Season 3, Episode 19 · Episode 52 of 79

Break-In at Santa Paula

First aired Saturday, February 22, 1986

Synopsis

Hawke helps break a wrongly convicted man out of a brutal Mexican prison.

Episode recap

A man sits wrongly convicted in a brutal Mexican prison, and the legal system has finished failing him. Hawke's solution is the series' speciality: jurisdiction by rotor blade. "Break-In at Santa Paula" is Airwolf's prison-break episode, planned like a military operation and flown like one — walls, guards and geography assessed as an engineering problem with a human being at the center. The moral line the show walks is deliberate: breaking a man out of prison is only heroism if you're certain, and the episode does the work of certainty before the Lady does the work of extraction.

Transcript

The Airwolf Wiki hasn't published a transcript for this episode yet — most of Season 4 is still untranscribed. When one appears, this page will link to it.

Test yourself

The Break-In at Santa Paula quiz

Six questions on this episode and the world of Airwolf. Beat your best score — it's saved on this device.

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Mission games

Five quick games — the first three are built from this episode's own mission briefing. More on the Trivia & Games page.

Redacted Briefing

Parts of this episode's mission briefing were censored before transmission. Restore the missing words.

Intercepted Transmission

Airwolf's scanners caught an enciphered line about this mission. Dial the rotor until it decodes.

Mission Timeline

Put this episode and its broadcast neighbours back in air order — earliest first.

Title Scramble

Unscramble this episode's title, one word at a time.

Wolf Hunt

Guess the hidden Airwolf word before the Lady flies off — hangman, fan-style.

Watch-party tools

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