Go down in flames Informal

To fail spectacularly, completely, and often publicly, especially after a promising or ambitious start.

It’s used for dramatic, visible collapses — a campaign, a business, a plan — rather than small, quiet setbacks.

The phrase is generally traced to early 20th-century aviation, when wood-and-canvas aircraft were highly flammable and a plane shot down in combat would often catch fire and plunge to the ground trailing flames — a vivid and very literal image of total, visible destruction. A 1918 New York Times article describing a downed German aircraft as going “down in flames” is among the earliest documented print uses, and the image was reinforced culturally by John Dos Passos’s 1920 novel featuring a pilot and Irving Berlin’s 1925 song describing a failed relationship in the same terms, showing the figurative use for non-aviation failure was already established within a decade of the literal wartime image. The phrase gained further currency during the Second World War before settling into its now-common, entirely metaphorical use for any dramatic collapse.

His campaign went down in flames after the scandal broke.

The startup went down in flames within a year.

Their plan went down in flames the moment the funding fell through.

A: “How did the presentation go?” B: “It went down in flames, honestly.”