Quotations on flying

It isn’t often that a writer of superlative skills knows enough about flying to write well about it.
— Samuel Hynes, A Teller of Tales Tells His Own, in The New York Times, 7 September 1997.

Anyone can do the job when things are going right. In this business we play for keeps.
— Ernest K. Gann 

Man is not as good as a black box for certain specific things. However he is more flexible and reliable. He is easily maintained and can be manufactured by relatively unskilled labour.
— Wing Commander H. P. Ruffell Smith, RAF, 1949

The way I see it, you can either work for a living or you can fly airplanes. Me, I’d rather fly.
— Len Morgan

He moves not through distance, but through the ranges of satisfaction that come from hauling himself up into the air with complete and utter control; from knowing himself and knowing his airplane so well that he can come somewhere close to touching, in his own special and solitary way, that thing that is called perfection.
— Richard Bach, A Gift of Wings

An airplane might disappoint any pilot but it’ll never surprise a good one.
— Len Morgan

From a safety standpoint, in our view one of the things that we do in the basic design is the pilot always has the ultimate authority of control. There’s no computer on the airplane that he cannot override or turn off if the ultimate comes. In terms of any of our features, we don’t inhibit that totally. We make it difficult, but if something in the box should behave inappropriately, the pilot can say ‘This is wrong’ and he can override it. That’s a fundamental difference in philosophy that we have versus some of the competition.
— John Cashman, Chief Test Pilot Boeing 777

A pilot who says he has never been frightened in an airplane is, I’m afraid, lying.
— Louise Thaden

The best safety device is the pilot, who, deep down, regardless of the aircraft, retains a sense of fallibility and vulnerability. No system can ever substitute for that.
— Arnold Reiner, retired airline captain and a former director of flight safety at Pan Am, end of Pilots on Autopilot op-ed, the New York Times, 16 December 2009

Get rid at the outset of the idea that the airplane is only an air-going sort of automobile. It isn’t. It may sound like one and smell like one, and it may have been interior decorated to look like one; but the difference is—it goes on wings.
— Wolfgang Langewiesche, first words of Stick and Rudder: An Explanation of the Art of Flying, 1944

Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.
— Franklin P. Jones

Prepare for the unknown, unexpected and inconceivable … after 50 years of flying I’m still learning every time I fly.
— Gene Cernan

Keep the aeroplane in such an attitude that the air pressure is always directly in the pilot’s face.
— Horatio C. Barber, 1916

When a flight is proceeding incredibly well, something was forgotten.
— Robert Livingston, Flying The Aeronca>

Never fly the ‘A’ model of anything.
— Ed Thompson

Though I Fly Through the Valley of Death I Shall Fear No Evil For I am 80,000 feet and Climbing.
— sign over the entrance to the SR-71 operating location on Kadena AB Okinawa

Better to hit the far fence at 10 knots than the close fence at V_Ref.
— Captain Rick Davies, Chief Pilot, Royal Flying Doctor Service of Australia (Queensland Section), advice given to new captains

Never fly in the same cockpit with someone braver than you.
— Richard Herman Jr, Firebreak.

I saw for the first time the earth’s shape. I could easily see the shores of continents, islands, great rivers, folds of the terrain, large bodies of water. The horizon is dark blue, smoothly turning to black… the feelings which filled me I can express with one word—joy.
— Yuri A. Gagarin

Remember, you fly an airplane with your head, not your hands and feet.
— Bevo Howard

For all professional pilots there exists a kind of guild, without charter and without by-laws. It demands no requirements for inclusion save an understanding of the wind, the compass, the rudder, and fair fellowship.
— Beryl Markham, West With the Night, 1942

What kind of man would live where there is no daring? I don’t believe in taking foolish chances, but nothing can be accomplished without taking any chance at all.
— Charles A. Lindbergh, at a news conference after his trans-Atlantic flight.

For the first time I was flying by jet propulsion. No engine vibrations. No torque and no lashing sound of the propeller. Accompanied by a whistling sound, my jet shot through the air. Later when asked what it felt like, I said, ‘It felt as though angels were pushing.’
— Generalleutnant Adolf Galland, on his first flight in a jet, the Messerschmitt 262, May 1943

When the weight of the paper equals the weight of the airplane, only then you can go flying.
— attributed to Donald Douglas (Mr. DC-n)

I don’t think I possess any skill that anyone else doesn’t have. I’ve just had perhaps more of an opportunity, more of an exposure, and been fortunate to survive a lot of situations that many other weren’t so lucky to make it. It’s not how close can you get to the ground, but how precise can you fly the airplane. If you feel so careless with your life that you want to be the world’s lowest flying aviator you might do it for a while. But there are a great many former friends of mine who are no longer with us simply because they cut their margins too close.
— Bob Hoover