Nightmare Fuel / Top Gun: Maverick

• The film goes out of its way to showcase how despite their reputation for living glamorous lives flying cutting-edge aircraft, military aviators must risk having their lives suddenly cut short every time they take off. Even before the final combat mission against enemy air defenses and aircraft, Maverick and three of his trainees are nearly killed from various aviation failures (Maverick's Darkstar disintegrates when he overstresses it, Coyote loses consciousness due to excessive G-forces and barely recovers in time, and Phoenix and Bob have their fighter damaged by a bird strike and are forced to eject). Flashbacks to Goose's death also show how a fighter pilot can be killed from being slammed into their jet's canopy while ejecting.
• Mav pushes the DarkStar to Mach 10, much to the triumphant joy of his ground team, but it isn't enough for him. He makes a mentally unhealthy push beyond that speed, with the ground team begging him to stop because he got what he wanted. Sure enough, at Mach 10.4, the plane disintegrates, with Maverick ejecting moments before. It's frankly a miracle that Mav even survived ejecting, let alone managed to walk on his own two legs to a diner in a faraway town with his only need being a glass of water.
• Part of the training Maverick puts his pilots through for the strike mission involves making an extremely dangerous high-G ascent up a steep mountain face that pushes their planes and bodies beyond their limits. During a training session one of the pilots, Coyote, ends up going into G-LOC (Gravity-induced Loss of Consciousness) while making the ascent and goes into a flat spin. Mav has to desperately get a targeting lock on his fighter in the hopes that the alarm will wake him, and Coyote only barely manages to regain consciousness and pull his plane up in time before hitting the ground.
• Mere seconds after Coyote narrowly avoids becoming a stain on the mountainside after recovering from his G-LOC, Phoenix and Bob's Hornet suffers a bird strike through its engine that proves to be catastrophic enough to send the jet spiraling out of control, despite Phoenix's best efforts at damage control. They too narrowly escape death by ejecting before their plane crashes.
• Coffin Corner terrifyingly captures the threat of SAMS in air combat. The best-of-best Dagger Squadron is reduced to a chaotic free-for-all for survival, the triumphant score replaced by desperate, overlapping "Defending!" radio calls.
  • Three things are typically necessary for a pilot to get out of a bad situation: Altitude, Speed, and Time. The specific circumstances of the air strike necessitate Dagger Squadron to enter the SAM batteries' engagement envelope at low altitude, low speed, and with little to no time to react to missile launches.
• Just after Maverick and Rooster barely defeat the two Felons while using up all of the F-14's weapons and defenses, a third one suddenly appears out of nowhere and has them dead to rights. After Maverick orders Rooster to pull the ejection handles, Rooster starts pulling... and the system doesn't work leaving them trapped inside the cockpit with it only being a matter of time before the Felon kills them. It's a miracle Hangman managed to arrive in time to save them.
  • Hangman's air-to-air kill, while a victorious moment for the heroes, shows how quickly a pilot can be killed by a foe they didn't notice approaching from their blindspot, as Hangman's missile comes seemingly out of nowhere and splashes his target without warning.