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Classic aviation scenario. The enemy is right behind you, on your tail, six o'clock and closing hard, with a lock-on, you in his sights and you just can't shake them.
So what do you do? There's no way you can return fire, not with them right behind you. Evasive action might delay the inevitable, but you need to do something to take them out for good. Some kind of really evasive action, some kind of suicidally evasive action...
Look there, a conveniently placed canyon! Of course! By flying through the narrow winding canyon at top speed, not only can you display your flying prowess, but your pursuers either won't be able to keep up or will smash themselves to pieces on the canyon walls in the attempt! You can win the day while looking cool!
What's this, though? One plucky pursuer somehow managed to keep up. There's only one thing for it: You'll have to dive into the ground as fast as possible in a crazy game of airborne chicken! Be sure to pull up at the very last second, so you can be properly framed against the giant explosion of your opponent splatting himself against the landscape in the most dramatic manner. Don't worry, your victory is assured. As the hero, you're granted +5 turning ability while flying.
We're still being followed though. Damn, somehow that last one must have got a missile off before the end. No, don't be stupid, of course we won't use chaff or flares to lure it away, those are for wimps! Never fear, we can put this to good use. As it happens, I forgot to pack the missiles this morning, but if you fly straight toward the target and then swerve away at the last second, we can destroy the enemy HQ with one of their own missiles! Mmmmmmm, I just love the taste of ironic destruction.
In real life, there are four major limitations to this trope:
- There are very few canyons of the appropriate size to accommodate a jet fighter while also being tight enough to provide these kinds of obstacles. This may have been more common in past ages, where service ceilings and flight speeds were lower and aircraft were smaller.
- Most modern air-to-air victories are scored with missiles being fired from beyond visual range. Shooting missiles beyond-the-horizon makes for uninteresting movies, hence the popularity of depicting close-range dogfights on film.
- Following directly behind your opponent into an obstacle is stupid. Reduce throttle, gain altitude, and shoot him when he emerges on the other side.
- While the Trope Namer is a race to get an object, any sort of chase has the following logic to it: unless you know for a fact the pursuer is significantly slower than you, they can both see you and what's ahead of you, and see you turn and react to it, generally turning in a more direct way. Thus, each subsequent turn will result in the pursuer getting closer, and the pursued getting tired from the rapid motion.
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.
Compare Dodge By Braking, Try And Follow.
Examples of the Wronski Feint:
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Anime & Manga
Comic Books
- In 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.
- In the "Wrecking Havoc" story in The Transformers, a human fighter pilot actually manages to pull this off on Cyclonus.
- This is essentially done a few times in Sin City 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.
Film
- In the first Fantastic Four movie, the Human Torch uses the Wronski Feint to dispose of a missile, when his attempt to lure it with flares proved ineffective.
- Han Solo and the Millennium Falcon do this in The Empire Strikes Back during the famous asteroid chase scene. As Solo was noting, "They'd be crazy to follow us." Unfortunately, Darth Vader is quite a motivator for his troops and they dive in after him.
- Slightly different from the normal Wronski Feint in that the TIE Fighters were simply too big to fit through, while the Falcon could turn sideways and be skinny enough to fit through a tiny crack in the canyon wall.
- Galaxy Quest uses magnetic space mines in a Wronski Feint to destroy the Big Bad alien's flagship.
- 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 the movie Blue Thunder, the hero (flying the titular 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.
- In The Incredibles, Elastigirl tries this move to cause pursuing missiles to hit the ocean. It doesn't work.
- Appears in the movie of How to Train Your Dragon. It helps that the Red Death's wings were shot full of holes so it can't pull up.
- 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 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.
- In the first movie of the Harry Potter series, Harry actually does this when he and the Slytherin Seeker are both going for the Snitch. Harry having done it is never referred to by name, and is never brought up in the movies after that point, despite it coming up in the fourth movie..
- 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.
Literature
- As mentioned above, it 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 Fan Fics 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 did occasionally try to lure the other Seeker off course by pretending to see the Snitch, though.
- Skandranon, the hero of the Mercedes Lackey & Larry Dixon novel The Black Gryphon does this in the first chapter of the book, when he's being pursued by enemy fliers. 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.
Live Action Television
- 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.
Machinima
- Occurs unintentionally in Red vs. Blue Reconstruction. The reds are fleeing from a pair of freelancers 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 freelancers 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.
Newspaper Comics
- 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.
Video Games
- 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 waaay 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.
- Mass Effect 2 has a cutscene battle where the Normandy SR-2 comes under attack from Collector fighter drones. Joker flies the Normandy into a dense debris field in an attempt to evade them. Despite the drones being quite small and nimble, they are crushed by the debris while the massive Normandy flies through unscathed thanks to Plot Armor.
- Justified in this case. The Normandy (SR-1 or SR-2) has a far larger drive core than normal, allowing it to maneuver with much more agility than a standard craft of its size. It also has far, far better kinetic barriers than do the tiny drones (which can be shot down by infantry in a pinch; same can't be said for the Normandy itself). Even those barriers aren't enough to withstand the repeated debris impacts if you've left the stock systems in place; unless you've purchased the Plot Armor, someone will die in that chase.
- Tribes Ascend allows nimbler classes to escape the Shrike aircraft's attacks this way. Especially common since a lot of pilots will aim to ram the infantry.
Western Animation
- At least one example of the missile version happens in Star Wars: Clone Wars: Anakin, pursued by a large numbers 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.
- 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.
- 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 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 CPU's. Web creatures escape, all CPU's crash and explode.
Real Life
- Occurred in Real Life, as seen on History Channel's Dogfights show. In the episode, "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 have 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, underarmed 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...
- This may be why J.K. Rowling made the inventor of the trope-naming manoeuvre 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 afterwards dive.
- At least until the end of WW 2, 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.
- Captain Jim Denton and Brent Brandon, USAF, manage to pull one of these in an EF-111 Raven radar jammer against an Iraqi Dessault 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 unarmed aircraft.
Examples of the canyon technique:
Anime & Manga
- A Variation in the Area 88 OAV, where several pilots fly through a canyon to avoid SAM batteries. Many don't make it.
- Used in the last episode of Grendizer, when General Gandal (Minos) tries to ram his ship into Grendizer in a suicide attack. Duke Freed manages to make him crash into a cliff, since the Spazer (Grendizer's UFO) was still controllable, while Gandal's flagship was a flaming mess.
Comic Books
- Dan Dare actually went and subverted this in at least one of its iterations, during the 'All Treens Must Die' storyline. After being released from his imprisonment for genocide as Earth, now with its defences offline, came under a surprise assault from the Mekon's invasion force, in a last, desperate bid to do something, Dan and his crew were bunged into the Anastasia and told to do whatever they could. When one enemy fighter launched a missile on their tail, Dan tried to use the Wronski Feint with a local canyon to escape it. Unfortunately, the missile was just as good, and his attempts to get back out of the canyon were thwarted by fighter wings at a higher altitude keeping them pinned down. With a mountain looming up ahead, Dan tried pulling straight up anyway, noted the missile was still unfazed, and just turned to his crew and apologised. Annie promptly took the missile up the tailpipe.
Film
- The movie Stealth has the out-of-control robot plane use this trope to dispose of one of the overconfident heroes.
- Will Smith uses this trope to escape the pursuing space invaders in Independence Day.
- When a conveniently placed canyon is not available in X-Men 2, Halle Berry's character, Storm, uses her weather manipulating powers to create one from tornadoes, giving the X-Men jet a chance to escape.
- The film version of The Hunt for Red October has two Wronski Feints. The first time is the Red October using the canyon technique (remember, underwater), and the second time the October manages to lead an incoming torpedo right into the bow of the (more maneuverable "Alfa" class) sub that fired it in the first place. In the novel Ramius just rams the submarine.
- Hot Shots! has Charlie Sheen's character luring enemies into a canyon and Top Gunning them by stepping on the brakes. Yes, he's piloting an airplane. No, that's not because it's cool.
- Airbrakes!
- He later pulls off the "missile" variant, when he's being tailed by one (possibly more) heat-seeking missile. His own plane is out of ammunition save for bombs, so he lets the missile[s] follow him to Saddam's base to use as extra ordinance.
- The Millennium Falcon performs this version too, in the attack on the second Death Star in Return of the Jedi. Complete with Outrun the Fireball for extra Tropey Goodness!
- The canyon chase in the asteroid field from The Empire Strikes Back is probably the most well known example of this.
- And then again in the prequels, several occasions.
- The Star Wars Expanded Universe loves this in general. If a book has "X-Wing" in the title (and even occasionally if it doesn't), expect there to be at least one Wronski Feint of some sort.
- X-Wings are actually somewhat slower and less maneuverable than TIE fighters, but there are a few reasons why the canyon trick can work. TIE fighters, with those wings, have greater air resistance, and those pilots who haven't trained in atmosphere often don't compensate for that. And an X-Wing can turn on its side and use its targeting computer to get through a gap only a handful of meters wide, while TIE fighters are almost as wide as they are tall. As Iron Fist showed, a TIE interceptor can pull off a similar maneuver due to it having a narrower profile than a TIE fighter.
- Though subverted by Solo Command, where the good guys hop through a dangerous asteroid field from large asteroid to large asteroid, and then the enemy battleship targeted the large, stationary asteroids, destroying the good guys due to their use of the feint. Or it would have, except that one pilot remembered that particular enemy had used that counter-tactic before, and managed to get the attack called off just in time.
- In the original Terminator, Sarah and Reese are driving flat-out in a parking garage with Ah-nult 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 Ah-nult doesn't react in time to avoid hitting the wall at top speed. Of course, him being a cyborg, this is just a minor inconvenience.
Literature
- There is an obscure Techno-thriller called Storming Intrepid wherein a pilot does this. He flies down a canyon and through an arch with less than six feet to spare on each side. The opposing pilot pulls up, thinking the first guy crashed, and the first guy simply pulls up behind him and lights him up. Admittedly, it was a laser dogfight. The second pilot later realizes that if he had tried to follow the first guy, he would've crashed anyway, and the first guy must be a sociopath to risk both their lives on an interservice competition. He's right.
Live Action TV
- Subverted in the Firefly episode "The Message". When this trope is attempted by Serenity, the pursuing ship simply flies above the canyon, keeping the ship in view. And when the heroes try to hide, the pursuers flush them out with saturation bombing.
Newspaper Comics
- One Garfield comic strip had the titular 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.
- Calvin and Hobbes parodied this. Or explored the origin.
Video Games
- Rescue on Fractalus! was originally going to have this be the only way to defeat enemies; George Lucas said that was silly.
- 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.
- In the original Wing Commander game, one of your fellow pilots suggests that asteroid fields are great equalizers when you're outnumbered. Asteroids are great shields, and you only have to concentrate on not hitting them, while your pursuers have to divide their attention between shooting you and not crashing. Sooner or later, they're more likely to screw up than you are. While it actually didn't work out that way in that game, it sometimes does in the later games or the FreeSpace series.
- In Privateer the trick is to take advantage of a quirk of the game engine, where if you repeatedly pitch or yaw (but not both) back and forth quickly while on afterburners, you can usually keep the game engine from drawing fatal rocks in front of you before it gets out of view with the next zig (no, not the ones you move). Particularly useful when in an underpowered ship and Gothri show up, or the "disgruntled pirate ambush" missions.
- Not necessarily a chase scene, but pretty much every Ace Combat game requires the player to do this for some reason. Sometimes there are enemy planes or helicopters skulking in the canyons or other narrow passageways or tunnels, just waiting to achieve missile lock.
- Appears in the cinematic for a secret project in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.
- The canyon level Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge is pretty much this trope.
Western Animation
- 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.
- The Futurama episode "A Clone of My Own" features an extended parody of the above scene during the escape from the Near-Death Star.
- The series TaleSpin did this all the time with Baloo being a master pilot. For instance, in the climax of the first story, Baloo leads a merry aerial chase into the bowels of the city, causing all his pursuers to eventually crash and him crowing "If you can't fly, don't mess with the eagles!"
- Another episode had Baloo pull up in front of a wall in a cave. Don Karnage hit it, with the statement "What a lousy place for a wall!"
- In an Episode of Storm Hawks, Aerrow tries this to defeat the Dark Ace. As demonstrated earlier in the episode, the very end of the canyon is so narrow, one must turn their fliers to motorcycle mode to get through, and then back again as to not plummet to the ground. The trick here is that, earlier in the fight, Aerrow had stuck a wrench into the Dark Ace's wing mechanism, preventing him from retracting them.
- Cheetor tries this with a canyon that has many close pillars in Beast Wars. Even though he manages to shake off the Mooks with this technique, Megatron just plows head-first right through the pillars to no ill effect.
Real Life
- This happened in Real Life, as shown in an episode of Dogfights on History Channel, "MiG Alley". USAF F-86 Sabre pilot Robbie Risner and his flight encountered a flight of 4 MiG-15s in MiG Alley and engaged them. Risner shot off the lead MiG honcho's canopy, prompting the Soviet pilot to take dangerously evasive action with a Split-S maneuver at low altitude. The MiG pilot miraculously survives and the chase descends into a dry river bed. The honcho brakes and accelerates but can't shake off the Sabres, which inflict a bit more damage. After rolling over a small mountain, both the MiG pilot and Risner again race through the river bed side by side. The MiG breaks off and leads the chase to his base in China, hoping AA fire will shake the F-86s off his tail. It fails and Risner gets another shot, setting fire to the MiG's wing. The MiG pilot tries to land in desperation, but the Sabres are still after him and shoot him down over the runway. The burning MiG crashes on to a row of parked MiG-15s, destroying them all, to end what was an incredibly awesome real-life chase.
- Saburo Sakai, one of the most successful Japanese aces of WW II, mentioned in his memoirs that several pilots of Allied P-39 Airacobras attempted to throw off pursuit (by him or his comrades) with this trick during air combats over the mountains of New Guinea, only to kill themselves in crashes.
- There are accounts of pilots over Paris attempting to lose attackers by flying through the Eiffel Tower. If anyone has definitive documentation of this, please post it.
- Truth in Television: An unarmed Israeli Fouga Magister trainer aircraft got an Egyptian MiG-21 on its tail during the Six Day War in 1967. It flew through a bunch of canyons. The faster MiG couldn't pull out and crashed. The Israeli pilot got credit for the kill despite having no weapons whatsoever.
- Subverted slightly earlier with an Israeli Mirage III chasing a Jordanian Hawker Hunter. It was the Hunter in this case that ended up in the Mirage's gun sight- resulting in a kill. The pilot would have been happier had the ejecting Jordanian pilot not smashed into a wall as he ejected (pilots generally prefer their enemies to eject - chivalry, professional courtesy and all that).
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