him...until [[spoiler: he gets so distracted by his grief that he lets two planes collide in mid-air, killing hundreds of people in an instant]].

* In one episode of ''Series/DeadliestCatch : After The Catch'', Mike Rowe is talking to a Coast Guard helicopter pilot and [[LampshadeHanging lampshades]] the pilot's display of this trope, and [[DiscussedTrope discusses it]] at length.

* Kyosuke Nanbu is portayed as such in the VideoGame/SuperRobotWars series, he has occasional bouts of shouting HotBlooded-ness but his overall character is the 'cool and levelheaded' archetype, slumbering volcano deal.

** If you play the Omega DLC as an Engineer Shepard in ''VideoGame/MassEffect3'', when you reach the central reactor, you can use a Paragon interrupt to re-route power to the city instead of shutting it down, which achieves not only the shutdown of the force fields, but saves the civilians instead. If you use it, once you get away from the reactor, you get this dialog:

** Deadly, the downed Cobra pilot Outlaw 2-5 landed to rescue, remains admirably collected whilst loosing her tail rotor and plowing into a building. The next you hear from her, she's a bit more shaken up. Considering she's also trapped in the cockpit with a broken leg or worse, her gunner is dead, and angry [[{{Qurac}} Quraqis]] with lots of guns and a grudge against American air power are pouring out of the woodwork, this is forgivable.
** Taken to the logical extreme in the level "DeathFromAbove", where you are the gunner of an AC-130 gunship. The crew responds to you disintegrating both infantry and vehicles alike with less emotion than a guy watching sports on TV; the only guy who speaks above a normal, conversational tone of voice is the loader for the plane's 105mm cannon who's only dialogue is "Gun Ready!".

** Although not a full 180 degree spin, ''Homeworld: Cataclysm'' radio chatter deviates from Chuck Yeager by a significant margin. FridgeBrilliance as ''Cataclysm'''s pilots are all civilians, hastily trained no less.

* Chliilingly averted in ''VideoGame/MetroLastLight'' when Artyom and Pavel share visions/hallucination/ghosts reliving their last moments: the crashed jetliner is shown minutes before the war gliding without power while Moscow goes up in flames as nuke after nuke bombards the surface. The pilot is barely holding it toghether while the co-pilot and passengers are screaming for their lives.

** In the episode "Sideshow Bob's Last Gleaming", two fighter jets are scrambled to intercept Sideshow Bob's escape in the Wright brothers' plane. It does not go well, as the pilot comments Yeagerly: "Bogey's air speed not sufficient for intercept. Suggest we get out and walk."
* Quagmire from ''WesternAnimation/FamilyGuy'', on the one occasion where we see him actually doing his job as an airline captain, uses this voice, a severe contrast to his catch-phrase-laden normal speech. He throws in one "giggity"[[note]]"headwind"[[/note]] in the last sentence.

-->'''Batman''': Batman to all points. I could use some air support, since I can't fly. At all. ''[about 50 feet from impact]'' Now would be good.

** Though Chuck Yeager is most known example and the book "The Right Stuff" made a nice legend, he probably isn't the first who started to talk that way. For example, Mark Gallai (a Soviet test pilot who started his career in 1930's) recounts just this way of reporting over radio about as soon as radio was introduced on airplanes. Let's just repeat: when you need to report your condition to ground crew, you are going to speak calmly and clearly, no matter what's happening with your plane. Yeager was definitely the TropeCodifier for affecting a faint Southern accent while doing so, however.

** Supposedly when listening to the air-to-ground loop shortly before all contact was lost, it's possible that commander Rick Husband calmly stated "feelin' the heat", which may be a deadpan acknowledgement that something had gone wrong.
** Conversely the crew of the ''Challenger'' were also unaware of any problems up until the shuttle broke apart. In fact the last statement recorded on the shuttle's CVR was pilot Mike Smith giving a nonchalant "Uh oh."

** This was also invoked to a degree on STS-27. Space shuttle ''Atlantis'' had suffered extensive tile damage that concerned the crew. Due to poor images Mission Control said it was of no concern. While the astronauts did not like that assessment, they decided to carry on with the mission regardless. Mission commander Robert Gibson later said that if the shuttle began to experience trouble during reentry, he would tell Mission Control "exactly what (he) thought of their analysis."

** His second report was that his situation was "a bit sticky" and he needed urgent reinforcement. By "a bit sticky" he meant "catastrophically outnumbered and near overrun, [[GuileHero throwing our ration cans at the Chinese in the hope that they mistake them for grenades."]] Unfortunately, the American commander didn't speak StiffUpperLip, and told him to hang in there.

* Not only is this trope for pilots in real life, but traffic control, as well. Air traffic control are not supposed to make "assumptions" about a pilot's plane, for instance, and are supposed to phrase statements in a similar fashion. i.e. "Your aircraft appears to be on fire, sir."

* The medical field actually requires a good amount of this. Whether it's one patient seconds from death, or 60 bus crash victims showing up in the emergency department on a slow Sunday night, you can't render any aid if you yourself are operating in panic mode.

* The crew of the ''Messiah'' from ''Film/DeepImpact'' keep their cool throughout their mission even when discussing their eventual SuicideMission to stop one of the comets. The only time anyone gets emotional is when Gus is blown off the surface of the comet and sent drifting into space, Tulchinsky yells at Sturgeon to go back for him and lets out a PrecisionFStrike when Sturgeon refuses.

* Another non-pilot example, this time averted: In the ''Series/TwilightZone'' short "A Little Peace and Quiet." In the final scene of the short (which is the opening episode of the 1985 reboot), nuclear war has broken out between the Soviet Union and the United States, and a radio newscaster -- who would normally be calm even in the presence of imminent death -- is clearly losing his efforts to keep calm as he advises the public as to the warning. He is starting to cry and say his goodbyes as the short's protagonist (a harried housewife who had found an amulet that can stop time) manages to freeze time shortly before she is killed in a nuclear explosion.

* In one episode of ''Series/DeadliestCatch : After The Catch'', Creator/MikeRowe is talking to a Coast Guard helicopter pilot and [[LampshadeHanging lampshades]] the pilot's display of this trope, and [[DiscussedTrope discusses it]] at length.

* Iceman, in the first ''VideoGame/WingCommander'' game, is described in the manual as being the [[AddedAlliterativeAppeal calm, cool, collected]] pilot, and the one on top of the scoreboard when you start the game. A fellow pilot notes that everyone else shouts in combat, but you sometimes have to strain to hear Iceman, because he's pretty much ''whispering'' in terse, two-or-three-word sentences.

* Although not a pilot, [[FourStarBadass Ferdinand Foch's]] [[BadassBoast "My center is giving way, my right is in retreat; situation excellent, I am attackng"]] deserves mention here for capturing the spirit of this example so well.

* Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 lost one of its two engines 20 minutes after takeoff, and by "[[BeigeProse lost one of its two engines]]", we of course mean "the engine evidently exploded, blowing a hole on the side of the airplane, and depressurizing the cabin while nearly pulling a passenger out." The pilot, Captain Tammie Jo Shults, who happened to be one of the US Navy's first female fighter pilots, calmly issued the following report to Air Traffic Control while taking her damaged plane down to a low enough altitude for her passengers to breathe:
-->''"Shults''': "No, it's not on fire, but part of it's missing. They said there's a hole, and — uh — someone went out."

-->'''Commander''': "Target tank, 11 o'clock, Sabot."
-->'''Gunner''': "Sabot. Loaded."
-->'''Commander''': "Fire. Wait for impact. Hit. Traverse, target BMP with radio mount, 12 o'clock, HE." etc

* Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 lost one of its two engines 20 minutes after takeoff, and by "[[BeigeProse lost one of its two engines]]", we of course mean "the engine evidently exploded, sending shrapnel through one of the windows and depressurizing the cabin while nearly pulling a passenger out." The pilot, Captain Tammie Jo Shults, who happened to be one of the US Navy's first female fighter pilots, calmly issued the following report to Air Traffic Control while taking her damaged plane down to a low enough altitude for her passengers to breathe:

* ''Series/TheTwilightZone'' episode "The Odyssey of Flight 33" has a fair bit of this:

* Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 lost one of its two engines 20 minutes after takeoff, and by "[[BeigeProse lost one of its two engines]]", we of course mean "the engine evidently exploded, sending shrapnel through one of the windows and depressurizing the cabin while nearly pulling a passenger out." The pilot, Captain Tammie Jo Shults, who happened to be one of the US Navy's first fighter pilots, calmly issued the following report to Air Traffic Control while taking her damaged plane down to a low enough altitude for her passengers to breathe:

* The Wraith pilot from ''VideoGame/StarCraft''.

* TruthInTelevision. In real life, Chuck Yeager, the first pilot to break the sound barrier, originated this voice and this trope. The phenomenon of how real-world pilots all started talking like him, for no other reason than that he was [[RuleOfCool so cool]], is described in the Creator/TomWolfe nonfiction novel ''TheRightStuff'', and to a lesser extent in the movie version of same.

** His collected persona on the radio was demonstrated profoundly in an incident mentioned in his autobiography and (sort of) shown in the movie version of ''TheRightStuff''. While testing the X-1A, the airplane broke into an abrupt spin at just over Mach 2 -- in an airplane that was impossible to escape from. When he finally manages to break out of the spin, he's just barely got enough altitude to make it back to base (the X-1 series was designed to use up all of its fuel on the way out and come back unpowered). Next thing you know, he's making a wisecrack to the carrier aircraft about not needing a structural integrity demonstration. Probably a RealLife SugarWiki/MomentOfAwesome for a man whose life was ''full'' of them.

[[/note]]

In RealLife, this makes some sense. Even if your plane's lost two engines and half a wing, the last thing you need is a bunch of scared people in the back of the plane panicking and raising hell; you can't be screaming "OH GOD WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE" over the radio. Not to mention the fact that if you stay calm and actually tell MissionControl what the problem is, you won't throw away what may be your last chance for one of you to actually work out how to fix it.

* Although not a pilot, [[FourStarBadass Ferdinand Foch's]] [[BadassBoast "My center is giving way, my right is in retreat; situation excellent, I am advancing"]] deserves mention here for capturing the spirit of this example so well.

* The infamous, understated, oft-repeated line "[[BeamMeUpScotty Houston, we have a problem]]", as delivered in the film ''Film/{{Apollo 13}}'', owes at least a little to the Chuck Yeager spirit.
** The urgency of the scene was actually ''played up'' for the film. The actual transcripts ("Houston, we've had a problem.") are ''further'' understated.
** in TheMovie, Jack Swigert (as played by Creator/KevinBacon) had this going on for most of the film.
** Heck, after the potentially-fatal reentry, which took over a minute-and-a-half longer than anticipated, the real response was just "Okay, Joe".

** It's also [[LampshadeHanging lampshaded]] in the novelization of the ''Aliens'' comic ''Genocide'':
-->Fitz was clearly from the Chuck Yeager school of pilots. Fly by the seat of your pants, but even if your wings had sheared off and your ejector was jammed, at no point abandon your laid-back Texas accent.[[note]]Yeager was from West Virginia, not Texas.[[/note]]

** In a similar vein, Blackhawk pilot Wolcott in ''Film/BlackHawkDown'' - "6-1 going down... 6-1 going down...", said in a very calm voice while the pilot's face displays quite a bit of concern. The radio guys relaying the info around sound more emotional than he does.

* Red Leader during the attack on the Death Star in ''Franchise/StarWars Episode IV: Film/ANewHope''. After losing both his wingmen and failing to hit the exhaust port, with one engine out and Vader closing in to finish the job, he calmly orders Luke to set up for his attack run before getting shot down
** He does scream as he crashes, but it's more of a "If I'm gonna die, [[TakingYouWithMe I'm takin' you bastards with me!]]" kind of a yell.
*** Red Ten also qualifies; he even maintains his cool (mostly) just before "Mauler" Mithel blasts him.
*** Gold Five was similarly composed, even going so far as to calmly issue a sitrep on the destruction of his squadron ''as Darth Vader is firing at him to finish him off'', apparently just so Red Squadron would know what they were dealing with. These two guys are of course responsible for coining the Star Wars in-jokes "Stay on Target..." and "Just a few more seconds..."
*** The novelization notes that Gold Five was a veteran who could avoid fire from the emplacements, make an accurate count, and not crash into the station while at attack speed.

*** Rogue Two is shot up, and even ''bleeding'' from cuts on his face, yet still calmly issues instructions to his gunner right up to the point his cockpit explodes in flames when his speeder takes a direct hit.
** [[Film/TheForceAwakens Poe Dameron]] averts the trope; there isn't a surface in his cockpit that doesn't get gnawed on when he's flying.

->''Dying might be unavoidable, but losing your cool is inexcusable.''