Coming in Hot

Make way, canyon. Darkling coming through.

"Get everyone out of the way; I'm coming in hot!"

— Starbuck, Battlestar Galactica (1978), first episode

Pretty much every action-genre movie, TV series, or whatever will at some point feature a sequence where an aircraft, damaged or otherwise in less than perfect flying condition, has to make an emergency crash landing. Cue the tense music, the landing signals officer patiently talking them down over radio, the crew erecting a crash barrier, the fire-suppression teams suiting up and grabbing their extinguishers and hoses, et cetera. May include Stock Footage of real crash landing accidents, often hilariously involving different aircraft from a different era than the one depicted in the story.

In fact, many airfields operate the same types of crash barriers and tailhook arresting gear as seen on TV, although they are reserved for emergencies where an aircraft will have difficulty stopping before the end of the runway (or when part of the runway is damaged, effectively shortening it.)

Sometimes this involves an aircraft carrier (or its spacefaring or flying equivalent) given that the associated risks with an emergency landing on an aircraft carrier at sea that is only a few hundred meters long are far greater than with a two-mile-long concrete runway. Note that most pilots with severely damaged planes in Real Life will not attempt a carrier landing, but rather will eject^note as in The Final Countdown, pilots with "minor" malfunctions will land, and won't crash spectacularly — but that aside. In fact, standard operating procedure is to ditch the plane and be rescued — writing off the expensive fighter rather than risk the even more expensive pilot or astronomically expensive aircraft carrier. But never mind that.

A staple of Captain Crash. See also Reentry Scare, in which Coming in Hot involves comm silence. For the non-vehicle variation see Too Fast to Stop and Inertia Is a Cruel Mistress. Sub-Trope of Arduous Descent to Terra Firma.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• The pilots of Area 88 frequently attempt to land damaged or burning planes at the eponymous air base, mostly because they have to personally pay for replacements.
  • The requirement of paying for their own planes and munitions led one pilot to attempt this with a full load of bombs. No spoilers required for you to guess what happened next.
  • Greg's Made of Iron credentials are established in his first scene of the original anime. He comes in so hot that his A-4 is literally on fire, yet makes a competent landing and doesn't explode (unlike the other idiot in an A-4 mentioned above), while having a serious head wound from broken cockpit glass.
• Performed during a hostage rescue in Classroom Crisis, where the landing system malfunctions, but Iris decides to force-land the ship anyway just to meet the payment deadline.
• In the first Gall Force, Lufy is introduced to the crew of the Star Leaf when she decides to use their landing bay for one of these.
• Hellsing has a scene where Alucard purposefully "lands" a jet plane on a Navy cruiser, after it's been shot into uselessness, traveling straight down at full speed. Naturally, he survives. The ship is reduced to a charred wreck; shame as it was a SR-71 Blackbird. Which then looked like a burning cross.
• Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory features a memorable scene of the main Gundam crashing into the Albion's hangar, with special nets being deployed to slow it down.
• Mu La Flaga crash-lands his skygrasper more than once onto the Archangel in Mobile Suit Gundam SEED, eventually wrecking it for good and moving on to pilot Humongous Mecha. Neo Roanoke in Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny does exactly the same thing soon after his Heel–Face Turn, awakening memories which indicate that he is (a brainwashed) Mu La Flaga (the fans, of course, already knew Neo had to be either this or a clone.

Comic Books

• Buck Danny does this quite a bit (to be fair, it's often because of bad weather, sabotage, or flying prototypes that can't be jettisoned). Compounding the problem is the use of Comic-Book Time with no explanation whatsoever — these guys have been flying ever since the Pacific Theater without aging a day, even making it to colonel despite the nearly half-billion dollars they've cost in aircraft.
• G.I. Joe: Half the time the pilot characters are featured, they end up landing a damaged plane somewhere.
• Marvel Universe:
  • The X-Men's Blackbird explodes more times than a Star Trek: Voyager shuttle. The Avengers' quinjets have an even worse track record.
  • As for the helicarriers, well... S.H.I.E.L.D. owns an open field in New Jersey specifically set aside as a crash site if (or should we say when) a helicarrier gets taken down.
    Maria Hill: I've owned the same car since I was nineteen years old and never had a problem. Yet this thing falls out of the sky every other Thursday.
  • Any aircraft travelling to — or even anywhere in the general vicinity — of the Savage Land will inevitably crash-land. Heck, crash-landing might as well be the only way to get to the Savage Land.
• Variant in Mortadelo y Filemón: at the end of Secuestro Aéreo, Mortadelo attempts to land an airliner that was almost hijacked going at 800 kilometers per hour, without having deployed the landing gear, and with one wing dragging across the runway. It lands... crashing against what remains of the airport's control tower, that was ruined before when Mort took off with the plane. Luckily everyone there is Made of Iron.

Comic Strips

• Calvin and Hobbes: In about four out of five Spaceman Spiff adventures, our intrepid hero is hurtling out of control and on fire toward the surface of some distant planet in his little red spacecraft. It nonetheless always lands mostly intact.

Fan Works

• The Naked Jedi: While Sarza is on her first official mission as a Jedi, an initially-unspecified event causes her ship to start to crash, but Sarza, Meelan Lah and Pilot are able to stabilise the descent before the crash would have proven fatal, and make a relatively even landing.
• In the very first chapter of The Pirate's Soldier, Heero's mobile suit gets one of its engines crippled during the scuffle between Ryoko and Ayeka's ships, which also result mutually damaged when the latter rams the former and the three of them begin to fall to Earth. He's forced to use Ryo-Ohki as a re-entry shield as he contacts Sally (citing the trope by name) so that their landing point in Lake Genval gets evacuated ASAP.

Films — Animation

• Penguins of Madagascar: While the penguins are free-falling through their air and aim for an airplane, Skipper tells them they'll be going in hot. At that moment, Private starts flaming up like a comet.
  Skipper: No-one likes a showoff, Private.
• Happens twice in the movie Planes:
  • Dusty helps Bulldog pull out of his death dive, and then guides him to the runway. It costs him though in that he's dead last for the second leg in a row.
  • At a later point, Dusty gets lost over the Pacific Ocean after the unfriendly competition sabotages his radio navigation (by chopping off his aerial in mid-flight) and has to land on a moving aircraft carrier. Dusty is a crop duster without a tail-hook though he does have a rear-center tricycle landing gear. Their procedure on the ship follows the opening description of the trope almost verbatim.

Films — Live-Action

• Alien: Resurrection: Happens literally when the Betty is plunging towards the Earth.
  Johner: What's burning?!
  Vreiss: US!
  [Beat]
  Johner: SHIT! You're right! [both scream]
• Chain Lightning: Matt is an Ace Pilot who is making an extremely dangerous test flight of a new jet from Alaska to DC, via the North Pole. He runs out of gas before he makes it to Washington and has to come in on a glide. The terrified air traffic control men send out a whole emergency crew, but Matt lands safely.
• The Core: The space shuttle has its navigation thrown off by changes to the Earth's magnetic field, and has to make a landing in the Los Angeles River owing to flawed navigation data. Not technically an example of this trope, although the unexpected location and lack of landing locales results in the shuttle landing at a higher speed than normal. Notably the film's script originally had the shuttle blow up on re-entry, but then the Columbia accident happened and several scenes were hastily re-filmed to avoid resembling the incident in question. This does mean one character's motivations now make no sense, but hey, it's The Core.
• Farrier in Dunkirk has his fuel gauge broken early in the titular battle, and has to use his wingman's reports on how much fuel he has left plus some mathematics to keep track of his reserve. He ultimately chooses to shoot down one last German plane after completely running out of fuel, and then his hand-crank to lower the wheels takes a hair-raisingly long time to work.
• Executive Decision, Kurt Russell must land a 747 after the pilots are killed. While he doesn't land it too fast or with any particular damage, he is forced to land at an airstrip meant for Cessnas very quickly running out of runway with the same effect as coming in fast. He ends up plowing into a large dirt berm at the end of the runway.
• This happens for real in American World War II documentary The Fighting Lady, which is all about the aircraft carrier Yorktown. One pilot runs out of gas and has to ditch next to the ship. Another comes in with flaming thermite leaking out, which is super-dangerous on a ship. Another lands with most of the control gear shot away, spinning to a landing as the tail, the nose, and one wing are sheared off. After what's left of the plane skids to a stop, the pilot gets out of the cockpit and walks away like it's no big deal.
• The Final Countdown: After passing through the first time storm, a rookie pilot has to be landed with the aid of the volleyball-net-like crash barrier. ^note This was a Real Life incident that occurred while they were making the movie, and the crew was allowed to actually film the recovery of the aircraft, which could not make a normal landing due to a malfunctioning tail hook.
• In the beginning of Flight of the Intruder, the urgency of the landing coming from the badly injured Bombadier-Navigator on board.
• Parodied, of course, in Hot Shots!, where Topper asks for permission to land his damaged plane. Then he reports that his landing gear is frozen. And that he lost his radar. And that he's out of fuel. Oh, and he just lost a wing. And the other one. In the end, it's just his charred fuselage hitting the deck as if dropped, complete with a "CLUNK". Also note, this isn't even played for mock-drama, it's just sort of mixed in with the carrier crew cheering the victorious pilots' return to the ship.
• The Hunt for Red October:
  • An F-14 collides with a Russian plane and crashlands on a carrier.
  • In the book, it turns out that this was Robby Jackson, Jack Ryan's friend (played by Samuel L. Jackson in Patriot Games) and future Vice President and successor as President.
  • Also in the book, Jackson's backseater is injured, and would have probably been killed in an ejection. Had this not been the case, it is likely that he would not have risked the landing in his damaged Tomcat. Also, the plane in the book was damaged not by a collision but by a missile fired by an over-excited Soviet pilot who thought he was under attack.
• The pre-credit sequence of It Came from Outer Space (1953) has the alien spacecraft (with sparks flying off it) crash landing in the Arizona desert.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2: The Milano gets shot to pieces by the very angry Sovereign, not helped by Quill and Rocket bickering as they try to escape. It makes it to another habitable planet and starts crashing, taking out more than half the ship, which Gamora chews Quill out for.
    Quill: Prepare for a really bad landing!
  • Avengers: Infinity War: Iron Man, Spider-Man and Doctor Strange wind up crashing the Ebony Maw's spaceship, on account of the fact they have no idea how to fly it, much less find the brakes in time.
• Early in Memphis Belle, a B-17 is shown trying to land with only one main wheel down. The Belle itself ends up in a similar predicament at the end of the film, coming in with only one working engine, a severely wounded crewmember aboard, and other crew struggling to lower the landing gear by hand crank before they crash. The B-17 wasn't nicknamed Flying Fortress for nothing.
• Midway (1976): Several of the pilots returning from various missions have damaged planes, and some of them crash on landing with the aid of Stock Footage (only occasionally from the wrong part of the war). One of the more memorable crashes uses stock footage from the wrong war entirely — the airplane is damaged as a twin-engine bomber from early in the war, approaches the carrier as a twin-engine fighter from late in the war, and crashes as a single-engine fighter from the Korean War. Worth noting, none of the American carrier planes at Midway were twin-engined in Real Life.
• Midway (2019) has a few SBD pilots shown returning this way following the titular battle, with many crew members badly wounded. Dick Best in particular, following his strike on the Japanese carrier Hiryu, suffers a power and electric failure on his plane, only landing in one piece thanks to his piloting skills.
• Non-Stop: At one point the plane appears to be attempting to land while on fire.
• The opening scene of Pitch Black involves a spaceship wreathed in flames as in plunges into the atmosphere of a Conveniently Close Planet, with the pilot making a Cold Equation Emergency Cargo Dump.
• Pacific Rim does this with Humongous Mecha. The flying Kaiju, Otachi, grabs Gipsy Danger and lifts it to almost low Earth orbit heights, intending to drop the mecha and its crew to their doom. After Gipsy's pilots, Raleigh and Mako kill Otachi in mid-air by slicing her in halves, Gipsy Danger falls down, burning its skin on reentry. Fortunately, Pentecost instructs the pilots to use Gipsy's Chest Blaster to slow its descent, and they crash land violently but still in one piece.
• Red Tails:
  • Deacon and Easy. It should be noted that Deacon was ordered to eject rather than land, but a malfunction prevented his canopy from coming open, forcing the landing.
  • Also Pretty Boy, who radios ahead to his base and then comes in for a high-speed belly landing while being chased by four American pilots.
• Serenity:
  • After being damaged by an EMP weapon, Serenity has to make a dead-stick crash landing at Mr. Universe's complex.
  • And the mule-swallow maneuver from the opening of the film — whilst the mule isn't damaged to any great extent, it is certainly coming in hot. In fact, those very words might actually have been used...
• One of these kicked off the "plot" of Space Mutiny.
  • If the first ten minutes were any indication, this movie's gonna BLOW!!!
  • My Buns of Steel videos were in there!!!
• In Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, a shuttlecraft has to land in the shuttlebay of the Enterprise without the usual tractor beams and other landing aids, so Kirk calls up Scotty and tells him to put into effect "Plan B... for Barricade!" This was because a Klingon Bird-of-Prey was bearing down on the Enterprise and it was faster and less riskier than using the aids and risking the Enterprise getting struck.
• Star Wars: The prequel trilogy comes close twice, both times with Anakin Skywalker involved.
  • In The Phantom Menace, he accidentally crash-lands in the docking bay of the Droid Control Battleship. During his attempts to take off again and escape, he accidentally launches a pair of torpedos into something important which causes the entire ship to go up in flames as Anakin narrowly outruns the destruction he caused.
  • In Revenge of the Sith, he and Obi-Wan intentionally crash-land in the docking bay of the Invisible Hand to board the ship and rescue the kidnapped Chancellor Palpatine. Not to mention the "Not to worry, we are still flying half a ship," scene shortly after that, when Anakin crash-lands said half a ship after almost burning it to a crisp on its descent through the atmosphere. He even says "we're coming in too hot!"
    Obi-Wan: Another happy landing.
  • Rogue One: Arriving on Eadu, the U-wing piloted by Cassian and his team flies very low inside canyons to avoid detection by the Imperials. Added to lack of visibility from heavy rain, they end up scraping a reactor against a rock and finally crash-landing. Nobody is wounded, but the U-wing is not going to fly any more and they have to steal an imperial ship to leave.
• Stealth:
  • Subverted when EDI, on approach to the aircraft carrier, nearly loses control after being struck by lightning. The deck crew, expecting this trope to play out in full, prepare the nets only to watch EDI correct his plane and land safely.
  • Happens later when Lt. Gannon's damaged plane ends up critically malfunctioning just as he comes in for a landing at an Alaskan airbase.
• Top Gun:
  • Cougar goes a bit crazy after the first MiG encounter, and has to be talked down, although there was nothing wrong with his plane. Maverick, who coached him down, was still chewed out — because his plane was very low on fuel, and the way he did it risked both planes rather than ensuring at least one made it back.
  • Done again in Top Gun: Maverick, with Maverick and Rooster crash-landing a badly damaged and stolen Tomcat.
• In Wing Commander, the black female pilot takes severe damage to her ship. After a failure in the ejection system, she attempts a landing and crashes on deck, dying in the process.

Literature

• In the Dale Brown novel Air Battle Force, the EB-1C Vampire Patrick McLanahan and Rebecca Furness are on board has been damaged by enemy fire and he crash-lands it on Diego Garcia despite Furness and other American personnel telling him not to.
• Commissar Ciaphas Cain (HERO OF THE IMPERIUM!) references another possible definition in The Traitor's Hand, noting that a transport dropping Guardsmen into a combat zone is also referred to as "coming in hot". Naturally, the Elysians probably do that a lot.
  • Another of the Ciaphas Cain (HERO OF THE IMPERIUM!) novels has a scene very reminiscent of the Serenity example above — with Gunner Jurgen parking a Chimera APC in the hold of Inquisitor Vail's shuttle as it was about to take off, with bare inches to spare between the front glacis of the tank and the back wall of the hold.
  • The Last Ditch does the spaceship version. After a daemon possesses a servitor and destroys most of the bridge they can't decelerate the ship enough to get into a stable orbit. The attempt to use atmospheric braking to fix this goes wrong when they hit the atmosphere at to steep an angle and end up crashing.
• The Day the Rocket Blew Up, the 1953 sci-fi classic by Lee Correy, is about a space shuttle pilot who makes a Heroic Sacrifice by piloting down his Retro Rocket instead of ejecting (itself a highly-dangerous situation) so it won't impact in a populated area.
• The plane the teens are on in Dr. Franklin's Island has something go very wrong in flight, forcing it to come down hard over water just off the coast of the island. Semi, Miranda, and Arnie are swept away from the others by currents after leaving the plane, which means that when it explodes and kills everyone else, they're okay.
• Flight of the Intruder: In the beginning of the book, the urgency of the landing coming from the badly injured Bombadier-Navigator on board.
• In the Lensman universe, spacecraft are equipped with inertialess drives which allow them to instantly attain FTL speeds and stop on a dime. When the drive is switched off, however, the spacecraft resumes whatever intrinsic velocity it had before turning its drive on. Disaster can happen if two spacecraft with wildly different intrinsic velocities exchange cargo or passengers, and then switch their inertialess drives off. In one case, a badly injured passenger had to be surgically operated on while still inertialess, because the trauma of decelerating him from his intrinsic velocity would have killed him.
• In a variation of this, a sequence near the beginning of The Sixth Battle, an Su-25 pilot is trying to land on Varyag and keeps getting waved off. It's not the plane that's in bad condition— it's the pilot, who, excessively tired, makes a fatal error and crashes into the ski-ramp.
• In The Ship Who... Searched, Tia causes an avalanche that will keep a bad guys' ship grounded by diving at a snowy mountain, pulling up, and smacking it with her landing gear, which breaks off. She can still fly afterwards but is pretty crunched up and questionably spaceworthy. Fortunately, the allies she was trying to prevent from being outnumbered in a fight help her.
• The Stainless Steel Rat: In "The Stainless Steel Rat's Revenge" Jim, posing as a pilot, is ordered to not pull one of these, as the officer ordering hates 10G landings. Jim diGriz, being who he is, pulls one on purpose.
• The Star Wars Expanded Universe will sometimes feature this, though rarely — repulsorlifts, a cheap and common technology, means most fighters are completely VTOL.
  • The Thrawn Trilogy does have an instance of Mara Jade having to land on a planet with her repulsors offline, and it's pretty harrowing.
  • Probably the most memorable is from Starfighters of Adumar, in which we hear Wes Janson tell the tale Tomer "Ejector" Darpen, a Y-Wing pilot forced to use the ship's landing skids after the repulsorlifts were damaged in a battle. The trope was played entirely straight, with a makeshift runway being hastily cleared, the ship bouncing up and down as it tries to land, rolling over completely, before skidding to a halt at the very limit of safety. The pilot slumped in relief... and then the trope was subverted when Darpen's ejection seat suddenly misfired. Since he was stationed on a low-gravity moon, he actually achieved escape velocity and had to be retrieved from orbit. Janson happened to see his expression just before and after it fired...
    Darpen: At least I managed to save the astromech.
  • In Galaxy of Fear: Army of Terror, the heroes' starship The Shroud loses power on the descent. Power is restored, but not in time to let it land safely, so it skips across the ground and tears itself apart. A later book has them riding with someone else, who asks if they're all right, receives complaints, and cheerfully says "First rule of piloting: If your passengers can answer the question, then the landing was good. Let's see the sights."
  • Planet Hoppers had a special intended to supplement the RPG. Beheboth: Blood and Water has a first-person section from Luke Skywalker.
    Luke: I've had some bad landings, but this beat all of them except my first trip to Dagobah and that time Leia and I were buried under lava.
  • In Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor, Luke pulls a repeat of his father's stunt and crash-lands what's left of a Mon Calamari cruiser.

Live-Action TV

• More than once in Andromeda, the Eureka Maru has to crash-land in the landing bay of the Andromeda Ascendant.
• The Trope Namer is Battlestar Galactica. Since both series are about an Aircraft Carrier in Space, the pilot movie or Miniseries for each series has one of these.
  • In the original series, Starbuck's Viper is damaged in the first big battle, and he has to do a controlled crash landing.
  • In the re-imagined series, after the final big battle of the pilot Mini Series, Apollo's Viper is damaged, and Starbuck has to hook onto his fighter with hers and fly them both in to the landing bay, while the doors are closing.
    Apollo: [yelling] We're coming in a little hot, don't you think?!
    Starbuck: No... not really. [eyes widen in fright]
  • The re-imagined series also gives us "combat landings," similar in execution, though not in set-up. When the Galactica needs to jump now and the Vipers are out, they'll disregard good landing technique in favor of just crashing their fighters onto the flight deck. Note that, in this series, it makes sense to take this risk, since the fighters are literally irreplaceable, and ejecting and being recovered really isn't an option. Ditching the fighter in ths case also means ditching the pilot. The reckless nature of the combat landings underscores the danger Galactica is facing, in that they're willing to risk losing a fighter and the hanger to a bad crash rather than simply write off the entirely irreplaceable fighters or pilots for certain.
  • As a flight cadet, Boomer in the re-imagined series gets into hot water with Adama over her poor landings, and the subsequent second chance he gives her leads to her repaying this debt in a vital way at the climax of the series.
• The Buck Rogers in the 25th Century pilot inverts this. Wilma decides to land her fully intact space fighter on the Draconian flagship. Said flagship is severely damaged, on fire and due to blow up very soon. She ends up pulling a Big Damn Heroes moment to save Twiki, Buck and Dr. Theopolis.
• An episode of long-running UK Medical Drama/Soap Opera CASUAL+Y had an airplane crash with this exchange between someone a dispatch and a paramedic.
  Dispatch: They'll be coming in at quite a rate.
  Paramedic: What's "quite a rate?"
  Dispatch: In miles per hour? About 200...
• In Crusade, Captain Lochley's Starfury is damaged and disabled, and is swallowed by the Excalibur as it flies past with the help of force-field crash barriers. Captain Gideon was ordered not to stop the ship, and was merely following orders. Galen also comes in hot one time.
• One of the more impressive cliffhangers of the classic series of Doctor Who is in "The Caves of Androzani", when the Doctor locks a gang of mercenaries out of the cockpit of their spaceship, which he then crash-lands in a desperate attempt to get back to the planet in time to save his companion Peri.
  Doctor: Stotz, we'll be touching down in a couple of minutes, or more likely crashing down. You see, I'm a bit out of practice with manual landings, so if I were you, I'd find something firm to hang on to!
• Eureka invents the Boson Cloud Exciter, or "space catcher's mitt" in Carter Speak, for just such situations involving interstellar craft. Used twice, first to stop a near relativistic speed spacecraft from turning the town into a mile deep crater, then later to catch the Mercury Era space pod containing Fargo and Zane that's equipped with the newly invented but untested Wormhole FTL Drive.
• Intergalactic: Ash crash lands the ship on Pau Rosa after jumping away from Commonworld ships pursuing them.
• Happens multiple times in JAG, and subverted once, with Harm in a damaged plane being told to eject, but he's insisting he can land it — cut to commercial — come back to him crashing then all the screens go blank around him, and we see he's in a simulator, with the instructor telling him "See, that's what would have happened if you'd tried to land it." Indeed, a botched carrier landing is what forced Harm to leave the "brownshoe navy" and join the JAG Corps (i.e., becoming a lawyer) in the first place. The botched landing was more due Harm's night blindness problem than a plane issue.
• The Mandalorian:
  • After the misadventures of the previous episode, "Chapter 11: The Heiress" has Din Djarin's Razor Crest so badly damaged he has a Reentry Scare and significant trouble slowing to land on Trask. He finally manages to stop above the landing pad... only for the thruster on one side to fail entirely and flip the ship into the ocean, from which it has to be craned out.
  • The second season finale, "The Rescue", has Bo-Katan and her crew piloting a hijacked Imperial shuttle (while pretending to be under fire from Boba Fett's ship) into the narrow launch bay of an Imperial cruiser. The shuttle clips the sides and comes to a screeching landing in the bay, conveniently blocking any more TIE fighters from launching to take on Boba. The sequence also serves as an Actor Allusion, as Bo-Katan is played by Katee Sackhoff, who played Starbuck in the Battlestar Galactica reboot mentioned above.
• Speaking of Space Mutiny above, the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode featuring it has Crow, Tom and Gypsy discover hyper-warp escape craft, perform a mock battle and gleefully crash all three ships like this. It takes the bots a bit to realize that they could have escaped from the Satellite of Love, but they don't realize this until Gypsy is coming in for a landing.
• The Silent Sea: The crew's ship has to crash-land on the Moon, seven kilometers from Balhae Station moon base, after the docking clamp on the main rocket breaks. They're forced to walk cross-country to the base, and they just barely make it before the oxygen in their suits runs out.
• In the short-lived Spy Game, the standard procedure to enter the secret base was to drive down the alley at over 100 mph — that's the only thing that would trigger the wall to open. The car would be stopped by its arresting-hook grabbing the cable inside.
• Supercarrier: This Top Gun rip-off TV series featured at least one episode with a land-based MiG-28 (played by an F-16 Falcon) landing on an American carrier with the aid of a crash barrier.

Video Games

• Ace Combat:
  • Ace Combat: Assault Horizon has the land-based variant in one mission, where the player tries to land their damaged plane after taking a hit in a dogfight; the plane's landing gear ends up giving out before the plane comes to a complete stop, causing it to spin and skid down the runway.
  • Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War makes reference to the Real Life Israeli F-15 incident mentioned below with the player's squadmate, "Solo Wing" Pixy, who gained the nickname and the red-wing paintjob on his F-15C after an incident before the game in which his plane lost its left wing and he managed to land it in that condition anyway.
• In Elite Dangerous, every pilot will at some point have to make a hot landing due a broken canopy with a dangerously short life support timer. As long they get their starship inside the space station's environmentally sealed docking bay before the timer hits 0:00, they're safe, leading pilots to go screaming through the hangar airlock at Mach 2 in a desperate rush for air. On planetary outposts, the ATC will call out alerts if the pilot is taking a dangerous trajectory either due to mad skills, incompetence or powerplant / thruster failure.
  ATC: Flight approved, set down on pad ONE-TWO... Terrain alert! Pull up NOW!
• Farpoint begins with the player's ship getting sucked into a space wormhole and through the atmosphere of a hostile alien planet, and as the game is in first-person players can experience this trope first-hand from the pilot's POV.
• Coming in hot is so common in the Halo series that there's roughly a fifty/fifty chance any human vehicle in the air is going to end up making a landing on fire.
  • Escape pods in particular land hot and rough. Virtually every escape pod that lands in the original Halo: Combat Evolved lost a portion of the survivors in it during the landing. Master Chief is the single survivor of his pod, and that's almost certainly due to being a Super-Soldier in Powered Armor. Somewhat justified since the atmospheric properties of a ringworld were certainly not factored into the escape pod's airdam design, making them land very fast (and very on-fire).
  • The Flood weaponize this tactic, as they'll send infected damaged ships on a crash-course for uninfected areas in order to speed up the spread of the parasite. Since they can spread via the spores their bodies emit, much less any Infection Forms that inevitably survive the crash, it's very effective.
• MechAssault 1 starts off with the player's Spheroid Dropship coming in hot for a vertical landing after heavy damage from anti-air fire. The rough landing destroys most the cargo, and the ship's idiot technician decides to use parts from the heavy, powerful battlemechs to repair a Cougar light mech.
• One scenario in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2000 has you land deadstick on a carrier.
• The opening cinematic to R-Type Command has a smoking and severely damaged R-9 limp into the carrier's hangar and crash, with deck crew running to rescue the pilot.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords consists of several distinct chapters. Almost every single one of them includes a crash landing or even two — to the extent that a normal landing in a new place comes off as a surprise. All these plot-forced landings make the supposed resident ace pilot into somewhat of a joke, and very defensive about his flying skills.
  • Star Wars: The Old Republic. The opening cinematic of the Republic Smuggler storyline has them make a controlled crash-landing at a pad on Ord Mantell, not because their ship is at all badly damaged, but because keeping it in that state despite the blockade meant they came in way too fast.
• War Thunder often has hot landings courtesy of Subsystem Damage affecting lift surfaces; thankfully, the majority of which are on the far more forgiving land airfields. On fire landings are rare (due to fire either dying out in-flight or causing a Critical Existence Failure), but it's not uncommon for players to have to make landings with a significant amount of their control surfaces missing or with huge holes in them, or have to perform a crash landing with nonfunctional landing gear or a dead engine. You actually get more points for landing a damaged plane, so if landing is the final objective, or there are no enemies capable of reaching you within ~20 seconds(the repair time) it's best to land in such a way the game thinks your plane is heavily damages, like scraping of the tail or losing a wheel.

Webcomics

• Avania: Una Pennrose tells Charlotte Burns to "brace for impact" while attempting an emergency landing after their Lancer's displacement arrays fail, leaving them unable to sustain flight.
• Schlock Mercenary has a few. In one instance, after the enemy disables the power on their troop transport:
  Legs: New flight plan, everybody. I'm going to bring us down really hard, and I'm not sure where. Also, I'm not steering.

Western Animation

• In an episode of American Dad!, Stan attempts a sex act with his wife Francine by barreling down a water slide to meet his wife at the bottom. When he realizes that his speed is higher than safety will allow he shouts "I'm coming in hot!" ending in a disastrous collision.
  Stan: I came in too hot.
• Several episodes of Codename: Kids Next Door involve these at some point.
  • "Operation L.O.C.K.D.O.W.N." opens with Numbuh One crashing into the hangar, setting up its Closed Circle plot.
  • "Operation H.O.L.I.D.A.Y.", meanwhile, ends with Numbuh One on the other side of this, trying to guide Lizzie into successfully landing a plane that's coming in hot.
• In the season 3 premier of Star Trek: Lower Decks, Boimler, Rutherford, and Tendi are trapped in a shuttlecraft that's programmed to take them to Earth. While they're unable to override the autopilot, Boimler is able to trick it into thinking that the Cerritos is Earth so it will return them to the docking bay. Unfortunately, the ship is still traveling at high speed when it comes in for a landing because it's attempting to compensate for the drag of Earth's atmosphere, leading them to suffer a crash landing.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars:
  • In "The Bad Batch", the titular squad's gunship comes in for a landing at Fort Anaxes with exactly this wording used by the officer on the PA system who's screaming for people to get out of the way, although the ship ultimately lands just fine with nothing wrong other than reckless flying.
  • Occurs in the beginning of the episode "Nightsisters", where Anakin, Obi-wan, and Asaj Ventress all crash their fighters in the hangar of a Separatist ship after a dogfight outside. The three of them promptly engage in a Lightsaber duel until they are forced to evacuate when Count Dooku orders the remaining Separatist ships to open fire in an attempt to kill Ventress.
• Star Wars Rebels: Occurs in the episode "Homecoming". As part of their plan to steal a Carrier from the Empire, the rebels use a stolen Tie Bomber and impersonate an Imperial pilot while a pair of Rebel A-wings "chase" them. In order to really sell it, an A-wing shoots off one of the Tie bomber's wings, Kanaan says the trope name word for word over the radio to the Carrier, and then Hera immediately goes full throttle and deliberately crashes into the hangar.

Real Life

• Apollo 13 had barely enough power to run the instruments in the capsule, plus the explosion of one of the oxygen tanks may or may not have damaged the heat shield. If it was damaged, the ship would burn up on re-entry, and there was no way to get out and fix it. Plus, the crew was sleep-deprived, had spent four days in near-freezing cold, and one crew member was running a high fever due to a kidney infection. They made it.
• An Israeli Air Force F-15, during a 1983 training exercise, lost one wing in a mid-air collision. Pilot Zivi Nedivi increased throttle to maintain control, actually succeeded (due to the F-15's wide airframe giving it a half-decent lifting-body effect) and attempted a landing — not actually knowing he was missing a wing the whole time. He touched down at over 260 knots (double the normal landing speed), and though he caught the emergency arresting gear it ripped the tailhook off the plane; this slowed the plane enough that he got it stopped 20 feet short of the crash net. He was demoted for disobeying his instructor and then immediately promoted for essentially doing the impossible (landing a plane with one wing) (He outranked his training officer in the backseat who had told him several times to eject; he said that had he known he lost the wing, he likely would have ejected right then).
• This newsreel footage from near the end of World War II, which opens with American aircraft carrier operations, shows two examples in quick succession; following a textbook landing of an F6F Hellcat, another has to come in without working landing gear, and slides across the deck at speed before coming to a stop, breaking its propeller on touchdown. A third wasn't so lucky — it came in too fast, smashed into yet another Hellcat at the rear of the deck, and fell into the ocean.
• The Dam Busters squadron, when they were using Tallboy and Grand Slam earthquake bombs, had to do this whenever a raid didn't go according to plan. While most bomber squadrons could just ditch their bombs and hence come in empty, the Tallboys and Grand Slams were in such short supply that they had to land with any unused bombs. This also took place when doing a raid on the Tirpitz, when they had to shuttle through a Russian airfield... and couldn't find it. All the planes had to land on fields with a multi-ton bomb slung underneath. No casualties.
• All attempts to convert the world-famous Spitfire fighter to a Seafire variant capable of operating from aircraft carriers were abandoned, when it was realised the Spitfire's landing gear was simply too delicate for landing on a carrier at sea; putting a suitably robust undercarriage on the Spit unbalanced it and added so much extra weight it lost its virtues as a fighter plane. The Seafire's operational history was a litany of landing wrecks when the undercarriage collapsed on landing, often making it difficult for other planes in the landing circuit. Once up there it was a great fighter and a nasty surprise for Italians and Germans who thought the Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm was the dumping-ground for obsolete fighter planes. It just failed too often on landing. Surviving aircraft were expended as one-shot catapult-launched planes on merchant ships in convoy (which of course had nowhere to land afterwards, unless near a friendly shore base).
• In 1989, United Airlines Flight 232 was on a routine flight from Denver to Chicago when its No. 2 engine suffered a catastrophic failure that resulted in damage to the plane's hydraulic system, rendering the flight controls useless. The flight crew were able to re-establish some control by using the two remaining the engines to steer the plane, and attempted to make an emergency landing in Sioux City, Iowa. Without hydraulics to deploy the flaps and slats, the plane was forced to come in at an extremely high landing speed. The crew attempted to raise the nose by powering up the engines, which would have at least allowed them to land in the correct position, but there wasn't enough time to straighten it out after finishing their final turn, causing the plane to strike the runway in a right-wing down attitude and break up. 112 of the 296 passengers and crew onboard perished, with many people, including the first responders on scene, being shocked that that anyone made it out alive; one of the pilots later revealed that while he was in the hospital following the accident, he saw a news video of an extremely violent plane crash and immediately had the thought that No One Could Survive That!, only to learn that that was video of the very crash he was recovering from.

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