Quotes About Aviation

The desire to fly is an idea handed down to us by our ancestors who... looked enviously on the birds soaring freely through space... on the infinite highway of the air.

You haven't seen a tree until you've seen its shadow from the sky.

Will someone please explain to me the logic that says we can trust someone with a Boeing 747 in bad weather, but not with a Glock 9mm?

I never trust the airlines from those countries where the pilots believe in the afterlife. You are safer when they don't.

The question is not how pilots can be so silly to rely on this, but how they have been led to believe (built up a mental model) that this is actually effective.

I looked forwards to the flight deck. The door was open and I could see the pilot and co-pilot toasting each other with glasses of vodka. In the context of where we were going, this felt completely normal.

I love flying planes.

I love traveling, but I hate planes.

You love a lot of things if you live around them, but there isn't any woman and there isn't any horse, nor any before nor any after, that is as lovely as a great airplane.

I love flying and kind of just fascinated with it, and to fly something like an F-22 would be a blast.

If I won the lottery,I would love to buy an airfield and populate it with enthusiasts like myself, and old airplanes.

I'd love to fly, especially with the gas prices right now.

I remember going into the office and asking Alma George, our secretary, if she would like a drink. She suddenly burst into tears and I asked her what the matter was. All she said was, The plane has crashed. The horror of those words will haunt me forever. - Jimmy Murphy

Three black men walked past us wearing airline uniforms, visored caps, white pants and jackets whose shoulders bristled with epaulettes. Black pilots? Black captains? It was 1962. In our country, the cradle of democracy, whose anthem boasted 'the land of the free, the home of the brave,' the only black men in our airports fueled planes, cleaned cabins, loaded food or were skycaps, racing the pavement for tips.

Control is the name of the game and if a Skunk Works really operates right, control is exactly what they won't get.

Being alone in an aeroplane for even so short a time as a night and a day, irrevocably alone, with nothing to observe but your instruments and your own hands in semi-darkness, nothing to contemplate but the size of your small courage, nothing to wonder about but the beliefs, the faces, and the hopes rooted in your mind - such an experience can be as startling as the first awareness of a stranger walking by your side at night. You are the stranger.

It was ... disconcerting to examine your charts before a proposed flight only to find that in many cases the bulk of the terrain over which you had to fly was bluntly marked: 'UNSURVEYED.' It was as if the mapmakers had said, 'We are aware that between this spot and that one, there are several hundred thousands of acres, but until you make a forced landing there, we won't know whether it is mud, desert, or jungle -- and the chances are we won't know then!

Night flying over charted country by the aid of instruments and radio guidance can still be a lonely business, but to fly in unbroken darkness without even the cold companionship of a pair of ear-phones or the knowledge that somewhere ahead are lights and life and a well-marked airport is something more than just lonely.

Tail winds and happy landings.

Many German flyers, having a superstition that to wish good luck brings bad luck, will see a fellow pilot off with the cheering remark, 'Farewell — but I hope you break your arms and legs!

THE DOORYARD OF NAIROBI falls into the Athi Plains. One night I stood there and watched an aeroplane invade the stronghold of the stars. It flew high; it blotted some of them out; it trembled their flames like a hand swept over a company of candles. The drumming of the engines was as far away as the drumming of a tom-tom. Unlike a tom-tom, it changed its sound; it came closer until it filled the sky with a boastful song. There

The wind in the wires is like the tearing of soft silk under the blended drone of engine and propeller.

I could sit in a cabin overcrowded with petrol tanks and set my course for North America, but the knowledge of my hands on the controls would be Tom's knowledge. His words of caution and words of guidance, spoken so long ago, so many times, on bright mornings over the veldt or over a forest, or with a far mountain visible at the tip of our wing, would be spoken again, if I asked.

I feel very confident that Americans flying in the air are safe and that only under the most dire of circumstances would our pilots ever even request permission to do that.