Quotes About Aviation

The Bombing Two Dauntlesses were launched with 12 percent less than maximum fuel, which would have critical impact later in the morning.

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Aeronautics was neither an industry nor a science. It was a miracle.

In flying, the probability of survival is inversely proportional to the angle of arrival.

Aviation, this young modern giant, exemplifies the possible relationships of women with the creations of science.

By 1917, a British fighter pilot arriving at the front had an average life expectancy of less than three months.

One day the fighter pilot guided from the ground will chase, at supersonic speed, the atom-bomb carrier for scores of miles high up in the stratosphere. But science must not become an aim in itself. Only the spirit of attack borne in a brave heart will bring a success to any fighter aircraft, no matter how highly developed it may be.

Four days before the declaration of World War II, on August 27, 1939, the test pilot van Chaim flew the first jet aircraft in the world, the Heinkel 178. Only a small circle of people directly concerned knew of this event, which for that time was of great importance. Exactly a year later, on August 27, 1940, the first Italian jet plane, the Caproni-Campini made its first flight. It reached 300 mph, and the event received great propaganda.

thirty-one of the first forty U.S. Post Office pilots were killed in the first six years).

Howard Hughes was in serious trouble.

Would not the sight of a single enemy airplane be enough to induce a formidable panic? Normal life would be unable to continue under the constant threat of death and imminent destruction.

It was my view that no kill was worth the life of a wingman. . . . Pilots in my unit who lost wingmen on this basis were prohibited from leading a [section]. The were made to fly as wingman, instead.

Flying the Feathered Edge captures my life story in an authentic and accurate way. I don't know how it could have been done any better.

Flying might not be all plain sailing, but the fun of it is worth the price.

I have never killed anyone - I realize that's not a statement most people ever have to make out loud but sometimes as a pilot you just do - but I would say the closest I got to it was just there and then specifically. I screamed back of course - I didn't know screams were contagious, but they are.

There is, by the way, lots of training - lots - about how to get a plane safely down on the ground or onto water. There is absolutely nothing that tells you what comes next. Once you've got the plane down and everyone more or less safely out of the aircraft, there's not much after that. Presumable you're meant to be set upon by cheering hordes who hoist you up on their shoulders.

I was 35 years old and in a position to take a shot at whatever I wanted to try. The Air Force said I was too old to fly fighter jets. I thought about becoming a fishing boat captain, before deciding that acting seemed pretty cool.

I used to skip out of high school and go flying. It was just one of those things, I thought it was kind of a cool thing to do. I never thought about doing that as a profession, but I started checking things out and I found out there was a flight school down in Daytona Beach, called Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

Livingston: Didn't you also insult them by describing publicly what it was like to have VCs run your company? Greenspun: Only after they sued me. I said it was like watching a kindergarten class get into a Boeing 747 and flip all the switches and try to figure out why it won't take off. That was before I got my pilot's license. Now I know how apt it was.

On THE DECSIVE DUEL: SPITFIRE VS 109 The epic struggle between the Spitfire and the Messerschmitt 109 upon which so much of western civilization depended in the summer of 1940 has found the ideal biographer in David Isby. I write "biographer" because, like the men who flew these remarkable fighter planes, Isby sees them in almost human terms, transcending the mere mechanical. (Andrew Roberts, Author Of The Storm Of War )

Paul Nash's 1941 painting The Battle of Britain

landing strip.

Early in the 1990s, I flew alone in a dandelion-yellow, single-engine, 180-horsepower Piper Cherokee from Westchester County Airport in New York westward to the Rocky Mountains, landing and refuelling a good many times in middle-sized cities and towns along the way.

I'm not afraid of flying; I just fear I'm going to die. I think I'm - vulnerable. I admit it. I don't fly. I got claustrophobia. I don't go in high buildings. I don't do those things. I'm just myself, whatever that is.