Quotes About Aviation

The throttles could only move very, very slowly, always watching the temperature, always watching. And even in throttling back, you could bust it, even being very careful.

Misty 2" was Bill Douglass, the operations officer and a laconic fellow who became famous for consistently neglecting marking rockets in favor of pointing the snout of his F-100 at a AAA battery and boring in with guns chattering.

If nobody is happy, then it's an equitable merger. —Maxim of airline seniority list arbitration

Pan Am was providing what amounted to a private 707 to carry the boss back and forth to Eleuthera. On most days the flight's only purpose was to deliver Trippe's Wall Street Journal.

Naval aviation, they believed, was not inherently dangerous. Sure, there were risks, but if you were good—really good, like they were—nothing bad would happen.

The pilot was military, so he was using the rudder. Civilian pilots avoid using the rudder. Using the rudder makes the plane slew, like a car skids. Passengers don't like the feeling. So civilian pilots turn by juicing the engines on one side and backing off on the others. Then the plane comes around smoothly.

We drove under a giant gray wing and headed out over open blacktop straight for a small white airplane standing alone. A corporate thing. A business jet. A Lear, or a Gulfstream, or whatever rich people buy these days. The paint winked in the sun. There was no writing on it, apart from a tail number. No name, no logo. Just white paint. Its engines were turning slowly, and its stairs were down.

The sound of the engine changed from a hardworking drone to a hum. My stomach lurched to my chest. Now we would fall out of the sky. We hit a bump, and the plane lifted, as if soaring over a bubble. I waited for the corresponding drop. It didn't come.

If flying meant that much to him, how had it felt to set himself a course that would deny him what he wanted most?

Flying is more than a sport and more than a job; flying is pure passion and desire, which fill a lifetime.

Sports, entertainment and aviation are three of the most exciting professions in the world; you are dealing with the same magnitude.

Fighting in the air is not sport. It is scientific murder.

The Wright brothers flew through the smoke screen of impossibility.

Popular Mechanics article entitled "What Really Happened Aboard Air France 447

The Taking of MH370.

People fly despite knowing that a certain percentage of airplanes crash every year.

As the plane nears 2,000 feet, the aircraft's sensors detect the fast-approaching surface and trigger a new alarm. There's no time left to build up speed by pushing the plane's nose forward into a dive. The pilot: "This can't be happening!" "But what's happening?" "Ten degrees of pitch…" Exactly 1.4 seconds later, the cockpit voice recorder stops.

There are no signposts in the sky to show a man has passed that way before. There are no channels marked. The flier breaks each second into new uncharted seas.

The average life expectancy of a fighter pilot was no more than fifty to sixty flight hours.

Flying has been such an important part of my professional life and I love to do it.

Flying, I continue to be involved with. I love flying, and I hope to keep doing it so long as I can pass my medicals and stay proficient.

I grew up and I kind of took the road of becoming a pilot, which was another dream I had of flying, and once I did attend the air force academy, that dream of flying became more like a project, and I wanted to be a fighter pilot, which I did. I became a fighter pilot.

Aviation is proof that given, the will, we have the capacity to achieve the impossible.

We want to be sensitive to people's concerns about privacy about their personal being and things, while ensuring that everybody on every flight has been properly screened.