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Let's hope the "fasten seat belt" sign is on.

"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

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:

Abilities of the Pilot

  • 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.

  • Flying Computer
    This pilot has extremely high intelligence, has excellent 3D perception skills and can estimate distances, altitudes, times and velocities in a split second. He can perform mental calculations in a snap of fingers and estimate what kind of maneuvers are needed to perform a certain feat. He is usually excellent on aerodynamics and what is possible and what not, and eager to take calculated risks that seem impossible for the laymen.

  • 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.

  • 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.

Abilities of his Plane

  • 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.

  • Reinforced Plot Armor
    Planes and most flying things tend to be fragile: if an unnamed character's craft or a or a minor character's cargo plane 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 Nedivi 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.

  • 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, such as the pilot facing down his nemesis with only one machine gun burst/missile left. 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 travel
    In science fiction a pilot will often fly his spacecraft as if it were a terrestrial airplane, especially using banking turns. In Real Life, 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. This aerial awesomeness may be counterbalanced if they're Graceful in Their Element and clumsy outside of it.

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

Sister trope to Ace Custom that makes it a little more believable. Contrast Captain Crash.


Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Anime & Manga 

  • Doki Doki! PreCure: This is pretty much the only explanation as to why Alice (aka Cure Rosetta), a 14-year-old, is capable of piloting a space shuttle. A space shuttle that she personally owns.
  • 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 Union Flag Custom from Gundam 00, each used by their show's Char Clone (Zechs Merquise and Graham Aker 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, and the standard Mook mobile suit is a deliberately downgraded version that normal people can survive piloting; 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. In Destiny he manages to avoid a point-blank shot from Minerva's cannon by banking the Archangel completely to one side, dodging the shot and flying completely past Minerva (who's own helmsman just looks completely stunned) to get behind her. While they were between two mountains with barely any room to move. And he does it before even getting the evasion order as the Captain was too surprised, he just does it by instinct.
    • Mobile Suit Gundam Wing was also one of the bigger offenders when it comes to Reinforced Plot Armor; the basic mook MS, the Leo, is Made of Explodium to such an extreme that at least twice they're blown up by shots that missed. But put a named character in the cockpit, and they get dramatically more durable. Especially if it's Zechs or one of the Gundam pilots.
  • 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.
      • And for Milia Fallyna (Max's eventual wife), who was known as the top Zentraedi Ace who had never been shot down even once. Then she went up against Max.
    • 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 of training, was able to match and surpass seasoned SMS and NUNS veterans (and became almost equal to a cyborg flying a Super Prototype of his own). However, it was noted that he already had some pilot training before joining SMS.
    • Zigzagged with Hayate Immelman. In his first time piloting a Variable Fighter, he's already able to dodge close-range Beam Spam with breakdancing. However, he was already a skilled civilian mecha pilot who was familiar with the control scheme used in VFs. Additionally, while he's an excellent mecha pilot, he has zero experience at piloting aircraft, which results in him getting shot down almost the instant he transforms his VF into jet fighter mode.
  • Hakura/Sailor Uranus of Sailor Moon is a champion-level racer in an improbably wide variety of motor vehicles, including sports cars, Formula 1, road motorcycles, motorcross, and even helicopters. Her Establishing Character Moment has her playing Minako in a racing video game and overcoming a Mercy Lead so fast her tailwind capsizes the other car. Theoretically, this could have been based on some kind of physics engine exploit, but no explanation is provided—Haruka's vehicle just seemed to be inherently faster because she was controlling it.
  • In The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces, main character Lynx/Cheetah demonstrates the ability to perform post-stall maneuvers such as the Kulbit, which explicitly require thrust vectoring because they are by their very nature maneuvers that cannot be performed with purely aerodynamic forces, in a piston-engine fighter, which cannot possibly have anything like thrust vectoring. Even for an exceptionally skilled pilot, this should be impossible.
  • 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.
  • While about 90% of feats 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.

    Comic Books 
  • Batman. Most versions of the Bat Wing should instantly spiral out of control and crash if they somehow managed to get airborne due to how small the control surfaces are. The fact that he can get the thing to fly level, much less actually dogfight with it, lands him squarely in this trope.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Cyclops, leader of the X-Men, and one of the best pilots in the Marvel Universe. Remember, he's colour blind (those special glasses/visors he has to wear to control his Eye Beams leave him seeing everything red-tinted), 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. This also seems to run in the Summers family. His grandfather Philip was an Ace Pilot in World War II. His father Christopher was an Air Force and NASA test pilot elite enough that he was one of the only a few dozen pilots chosen to fly the SR-71 Blackbird (appropriately enough Cyclops later pilots the X-Men's own Blackbirds, the original version of which was a modified SR-71), before being abducted by aliens and becoming the Space Pirate Corsair.
  • Fantastic Four's 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 vehicles. This (along with being Reed Richards' best friend) is why he on the space mission that led to the Fantastic Four's existence. 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.
  • This is the schtick of Kevin "Ace" Koss in Fred Perry's Gold Digger. Pulling a Curb-Stomp Battle against a squadron of enemy pilots (all of them veteran fighter aces, all of them using technologically superior fighters—and with his weapons mostly non-functional) is just a typical adventure with the Diggers sisters. His rivals (and one unwanted Stalker with a Crush) Roxanne "Dark Bird" Rabinowitz and Skipper "Skippy" von Richtofen are just as good—and the only people who can make any of them break a sweat in a dogfight is either of the other two.
  • 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.
  • Subverted in CrossGen'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.
  • 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."
  • Wonder Woman:
    • Wonder Woman (1942): In the Golden Age—before Diana could glide on the winds—Diana was capable of piloting her own admittedly advanced air/spaceplane through impossible tasks, possibly helped along be the inclusion of the Amazon mental radio tech in the plane's piloting system. She was also able to pull off some impressive stunts in other planes, including piloting a heavily sabotaged plane so that it would be believable for her to survive the inevitable crash even as a baseline human.
    • Steve Trevor has lived up to his Ace Pilot status fairly spectacularly on multiple occasions including when having to pilot while his co-pilot was possessed and on fire, while in a plane crashing into the sea, and while in a plane being torn apart by being ripped betwixt dimensions.

    Fan Works 
  • In the Discworld of A.A. Pessimal, Olga Romanoff has become Captain Commander of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch Air Division and the Pegasus Service. The Air Division is probably the nearest thing Ankh-Morpork has to a combat Air Force, and is composed of witches with a particular interest and aptitude in flying. Olga realises that her deal with flight is like Jason Ogg's bargain with blacksmithing - if you aspire to be the greatest flying witch on the Discworld, then you have to be prepared to fly anything, however ludicrous and pointless and potentially dangerous it is. Olga is therefore skilled in a dozen different types of broomstick, flying carpets, the Pegasus, the yarrow stalk of the elves, and the mortar and pestle of her own people. In The Price of Flight, Olga has branched out into mastering a new kind of heavy air-capable craft...Osibisi. Winged elephants.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Always has pilots diving headlong into a blazing forest, with the tips of trees brushing their belly, and coming out in one piece. Al describes just what they're up against:
    Al: In a real fire, there's heat! There's heat that can suck you under, flip you over! There's currents that can tie a knot in a windsock!
  • 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. 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 (earth) with an optical sight (read: crosshairs in the window).
  • The A-Team had Murdoch do some impossible things with a helicopter and then culminated with him 'flying' a tank.
  • 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..." Lampshaded, with his present-day associate 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." Well, the Camel was notoriously unforgiving of pilot error...
  • Naturally, First Man shows off the incredible and dangerous maneuvers pulled off by the Apollo 11 astronauts.
    • Neil manages to regain control of the X-15 flight as it threatens to skip off the atmosphere helplessly into space and he even manages to land roughly where he was supposed to.
    • Neil recovers the spin on the Gemini flight, with little help from Mission Control, in pitch darkness, and after his co-pilot has passed out from the G-forces. He does it by correctly deciding that the flight control thrusters are causing the problem, turning them off, and then using the ship's re-entry thrusters to regain control. He saves the astronauts' lives, but the mission has to be aborted because he used up three-quarters of the re-entry fuel doing it.
    • Neil fails to regain control of the LLRV (in reality the vehicle suddenly lost fuel pressure to its attitude thrusters, so there was no way to regain control), but he does eject in time to avoid being killed in the crash.
    • Lastly, landing the LEM manually to avoid landing on top of a boulder or in a crater, all while the landing computer keeps setting off the master alarm. The movie, in fact, downplays the precariousness of the LEM landing as the error codes displayed by the computer required more serious intervention than just turning the alarm off each time. This was displayed with some accuracy in From the Earth to the Moon.
  • 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.
  • Independence Day:
    • Steven Hiller gets an If it flies with the alien space craft. Then he crashes.
    • The President orders anybody with piloting experience to fly F/A-18 Hornet fighters in the battle over Area 51. This includes a crop duster pilot.
  • 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 Matrix justifies this trope: Trinity turns into an Instant Expert at helicopter flying after having the knowledge directly uploaded to her brain. However the helicopter does end up crashing. Some of the maneuvers with the real-world hovercrafts fall into this trope as well.
  • In Sky Bandits, Barney and Luke manage to land their unwieldy gunbus on top of the German airship!
  • In Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, we see that 23rd century denizen, Sulu, is able to fly a 20th century helicopter with minimal difficulty. Helming a starship is hardly the same thing. It's possibly justified that Sulu seems to have piloted antique helicopter's in the future just for fun as he is indeed familiar enough with the technical specifications of a Huey to strike up a conversation with the actual pilot about it and convince him to let Sulu borrow it for a short while.
  • Star Wars: Most of the subtropes can be justified by the Force, and we all know George Lucas is in hot, drooling love with the Old-School Dogfight, 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.
    • Anakin somehow manages to land the remaining section of a breaking-apart capital ship on a landing strip on Coruscant, not to mention blowing up the Droid Control ship in The Phantom Menace despite having never flown before.
    • Luke has flown a T-16 Skyhopper, which is manufactured by the same company (Incom) that makes the X-Wing, with a similar design. This allows him to climb into the cockpit with little trouble. And he is, after-all, not only Force Sensitive but, per Lucas, the strongest Force-user in all of (Legends) canon. Still...
    • Poe Dameron in The Force Awakens. He actually manages to exceed anything even Luke has done onscreen, despite (supposedly) not being Force-sensitive. He is practically a one-man squadron. At Takodana he takes a massive toll on First Order TIE Fighters (downing half a squadron in a single pass!) as well as managing to snipe Stormtroopers on the ground! At Starkiller Base he accomplishes an Airstrike Impossible, flying through a trench while under heavy fire (like Luke in A New Hope) and into the weapon through a burning rupture formed by explosives so that he can shoot out crucial systems from the inside while still making it out alive (like Wedge Antilles in Return of the Jedi)! He also invokes the "if it flies..." trope when Finn frees him from his cell and ask if he can fly a TIE Fighter, saying "I can fly anything."
      • Rey pulls off some impressive maneuvers herself after stealing the Millennium Falcon on Jakku, despite all her previous experience being on simulators for smaller ships, and some of the controls being physically out of reach from the pilot's seat (the minimum crew of a YT-1300 is supposed to be a pilot and co-pilot). She evades TIE Fighters by flying through the remains of a crashed Star Destroyer, and sets up Finn to kill the last one despite his turret being jammed downward, by flipping the ship and pointing the now very awkwardly placed gun straight at the enemy fighter.
  • 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 that 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.

    Literature 
  • 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.
  • In the Biggles books, Biggles and his companions never seem to have much difficulty mastering the controls of whatever aircraft they're required to fly in each volume. Probably justified, as Biggles has been a professional aviator since the age of seventeen, starting out as a fighter pilot in wood-and-canvas biplanes and then spending the twenties and thirties in civil aviation before being called up for the Second World War; there can't be many classes of aircraft he hasn't flown at some point, and his colleagues aren't far behind him in professional experience. There's also a surprising exception: It was a plot point in one of the earlier novels that Biggles was not IFR-certified. It never comes up again, so presumably he eventually corrected this gap in his skillset.
  • Lethally subverted in Dread Empire's Fall - not only are maneuvers like those of this trope terribly hard to comprehend, never mind perform, but in what is essentially an atomic slugfest, your pinnace is the least survivable cans on the firing range. And the closest. And missiles can pull more G's than you. The only wartime purpose they serve is to coordinate the missiles at the relativistic battle distances, and they're only slightly more retrievable than their explosive flock.
    • Even with large ships, this trope is averted. Good tactics and firing solutions served the protagonists better than piloting did in any combat. And lighter armor or smaller arsenals only meant you had less firepower to overwhelm the enemy with.
    • There's one avian-style species noted to have a much better comprehension of 3D maneuvering than most other species', but being avian-esque, they have weaker bones and so they can't pull as many G's. And since all travel is acceleration-based (thank you, Einstein), fleets with ships outfitted for them can't accelerate nearly as hard.
  • 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.
  • Almost everyone of Korval 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.
  • In Melisa Michaels' Skyrider series, Melacha "Skyrider" Rendell has this reputation. She's widely considered to be the best pilot in the belt. To some extent, the reputation is deserved, as she proves when she has to manually dock with a spinning, out-of-control ship, rescue its crew, and get away safely again.
  • 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.
    • Prior to his Face–Heel Turn Anakin Skywalker already had a well-deserved reputation for this. The height of his achievements was piloting General Grievous's flagship from orbit and landing it on Coruscant, without burning up on reentry and with minimal property damage. Note that said ship was not designed to land on a planet. And it was exploding at the time. And that Anakin didn't have any actual piloting controls to work with: he was flying entirely by opening and closing vents on the ship's hull to steer it where he needed it to go. When Obi-Wan told Luke that Anakin was the best pilot in the galaxy, he was being completely sincere.
    • 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. Wedge Antilles, the long-time squadron leader of the Rogues, is the only man in the entire galaxy to have the kill mark silhouettes of two Death Stars on his ship.
      • 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.
      • Many quiet mentions are made of Tycho Celchu's piloting skills throughout the series, usually referring back to past feats, but the big example comes in I, Jedi where he very nearly takes Corran apart with his Awesomeness by Analysis style. Corran is not only an ace pilot, but a Jedi as well.
    • In Galaxy of Fear, Tash finds while navigating an Asteroid Thicket that while she's a decent pilot most of the time, with the Force to help she's pretty spectacular.
    The two smashed asteroids had turned into a hundred smaller rocks. There was no way to avoid them. Tash closed her eyes tight and moved her control stick, flying totally by feel.
    When she opened her eyes, she'd passed through the debris untouched.
  • John Ringo's Troy Rising: In Citadel and The Hot Gate, Dana "Comet" Parker stands out for her flying skills. After a fair amount of training, on her first mission she accelerated into the landing zone (she was being chased by missiles), executed a skew turn (on her first try) to decelerate, and barely survived smashing into the far wall before dropping into the landing zone as her craft lost all power. The people watching this were debating whether to give her a medal for such skill or a Mast for being utterly insane. Later she accelerates into another landing zone and then decelerates at 400 gravities (Ringo goes on and on about how Earth-based equipment cannot accomplish 400 gravities even with head-on collisions) with such skill that she comes to an almost dead stop exactly on the landing zone "with a slight bump". The people watching were openly screaming in terror as they saw her heading towards them at incredible speeds, convinced that she was going to crash and kill them all.
  • 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.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Air Crash Investigation: The series covers actual incidents that have occurred in aviation, a number of which feature pilots having to control aircraft under highly unusual and dangerous circumstances. Several of the incidents are listed under Real Life.
  • "Howlin' Mad" Murdock from The A-Team is of the "If it flies" variety. 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.
    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.
  • 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.
    • Starbuck does however have a few advantages over most examples on this page: She's trying to figure out how to get a Space Fighter off the surface of a moon with fairly low gravity, which means that once she gets it off the ground and up to escape velocity she doesn't have to care about its stalling speed, never-exceed speed or other aerodynamics issues for very long. Space is also by its very nature largely free of anything to crash into.
  • 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.
  • In Firefly, if it weren't for Wash's piloting skills the crew of Serenity would have been captured, dead or worse several times. 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 Serenity. He's done a flat spin in atmosphere, successfully docked the ship with a space station, unpowered, from 6000 miles out, barnstormed down a snowy canyon, and in the movie Serenity (2005), he flies their tiny ship through a titanic battle without a scratch and manages to crashland it safely, even after losing one engine and getting hit by an EMP weapon.
  • Intergalactic: Echo is a very skilled pilot, matter of factly saying he'll fly the ship with just one thruster while riding out the turbulence (he does).
  • 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.
  • Comedy ensemble show The Mary White House Experience subverted this trope. A sketch noted that as the skills required to pilot a modern jet fighter in combat were converging more and more with those necessary to succeed in air-fighting computer games, the next generation of RAF aces were not going to be craggy manly Biggles types. Oh, no. A sketch followed through the recruitment and training of spotty, geeky, teenage nerds into the Royal Air Force, who all became fighter aces in an unspecified war somewhere.
  • Stargate-verse:
    • Stargate Atlantis:
      • Colonel John Sheppard from 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.
      • In the Grand Finale, Dr. Carson Beckett (a physician) manages to not only fly the titular city but also engage in a battle with the Super-hive and successfully almost crash-land the city in the San Francisco Bay, with hardly a tiny wave from the splash-down. This is the same guy (or rather, his clone) who had trouble controlling anything with the control chair prior to the mission and didn't really get much training in the meantime. Could be justified by the fact that it's mainly the city flying itself with Beckett just giving overall commands.
    • 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. He has stated in dialogue to have been a test pilot in the past, to give a Hand Wave for this.
  • Tom Paris in Star Trek: Voyager. While this can be explained by the universal controls on all Starfleet ships and shuttles (and the one Starfleet shuttle with nonstandard controls has a cockpit of Paris's own design, so that's not exactly going to trip him up), he was still able to pull off some incredible maneuvers, such as putting his shuttle in one of the Voyager's blind spots when the ship was hijacked.

    Radio 
  • Douglas in Cabin Pressure has improbable piloting skills, and unfortunately knows it, leading to him perfoming absurd stunts for absolutely no reason, and regarding basic safety procedures as polite suggestions. This is why he's the first officer and not the captain; as Carolyn puts it, she has a good pilot and a safe pilot, and the safe pilot is the one in charge.

    Tabletop Games 
  • The Speed Demon Advanced Class from d20 Modern Urban Arcana, who uses explicitly supernatural enhancements, falls under Aerody-whatsit? (due to outright reducing speed penalties to piloting skills), Reinforced Plot Armor due to having the class ability to apply their own Defense bonus to the vehicle they are piloting, making it almost untouchable at higher levels, and Three Times Faster than a Normal Zaku due to possessing a class ability that improves the top speed of any vehicle they are currently piloting by 25%.
  • 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.
  • Warhammer 40,000: 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.
  • All over the place in X-Wing Miniatures. While Space Is Air being in force is mostly inherited from Star Wars, you get some impressive displays of piloting implausibility: Juno Eclipse's ability to modify her manoeuvre speed by 1 allows her to do things with a TIE Advanced that even Darth Vader can't, Hera Syndulla can turn a chunky freighter on a dime even if she was heading into a long-distance Koiogran turn, BB-8 in the astromech slot allows slow, chunky Y-wings to barrel roll, and the list goes on.

    Video Games 
  • 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.
  • Along with Zeerust, this trope is pretty much what powers Crimson Skies.
  • EVE Online is possibly the poster child for this trope. Although it does take time (lots and lots of time), the gamer 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.
  • Final Fantasy XIII: 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.
  • 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. Possibly 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.
  • Halo:
    • Captain Keyes 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. That said, it's very possible that he's piloted alien craft before, as he's had some adventures in the past (to say the least).
    • However, Keyes is best known for the "Keyes Loop", where he defeated a force of four superior Covenant ships with just his one, with one part involving charging straight past a Covenant destroyer so that the plasma torpedoes chasing his ship would hit the destroyer instead. Of course, fighting in space allows you to pull off all sorts of maneuvers that you wouldn't be able to do in an atmosphere.
    • In some games (notably Halo 3) vehicles can only be destroyed by killing the player - making this a surprisingly literal example of the extending-shields aspect of this trope.
  • In Hardwar, you are the only pilot who has the skills to perform crazy stuff with your Moth in the Titan moon, even if you're flying in the smallest and weakest Moth in the game. All of the other AI pilots including the police don't have such skills and are restricted to flying predictable patterns of which you can easily exploit even in their best days. Unfortunately, your Moth is limited to pitch and yaw maneuvers as the game has no ability to perform complete roll maneuvers (you're limited to 70 degrees when rolling right or left) due to the game's programmers not having the time to implement specific codes during their era, meaning that evasive maneuvers are rather limited. In multiplayer, though, expect the other human pilots to utilize the same flying skills as you do so don't get cocky.
  • Another example would be Kang the Mad in Jade Empire, though it's mostly a case of his flying machines probably shouldn't be getting off the ground at all, and he's piloting them with ease. Justified in that he's an amnesiac minor deity.
  • An earlier BioWare example was Carth Onasi of Knights of the Old Republic. Flying a damaged escape pod and managing to crash it in the "good" part of town, flying through at least one Sith blockade, a dramatic escape from the Sith flagship Leviathan, no less than five Sith patrols, and setting down on Lehon, despite having most of the Hawk's engines and systems crippled by the planet's defense shield (the place they land is pretty much a starship graveyard with hundreds of ships fallen over he centuries). Atton in the second game also flies the Ebon Hawk and several shuttles through overwhelming blockades and hostile fire. Atton is confirmed to be a Force-sensitive and drawing on it subconsciously to help him fly. There are several hints in-game saying this could apply to Carth as well.
  • Mass Effect: On a larger scale, Non-Action Guy Joker in the first game 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. In Mass Effect 2, 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. Joker comments that banking in a vacuum is actually really hard, but he's just that good. He was probably exaggerating to promote himself. Regardless, he's one of the best human pilots alive, if not the singular best. Makes you wonder how someone with weak bones can pull that many G's, but when you accept the Mass Effect itself, you can pretty much handwave most of physics quite comfortably.
  • In MechWarrior Living Legends, aerospace fighters behave somewhat like a real plane - provided you fly it like one. Ace pilots rely on exploiting the wonky aircraft physics, such as flying a Sparrowhawk scout plane at 30 kph upside-down mere meters from the ground, or by cutting the throttle while hammering the pitch/roll/yaw controls, causing the plane to turn on a dime in mid-air. It's possible to land planes on each other or have battlearmor ride on the wings (albeit very prone to ending in disaster). Planes will bounce harmlessly off battlemech torsos (but nothing else), allowing pilots to literally ricochet themselves out of danger. Additionally, planes suffer no consequences for flying underwater or in space, the latter courtesy of all in-game aircraft being both atmospheric and vacuum flight-capable
  • 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!"
  • 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.
  • 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 maneuvring 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 Super Robot Wars crank up the skill Amuro Ray displayed in the series to a ridiculous degree, to the point where even the Eldritch Abominations let alone every anime's cast recognize him as one of if not 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).
  • 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. The backstory even claims he single-handedly saved the shuttle he and his family were taking by piloting it... as a teenager with no prior experience.

    Webcomics 
  • In Avania, during the first chapter she appears in, Una Pennrose flies her Lancer into a canyon in pursuit of a much smaller aircraft narrowly avoiding a fatal crash in the process. Later, while engaging in a mock battle with the White Knights squadron's ace pilots, she pulls off a fancy stunt with the help of Charlotte Burns' manipulation of the flight systems only for it to be predicted and lead to an uncontrolled dive, saved at the last minute by a high-G pull-up.

    Western Animation 
  • Shane Gooseman in Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers can pull off maneuvers in an interceptor that are physically impossible for humans. The good thing is that he's not exactly human. The bad thing is that he drives exactly the same way he flies.
  • DuckTales (1987) has Launchpad McQuack, who has the catchphrase "If it has wings, I can crash it." He can fly anything — even live animals, untested technology, and alien spaceships with controls not designed for his species — 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.
  • The Legend of Korra:
    • General Iroh manages to fly a biplane within moments of hijacking it. This was the first time he had ever encountered such a machine in his life and had zero training in it, yet despite a rocky start he manages to get it in control and dogfight in it.
    • If it can be driven or piloted, Asami Sato can drive it. She's an expert biplane pilot who can strafe enemy encampments with, at most, six months of study.
  • Miles Mayhem, the Big Bad from M.A.S.K., has a helicopter that transforms into a fighter jet. He pilots both modes expertly and even has the precision to fly the vehicle into caves.
  • In the Ready Jet Go! special "Back to Bortron 7", Celery assigns Sydney the role of the co-pilot of the Mothership. Sydney figures out how to steer the mothership almost instantaneously. This continues into the regular season 2 episodes as well. In "Souped Up Saucer", Sydney becomes the Wingman of the flying saucer, proving herself to be just as skilled a pilot as she was in "Back to Bortron 7".
  • While Anakin Skywalker is reportedly one of the best pilots in Star Wars, it's not until the CGI Star Wars: The Clone Wars movie where we see him commandeer a flying bug and an Alleged Spaceship and pull it off both times.
  • Aerrow in Storm Hawks will perform at least one crazy and/or suicidal maneuver per episode if he has a chance to fly his skimmer or use its motorcycle alt. mode and succeed with style. At various points he's managed to outfly the opposition on broken-down or otherwise rusted-over vehicles barely held together. He's even surfed on a vehicle's thruster like it was a skateboard!
  • Baloo from TaleSpin. He possesses all the aforementioned skills sans one (the Seaduck isn't armed with missiles... unless you count thrown fruit. Which he's a pretty good shot with, anyway.) He figured out the world's very first, prototype helicopter and Jet Pack in just a few minutes, despite them being so revolutionary for his 1930s-style world that he had never been trained or even SEEN them in his life. His beloved Sea Duck, an old, rusty and unwieldy cargo plane, is customized up the wazoo, making it faster and more maneuverable than the Air Pirates' zippy miniplanes, to the point only Baloo can pilot it to its full potential. He can withstand the immense G-forces from said plane's Overdrive, which is heavily implied to be a supersonic drive designed by Wildcat and Baloo himself (and remember, these are propeller engines spinning hard enough to go supersonic.) He can catch small objects (and people) mid-fall, while flying at top speed, just by reaching out the window, and they're not even hurt when he yanks them in with his bare hand. He can fly into caves and cracks in cliff-faces barely wider than his plane, through rainforests, through a skyscraper-filled city, under bridges, and into highway tunnels, the ends of his wings scratching and scraping the walls, and fly out without incident even as the aforementioned miniplanes (about a tenth the size of the Sea Duck) smash and crash. He can kamikaze into Wave Motion Guns as they fire at him AND glide the resulting wingless hull 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 to change course, proving that he doesn't even need wings to fly. Oh and he was officially acknowledged as 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!
  • In Thunder Cats 2011, Tygra manages to pilot an aircraft they had built, having never flown before in his life much like Iroh from the example about. Not only that though, he manages to beat Vultaire, a seasoned pilot with a better jet, in a flying contest, though just barely. The next episode he's leading flight formations. It is hinted that his skills were somehow passed on to him through his ancestor Tygus, who was an Ace Pilot.

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