Wronski Feint

A Wronski Feint is a maneuver where a pursued character feints at an obstacle in order to get their pursuer to follow. Because the pursuer is focused on following their target, rather than their actual personal movement, this allows the pursued character to pull up at the very last second, and the split-second of confusion, or their enemy's inferior piloting skills, causes the enemy to crash into the obstacle instead of following.

This trope allows the work to show off what a skilled pilot the hero is — he can take out the enemy with only his piloting skills. It also shows the audience his level of fearlessness and ability to keep cool under pressure.

Note that while the obstacle is usually a cliff, the ground, or a similar immobile object, it's not unheard of to pull this off with missiles, other vehicles, or other mobile targets.

Named after the Quidditch technique where one team's Seeker will pretend to see the Snitch near the ground and go into a dive to attempt to lure the opposing Seeker into crashing into the ground. The Wronski Feint is first mentioned in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and again in Quidditch Through the Ages by Kennilworthy Whisp, wherein it was revealed to have been named after famed Polish Seeker Josef Wronski (Józef Wroński).

Often used with a vehicle-themed Defensive Feint Trap. Sometimes peppers and ends a longer Try and Follow sequence or Aerial Canyon Chase.

Subtrope of Try and Follow. Compare Dodge by Braking, Deadly Dodging. Buzzing the Deck is a similar move done just for the hell of it. A Game of Chicken can cause one or both participants to fall victim to this.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Used in Dragon Ball twice:
  • First, Piccolo Jr. uses a homing ki shot to track Goku in their match in the 23rd Tenkaichi Budokai. Goku successfully outruns it and runs right up to Piccolo, who takes the shot full-bore and loses his arm (which he then promptly tears off and grows back).
  • Later on in the Namek arc, this is attempted by Goku as a way to hit Frieza using his own manually-directed Kienzan discs. Frieza doesn't fall for it the first time, and the second time only comes close to working because of Goku's use of a smokescreen. It turns out to be a ruse as Goku predicted Frieza's dodge and pummels him as soon as he jumps into the air. Frieza is forced down into the ground and leaps back up... and then gets cut in half by the remaining disc, which he lost track of.
• Gundam Evolve 7, a computer-generated short based on Mobile Suit Gundam Wing, has Heero use the colony cannon he's attempting to destroy for a Wronski Feint.
• Early in Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam, Quattro and his team take advantage of their Rick Dias suits' superior maneuverability to pull the basic 'fly at the ground and swerve away at the last minute' version on a squadron of pursuing GMs. Made rather more plausible by the fact that the Federation GM II, to be blunt, steers like a cow.
• Tails tries the missile maneuver with one of Eggman's missiles in the last episode of the second Sonic X season. It doesn't work.
  Eggman: This isn't your typical anime weapon!
• Fiendishly Inverted by the Anti-Spiral termination forces in Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. The machines attempt to fake out their opponents with sluggish movement and feeble attacks, tricking them into thinking they have the upper hand. Said opponent might let up on the attackers just long enough to realize he's in the middle of a sudden Zerg Rush, or mount a counterstrike and charge forward- racing toward their doom. As soon as the enemy falls for the bait-and-switch tactic by dropping their guard, the mecha equally drop the charade and IMMEDIATELY go for the kill- with very deadly results.
• In Tiger & Bunny, Kotetsu actually manages this against Barnaby without flight — his opponent didn't take into account his Grappling-Hook Pistol when following him off a skyscraper.

Comic Books

• Athena Voltaire: Athena seems to favor this tactic for disposing of attackers. The fight in The Brotherhood of Shambala is typical; she's out-gunned by two Japanese fighter planes, but thanks to being a better pilot, is able to arrange matters so that one fails to pull out of a dive and hits a river, while another doesn't turn quickly enough to avoid a cliff.
• The Avengers: Played with in issue #104. Quicksilver runs full-speed into a wall while being chased by a Sentinel. The Sentinel thinks that he is playing this trope. He wasn't—instead, he was gambling that he would survive hitting the wall at speed, but the far more massive Sentinel wouldn't.
• DC One Million: Superman pulls this when being chased by "icon jockeys" (superhero wannabes who, thanks to 853rd century science, can buy temporary powers) who think he's a Bizarro.
• The Desert Peach: Rosen does this to a pursuing British pilot. Rosen's in a Stuka—a dive bomber that's made to deal with the G-forces and stresses of pulling up out of a very steep dive—and the British pursuer isn't. Truth in Television; see Real Life below.
• Masters of the Universe: In "The Power of Point Dread" (a pack-in minicomic), He-Man manages to defeat Skeletor, who was piloting the faster and more heavily-armed Talon Fighter, and Beast-Man who is using the guns of Point Dread itself by taking advantage of the superior maneuverability to the Wind Raider to slam the Talon Fighter into Point Dread itself.
• Sin City: This is essentially done a few times in which a character lures one or more cop cars into Old Town where cops are not allowed. This ends with the cops turning and leaving... usually. The cop cars unfortunate enough to land in the neighborhood get blasted apart.
• The Transformers (Marvel): In the "Wrecking Havoc" story, a human fighter pilot actually manages to pull this off on Cyclonus.
• The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye: Played with in Lost Light. Cyclonus is being chased by Star Saber, both of whom are in jet modes, only for Cyclonus to suddenly transformer into robot mode and use his BFS and Star Saber's momentum to slice Star Saber in half from nose to tail.
• Tragg and the Sky Gods: In issue #9, Tragg is attacked by a reanimated T. rex skeleton. He defeats it by tricking it into chasing him and then lures it the edge of a cliff. He jumps off and the skeleton follows him. He lands on a small ledge and the skeleton plunges into the sea.
• X-Men: Angel/Archangel often performs this on his enemies. While Warren isn't nearly as fast as most airborne people in the Marvel Universe, he is far more agile, and sometimes it's hard to see the incoming wall with those big wings in your vision...

Comic Strips

• One Garfield comic strip had the eponymous feline chasing a bird at ground-level, at full speed, only to have the bird pull up sharply (90° angle!) at the base of a tree. Garfield did not dodge.
  • Another Garfield comic strip shows Garfield chasing Odie. Odie darts away from a sliding glass door at the last second. Garfield doesn't.
• Dude Hennick pulls one against a Japanese fighter in Terry and the Pirates when the heroes are escaping from Temple Rock prison, causing the fighter to crash into a lake.

Fan Works

• Evangelion 303: Shinji did this in chapter 2, using himself as an obstacle during his duel with Asuka. As she was chasing after him, he abruptly braked in midair, forcing her to dodge him and letting him tag her jet fighter.
• The Great Alicorn Hunt: Chased by bullies, Scootaloo finds an updraft. Her glider's much larger wings catch the air better than the bullies' wings, sending her hurtling up fast while the bullies continue going forward and crash into a dumpster.
• Here There Be Monsters: During an aerial duel with Black Beauty and Illyria, Mary Marvel uses her superior flying technique to outmaneuver them and make them collide with each other.
• Myrmidons: Kanril Eleya, badly outnumbered by a Fek'Ihri fleet, launches a hit-and-run raid with her flotilla to get them to follow her, then makes a carefully calculated dive across the event horizon of a black hole hoping some of them will fall in. This is only half of her plan: she also exploits the Time Dilation effects near the black hole to slow down their collective timeline, enabling faraway Starfleet reinforcements to arrive so she can turn around and destroy the Fek conventionally.

Films — Animation

• In Finding Nemo, Nigel the pelican pulls this to get away from a swarm of seagulls that are after Marlin and Dory (who are riding in Nigel's mouth), by flying through the space between the mast and sail of one of the many sailboats in the harbor. The entire flock of seagulls fall for it and get their beaks stuck in the sails.
• Occurs in The Incredibles, when Elastigirl's plane is targeted by the first two missiles launched by Syndrome. After her initial evasions fail, she dives toward the ocean spiraling her plane while launching flares to try and break the missile lock. She succeeds, in that the two missiles impact with the ocean, but she also damages her plane in the process, leaving her with virtually no fuel when the second salvo of missiles arrive.
• Mario pulls this off near the end of The Super Mario Bros. Movie to lead the gigantic Banzai Bill toward the magical pipe out of the Mushroom Kingdom, pulling up at the last moment to ensure that he doesn't follow the Bill into the Void Between the Worlds, where it relatively safely explodes.

Films — Live-Action

• Terrestrial variant: Batman Forever shows the Batmobile accelerating into a brick wall before using a combination of rocket boosters and a grappling hook to drive up the wall. The pursuers drive right into it.
• In the movie Blue Thunder, the hero (flying the eponymous Black Helicopter) dodges two heat seeking missiles fired at him by military F-16s by luring them into, respectively, the heat from a Japanese barbecue shop and the sun reflecting off a skyscraper. Under the circumstances, he had no real choice, but the film rather jarringly avoids dealing with the consequences.
• Condorman: At the end of the speedboat chase, Woody's boat is damaged and out of gas. Morovich, whose weapons are also disabled, elects to ram him in a final attempt to finish the hero off. Unfortunately for Marovich, the speedboat is airlifted away just in time, causing him to crash spectacularly into the rocks.
• Death Race 2000. La Résistance is trying to bomb Frankenstein with a small low-flying aircraft. Frankenstein spins his car around a large rock and the aircraft follows, only to find the rock is jutting out from a cliff face which he flies straight into.
• In Fantastic Four, the Human Torch uses the Wronski Feint to dispose of a missile, when his attempt to lure it with flares proved ineffective.
• Galaxy Quest uses a Wronski Feint combined with a game of chicken (while trailing a huge swarm of magnetic mines) to destroy the Big Bad alien's flagship.
• The Great Waldo Pepper: Kessler attempts to use this against Waldo during their final flight.
• Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone: Harry actually does this when he and the Slytherin Seeker are both going for the Snitch. A subversion in that the Snitch actually is in sight and the Slytherin player gets skittish and cautiously pulls up well before he would collide with the ground, leaving Harry alone to finish the maneuver and snatch the orb.
• Hot Shots! has Topper leading a couple of heat-seeking missiles to Saddam's base to use as extra ordnance. And due to Rule of Funny, he does so by braking his fighter jet.
• The Hunt for Red October:
  • Captain Ramius pulls this when a torpedo locks on to the sub while it is in its canyon run — he purposefully delays a turn by several seconds, then turns very hard (for a sub, anyway), causing the torpedo to impact into a canyon wall.
  • Repeated by Captain Mancuso late in the movie, with one difference: the torpedo hit the Alfa sub that originally fired it.
    Mancuso: The hard part about playing chicken is knowing when to flinch.
• The Incredible Mr. Limpet. The Nazis develop a torpedo that can follow Henry Limpet's "thrum" sound. He uses this to lure the torpedoes into following him. He moves in front of the U-boats that fired the torpedoes, makes the "thrum" sound, and moves away before the torpedoes hit the subs.
• In Independence Day, Steven Hiller uses the canyon ploy to escape from the alien dogfighters. He then uses the actual Wronski Feint on his last pursuer, ejecting and deploying his plane's drag chute, causing both plane and alien fighter to crash. Mostly justified since the chute obscures the alien's sight, and by the time it slides off the alien craft, it's too close to the canyon wall to pull up in time.
• Jason Bourne does a Car Fu version; while riding a motorcycle down some narrow streets in Athens during a riot, Bourne drives down a dead-end street and then suddenly turns and rides the bike up a stairway, causing his pursuer to crash. However, the car's airbags absorb the impact and he's soon after Bourne on foot.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • In Iron Man 2, Iron Man gets rid of a half-dozen or so Hammer drones chasing him by leading them into the partly-hollow Unisphere at the center of the Stark Expo grounds. Iron Man is able to stop short of the Unisphere's solid wall and then fly up and away in a new direction. The drones, being rather stupid robots with slow reaction times, are not so lucky.
  • In The Avengers, Hawkeye advises Iron Man that this is the way to get rid of the Chitauri bogeys on his six, because "they can't bank worth a damn."
  • In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Falcon finally gets rid of the dozen or so heat-seeking missiles behind him by flying directly toward the glass frame of the Project Insight helicarrier's targeting core, then suddenly retracting the suit's wings and shutting off the jets. He immediately drops out of the way and the missiles slam into the glass, leaving him totally unharmed and now with a convenient way in.
• Outbreak: Colonel Daniels and Major Salt manage to pull this off on two UH-1 Hueys while flying an OH-6 Loach. Both Hueys survive, but it distracts them long enough for the Loach to fire some missiles into the forest, keeping them even further distracted while they work on a cure for the virus.
• In a variation without canyon walls, the heroes of Pearl Harbor do this by flying their planes directly at each other, and then swerving at the last minute, causing their pursuers to crash into each other.
• Star Wars:
  • Done in A New Hope when Luke is being pursued by a TIE fighter. He pulls to the side suddenly, allowing Wedge Antilles to come at it from the front and blow it away.
  • This is the entire point of Han Solo flying the Millennium Falcon into an Asteroid Thicket in The Empire Strikes Back. All four TIE fighters pursuing him get smashed by asteroids.
  • The Falcon does it again in The Force Awakens using the ruins of a wrecked Star Destroyer in the Jakku desert.
  • And one more time in The Last Jedi through a crystal cavern on the planet Crait.
• In Stealth, EDI does this to Henry when both are flying in a canyon. The sequence ends with EDI using the smoke from the pilot's missile to hide a cliff and the latter crashing against it.
• In the original The Terminator, Sarah and Reese are driving flat-out in a parking garage with the Terminator just behind them. Sarah spots the wall but Reese is too distracted to listen to her (with the gunfire and all). Sarah slams her car into park, but the Terminator doesn't react in time to avoid hitting the wall at top speed. Of course, being a cyborg, this is just a minor inconvenience for him.
• In the Action Prologue of Tomorrow Never Dies, James Bond does this to destroy some missiles fired at him by a pursuing fighter, though the fighter itself manages to pull away in time. Pretty ordinary for Bond, right? Only at the time he was piloting by holding the joystick with his knees because he was trying to stop himself from being garotted by the mook in the rear seat of his own fighter.
• The Lightcycles in TRON use a unique variant, creating their own walls for their pursuers to crash into. They use the standard version when there's a wall already in place.
• In TRON: Legacy, the 4x4 Light Runners do the same, as do the aerial Light Bombers and Fighters, but improvements in digital technology allow them to create curved walls instead of the straight angles of the ENCOM Lightcycles. Light Bombers are especially dangerous to pursuers because they produce two light walls in midair, trailing twisting and turning constructs as the plane corkscrews and barrel-rolls.
• Upwards variation in The Wolverine: the Traintop Battle has Wolverine and the Yakuza mooks jumping and ducking to avoid the overhead signs above the train. At a certain point, Logan makes it like he's going to jump... so the other guy does so and gets struck by a higher up sign.

Literature

• The Executioner: In the Able Team spin-off series, the villains are in a helicopter in Guatemala, amusing themselves by pretending to do a strafing run on the local peasants who flee in terror except for one old man who runs for a solitary tree, knowing the pilot will focus on him and miss the tree against the forest background. The Dragon abruptly calls the pilot's attention to it, and Helicopter Blender is averted.
• S. M. Stirling and James Doohan's The Flight Engineer: In The Privateer, The light carrier Invincible jumps into a barely explored system that happens to have a pulsar dangerously close to the jump point. Since they're expecting it, they're able to slingshot around the pulsar at high speed and back to the jump point. The enemy flotilla pursuing them is not expecting the pulsar and ends up smearing itself across its surface.
• Harry Potter:
  • Feinting was demonstrated quite effectively in the Quidditch World Cup by Viktor Krum in the book Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. And several Harry Potter Fanfics have Harry himself performing it, as in the book he thought after seeing it that he couldn't wait to try it. Unfortunately, later events (the Quidditch cup being called off due to The Triwizard Tournament in his fourth year, getting banned from Quidditch by Umbridge in his fifth year, getting weekly detentions for the end of the season in his sixth year, and skipping his seventh year) conspire to prevent him from ever trying it.
  • He does perform a similar move in the Quiddich match against Ravenclaw in the third book, where he fakes seeing the snitch to trick Cho Chang into flying the wrong direction (it lacks the large solid object to truly be considered this trope). His tactic against the dragon in the First Task was similar as well.
• Mercedes Lackey and Larry Dixon's Heralds of Valdemar: Skandranon, the hero of The Black Gryphon, is pursued by enemy fliers, so he flies towards a tree and he veers away, causing them to crash. It's subverted by the fact that he promptly runs straight into a tree himself shortly thereafter. Of course, it was a tree on his team's side of the warzone, which is what he was really worrying about.
• Isaac Asimov's Lucky Starr and the Rings of Saturn: Lucky tries to evade pursuit first by hiding behind Saturn's rings, but the Sirian ships are still able to detect the Shooting Star, so he flies directly at Mimas, the (second/third) nearest moon of Saturn. He dives down so steeply, it looks like he's going to crash, until he activates the fusion beam, a close-range "heat ray". The weapon vaporizes the icy substance of the moon ahead of him, giving him sufficient room to come to a stop beneath the moon's surface.
• Nightworld. While flying over the Atlantic Ocean a Giant Flyer swoops down on their Lear jet, which escapes by flying close to the water then banking hard at the last second. The creature's huge wingspan causes it to clip the water and crash as it tries to follow.
• Retribution Falls. A fleeing aircraft does this to Harkins during an Aerial Canyon Chase enveloped in cloud cover. He realises what's happening at the last moment and pulls up in time, but loses his quarry.
• Star Wars Expanded Universe/Star Wars Legends:
  • Shadows of the Empire sees Luke deal with several bounty hunters foolish enough to follow him into his old playground, Beggar's Canyon. It's not hard for him to find deceptively sharp turns and impossibly narrow passes that force them to detour or die.
  • X-Wing Series:
    • Corran Horn uses this trope; a wing of Y-Wing bombers can't get close enough to a Lancer-class frigate to get a missile lock without getting blown away. So Corran, in his much more agile X-wing, tells the bombers to have the proton torpedoes lock on to him, with the express intent of using a Wronski Feint to deliver the ordnance to target. It works.
    • Corran ends up on the wrong side of this during The Bacta War, when Imperial pilot Erisi Dlarit dodges his last pair of missiles by feinting toward a mountain ridge and forcing them to crash into a moon. Unfortunately for her, the second impact against the ridge kicks up a colossal dust cloud that prevents her from seeing Corran bearing down on her position.
  • Wedge pulls off a variation in Solo Command against a frail, but agile TIE Raptor. The Raptor is adept at dodging his attacks, and with the high winds, he finds he can't get an accurate shot off. The two find themselves flying at high speed over the ocean, with Wedge still unable to bring his weapons to bear. So he fires directly over the Raptor, causing the pilot to dodge out of reflex — straight into the water.
  • The Thrawn Trilogy:
    • Yet another variant comes to us courtesy of General Garm bel Iblis. One of his favorite combined-arms tactics uses a squad of X-Wings and A-Wings to bypass an enemy's fighter defenses. The X-Wings engage the enemy squad, and make a sideways maneuver, trying to lure the enemy fighters into matching it and preventing the X-Wings from passing — which is when the much faster A-Wings, who have been hidden behind the X-Wings the whole time, blow through the now-empty space and on to the objective.
    • In a later book, Admiral Pellaeon uses a variant of bel Iblis' trick (using torpedoes instead of A-Wings) to defeat a fleet of ships that attacked him at a time when he was expecting bel Iblis to be meeting him to discuss a peace treaty. Since he had been present at the battle when bel Iblis had invented that move, he took the fact that the enemy fell for it as proof that the Corellian had nothing to do with the ambush.
  • During Galaxy of Fear Tash once takes a tiny Starfly ship into an Asteroid Thicket and is pursued by a Star Destroyer. Unlike in The Empire Strikes Back, it's not concerned by the asteroids and can shoot the big ones and take the smaller ones on its shields, which makes the entity controlling it more confident in its inevitable victory. But it can't take the two giant space slugs she leads it to and buzzes.
  • In one of the novellas in the Dark Forces Saga, Jan Ors attempts to evade several Imperial TIE fighters by flying the Moldy Crow through a series of canyons. Thanks to Kyle Katarn shooting a crack into the fighter's viewscreen, the enemy pilot is unable to see when the Crow pulls out of the canyon at a dead end.
• Mercedes Lackey's Tales of the Five Hundred Kingdoms: In One Good Knight, one of the creatures native to Arcadia is the Kyryxes, a bloodsucking insect the size of a bird, and with barely enough brainpower to tell which potential meal is closer.
  More than one hero of the Wars had turned the tide by leading a swarm of the wretched creatures into the enemy's side of a battle.
• Fireheart's plan to defeat the dog pack in Warrior Cats is to lead them to pursue him until they reach the gorge, at which point he will back off at the last minute and let the dogs keep pursuing and fall off. It works for all but one of the dogs, and Bluestar has to intervene to kill the last one.
• In The Forges of Dawn Uhuru kills a hound by letting it pursue her and then backing off at the last minute, while it continues on ahead and is impaled by a thorn bush.

Live-Action TV

• In the Babylon 5 episode "Messages from Earth", Sheridan baits an insane Shadow vessel into following the White Star into Jupiter's atmosphere. When the White Star reverses direction, the Shadow vessel overshoots; it ends up going too deep into the atmosphere and gets crushed by the pressure; the White Star barely manages to escape itself.
• In the first episode of The Expanse, Holden tells Alex to make a very close dodge behind the nearby asteroid to make a swarm of pursuing missiles crash into the rock instead. They don't make it to the asteroid in time, but it doesn't matter anyway because the missiles were not aimed at them.
• Farscape. A Harvey-possessed John Crichton does this while being pursued by Aeryn Sun in an Aerial Canyon Chase through a glacier. Thanks to her superior piloting ability, she's able to burst her Prowler through a fragile sheet of ice instead.
• Subverted in the Firefly episode "The Message". Wash tries to lead the pursing Alliance gunship on an Aerial Canyon Chase. The gunship doesn't take the bait; instead it simply flies over the canyon and bombards them from afar with missiles and bombs.
  Wash: I didn't think of that.
• The Mandalorian: During the aerial dogfight in "The Pirate", right after Din tells "I like those odds..." to Greef over the radio, his N-1 Starfighter swerves away from a pursuing pirate subfighter, revealing another one coming from the opposite direction, and the two fighters collide in a pretty fireball.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation: During the Klingon Civil War, Worf's brother Kurn does this against two pursuing Bird of Prey spaceships by diving at a sun! Only Kurn's vessel pulls up in time. Specifically, he goes to warp REALLY close to the sun, causing a plume of solar gas to erupt in front of the pursuers.

Puppet Shows

• An apparently accidental variant in Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons: a dogfight between the Angels and mysteron fighter jets ends with the last fighter and Melody both diving steeply into the ground while trading fire, with only the latter successfully pulling up.
• In the Stingray episode "The Man from the Navy", the titular super-sub is being used as the target vessel for a new underwater homing missile. In all previous tests, Stingray hasn't been able to shake off the missile, so an annoyed and frustrated Troy Tempest charges at a large rock formation on the ocean floor, only veering off at the last second. The missile can't follow the insane turn and crashes into the rocks. Just as well, because while the other missiles have been inert test rounds, this one has a live warhead courtesy of Titan's agent X20.

Tabletop Games

• In Flying Circus, through the Slipstream Mastery, the move Welcome to Earth triggers upon trying to escape a pursuer by diving to the ground, and causes them to crash on a full success. This move was even called Wronski Feint before version 1.2.

Video Games

• An infamous trick in Ace Combat: Assault Horizon's multiplayer, known as "ground pounding", allows players to cause a pursuing enemy aircraft engaged in Dogfight Mode against them to crash right into the ground.
• In Forza Motorsport this is a popular method to get rid of AI cars tailgating you; if they only start to overtake you right before a turn, they'll go flying through the turn from braking too late, often slamming into a wall. This also happens frequently in multiplayer when dealing with rammers - if you see someone aiming to smash into you at a tight turn, just go wide at a turn and smash on the brakes, and the rammer will go flying through the turn and smash into the walls of the track.
• In the Grand Theft Auto and Saints Row games, the best way to lose a cop pursuit is to switch into the opposite lane, wait for them to follow you, and switch out just before you hit another car.
• A gameplay mechanic in Hades. Certain enemies in Elysium (Flame Wheels, the Minotaur) will chase you around until you can make them crash into an obstacle by swerving or dashing through at the last second.
• This is used in Jak 3 when Daxter is accidentally testing a missile and must destroy the trailing heat seekers from his tail. While a majority of these are dealt with by 'flare defense' the last one is destroyed by pulling off a Wronski Feint with a giant statue of Daxter.
• In Mass Effect 2, during the Suicide Mission, Joker will pull one of these to deal with several Oculus drones engaging the Normandy by flying into the wreckage of thousands of other ships that entered the Omega-4 relay. How it plays out depends on whether or not you bought Tali's shield upgrade. If you did the Normandy makes it through needing a new coat of paint, but otherwise intact. If you didn't, however, the Normandy's drive core overloads and vents into the engineering compartment, killing a squadmate, possibly Tali herself.
• In Star Fox 64, Team Starwolf would tail you unmercifully. You COULD pull an Immelmann Turn and shoot whoever was following you that way — but it's way more fun to fly almost right into a pillar, then pull an Immelmann, and have Wolf die an instantaneous death. Cue Evil Laugh. However, due to technical limitations, this would only work if you had the victim in your sight.
• Tribes: Ascend allows nimbler classes to escape the Shrike aircraft's attacks this way. Especially common sense a lot of pilots will aim to ram the infantry since its cannon are slow and hard to aim.
• In the intro for Wing Commander: Privateer, the player character lures a pirate's missiles around an asteroid, and then sends them back at the firing craft. How he did that in a ship that can't outrun or outturn the missiles is an exercise best left for those who forget the MST3K Mantra.
• This has no-doubt happened a lot in War Thunder from people being unfamiliar with how their plane handles or from becoming too used to Arcade Mode's flight models when entering their first Realistic Mode game.
  • A effective tactic to use with bombers equipped with adequate ventral/tail protection when a fighter glues themselves to their tail is to fly fast and low towards a valley, then suddenly dip altitude and pull up, intending for the pursuer to follow. If they do, two possibilities then exist: Either the pursuer plows themselves into the ground, or they find themselves in the perfect position for those mentioned tail and ventral turrets to tear them apart.

Web Animation

• Red vs. Blue:
  • Occurs unintentionally in Reconstruction. The reds are fleeing from a pair of soldiers in a car chase. Grif races towards a cliff, believing he can make the jump over the river, but changes his mind at the last second and brakes just in time. The soldiers are not so lucky and go flying off the edge. Simmons shoots them with the car's turret as they go down for good measure.
  • Tex combines this with teleporters to shake a locked-on rocket.
    Tucker: Are you fucking kidding me? RUN!

Webcomics

• Angels 2200: Greykat uses some of the ship's external structure for this, in her duel against Quetz.

Western Animation

• Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker. Terry finds his ass kicked by the Dee Dee Twins every time he confronts them, so in the final battle when they both charge him from opposite directions, he just activates his rocket boots and launches straight into the air, causing them to crash into each other.
• The Gargoyles use this trick against the Steel Clan a couple of times. Late in the second season, one of them even lampshades it: "It's amazing how many times that works."
• The finale of Justice League Unlimited had Batman do this with the Omega Effect (self-guided Eye Beams of Ret-Gone); he throws down a Mook he passes trying to elude it so said Mook bounces into the Effect's path at just the right moment.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • "Shadow Play – Part 2": Somnanbula pulls this on the Dazzlings in a flashback. By circling around the Sirens, she annoys them enough that all three give chase to her. Thus Somnambula leads them toward the interdimensional portal that Star Swirl just opened, and feints at the last moment by flying up. The Sirens, bigger and less agile than a pegasus, can't stop in time and fly straight through the portal, banishing them to the human world.
  • "The Beginning of the End – Part 2": Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy trick the pursuing mind-controlled pegasi Royal Guards into Watch Where You're Going!, letting them crash into one another and fall to the ground below. Luckily, Twilight uses her magic to set them down gently.
• The good guys fall for this in ReBoot. Two web creatures on a collision course going around the Principal office, each followed by half a dozen CPUs. Web creatures escape, all CPU's crash and explode.
• At least one example of the missile version happens in Star Wars: Clone Wars: Anakin, pursued by a large number of enemy fighters, orders his squadron of clone pilots to fire their missiles across the bow of a capital ship and then lures the enemy fighters into the path of the missiles, and even carries over some of the missiles to one of the enemy carriers.
• Anakin also pulls this in the newer series Star Wars: The Clone Wars. In "Cat and Mouse," Admiral Trench fires a few missiles from his dreadnought at Anakin's stealth ship, who then led the missiles right back to Trench's command bridge when it was unshielded.
• Baloo, in TaleSpin, is a master of this, getting the air pirates to crash their fighters when they can't follow his cargo seaplane!
  Baloo: If you can't fly, don't mess with the eagles!
  Don Karnage: What a lousy place for a wall! [Don Karnage, after hitting one Baloo managed to avoid]
• In the Wing Commander Academy episode "The Lords of the Sky", Grunt uses the bottom of a canyon to scrape off some Kilrathi fighters chasing him, by diving down at it and then pulling out at the last moment.
• In X-Men: Evolution, a more unusual form of this is done to evade missiles and fighter pursuit. Instead of bothering to pull out of the dive, Kitty Pryde phases the entire jet through a mountainside. The missiles crash harmlessly into the rock and the pilots who were in pursuit (not knowing about mutants) swear never to speak of it again.

Real Life

• Occurred in Real Life, as seen on History Channel's Dogfights show. Making an enemy crash in a Wronski Feint counts as a Maneuvering Kill for the pilot.
  • "No Room for Error", which focused on low-altitude Dogfights, features one instance of this, in Korea, when a MiG-15 tries to evade a chasing F-86 Saber and misjudges the altitude, crashing into a mud field; the Saber barely makes the maneuver.
  • In "Desert Aces", the to-be Israeli jet ace Geora Epstein is chasing a MiG-21, which tries to shake him off by doing a Split-S maneuver at dangerously low altitude — a Suicidal "Gotcha!". At first, Epstein thought he had crashed and died... but then, the MiG began rising out of the swirling storm of sand kicked up by his jet afterburners. The feat was Awesome, but Impractical, and Epstein used common sense, casually flying up to the struggling MiG and scragging it with his cannon.
• At least one Real Life instance of the Wronski Feint has been reported to be used by pilots of No. 303 Polish Fighter Squadron during WWII.
  • And a variant was used regularly: the Poles were used to underpowered, under armed Polish and French fighters, and found that the only way to make any impression on German formations was to dive head-on at them and open fire at point-blank range. When they tried this in Merlin-engined, 8-gun Hurricanes, the tactic proved to be awesomely effective, causing more than one German raid to abort entirely as the pilots tried desperately to get away from these madmen... ^note This may be why J.K. Rowling made the inventor of the trope-naming maneuver Polish.
  • Also (sometimes) averted during the WWII Polish Campaign: German Bf 110 pilots understood their large and heavy fighters would become hapless victims of the Wronski Feint if they attempted to dogfight small and nimble PZL fighters, so they used superior engine power to fight only in the vertical plane, by zoom-climbing towards the Poles, guns blazing, and repeat the shoot-out during the dive afterward.
• At least until the end of World War II, this also gave the Swiss the edge when flying substantially inferior aircraft against combatants who had entered their (neutral) airspace — they knew the mountains like the back of their hand and the intruders did not.
• This was pretty much the only edge that the infamous Stuka dive-bomber had if it was engaged by enemy fighters; it could withstand dives that would rip the wings clean off a Spitfire, but at the cost of a dismal turn-rate and mediocre top speed.
  • Dive bombers such as the Stuka and SBD Dauntless had remarkable turn rates when not carrying ordnance (their wing area is very generous, to provide the lift to carry bombs and to pull out of their dive runs, so when the payload is gone, their wing-loading numbers approach or exceed contemporary fighters). The US Navy used SBDs as fighters during the early days of WWII when its supply of Wildcats was limited. One of the episodes of Dogfights ("The Long Odds") focused on a Dauntless pilot holding off a whole passel of Zero fighters, and shooting down a couple, and returning alive.
• Captain Jim Denton and Brent Brandon, USAF, manage to pull one of these in an unarmed EF-111 Raven radar jammer against an Iraqi Dassault Mirage F1. Though the kill was credited to a nearby fighter pilot who was in the process of locking the Mirage, Denton and Brandon were both awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for their role in causing the Mirage to plow into the ground at full speed. This is the only time that a kill of a jet has been credited to an F-111 Airframe. Though this story is now in doubt, as No F1 was lost in according to official Iraqi records.
• This tactic is used by the crew of Philippine Coast Guard MCS-3000 to escape the chase from eight Chinese vessels (namely, CMS and FLEC) during the Scarborough Shoal Incident.
• Royal Navy pilot Lt. Charles Lamb pulled this move to shake off two pursuing Italian fighters who thought his antiquated Swordfish biplane would be easy meat. Lamb dived to sea level hoping the far faster Italians would overshoot and lose him. Pulling out of his dive just above sea level, Lamb's rear-cockpit observer alerted him to the two Italians who were in close pursuit. But a hundred-miles-an-hour biplane can pull out of a dive far more easily than a monoplane fighter doing nearly four hundred... the two Italians crashed into the sea, so intent on an easy kill they hadn't noticed their own peril.
• The all-female Soviet Night Witches used old biplanes for night bombing raids that were difficult to shoot down since they flew slower than the stall speed of the Germans' Messerschmitts and Focke-Wulfs.
• Rabbits and hares will do a version of this. If a pursuing predator gets too close, they'll make a sudden ninety-degree turn in the hopes that the predator will overshoot, putting more distance between them.

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