The plane on fire was part of a larger sequence i was going to create which featured a realistic plane crash

Scene setup

i started off by creating the basic scene, consisting of a plane that is constrained to a Bezier curve that flows downwards to guide the plane model. The curve goes through a smoke domain that is setup for smoke simulation.

Simulation

The majority of the simulation is actually based on images of smoke in a PNG file being emitted thousands of times a second in a particle simulation. This free’s up lots of compute power while still looking very realistic. However, I did also use smoke simulation to just cover up a few inconsistencies and to make it looks more random

Crash

While I never put together the entire sequence, I had all of the parts needed to do so. For the main crash sequence i spent lots of time trying to get the right physics on the plane. I started by creating a deformed floor when the plane crashed using Dynamic Paint

I then deformed the plane using rigid body and constraints, which help to keep the plane as one piece

I then started using that setup to create my plane crash on the floor, changing the point of impact for different results

I then started working on trying to get the plane to stop realistically after impact by using a collider (cube) that would eventually become trees

I then went down a massive rabbit hole of creating dynamic, simulated trees. This was an entire project in itself which you can view here