Flight Quotes - Page 40

• Science, freedom, beauty, adventure: what more could you ask of life? Aviation combined all the elements I loved. There was science in each curve of an airfoil, in each angle between strut and wire, in the gap of a spark plug or the color of the exhaust flame. There was freedom in the unlimited horizon, on the open fields where one landed. A pilot was surrounded by beauty of earth and sky. He brushed treetops with the birds, leapt valleys and rivers, explored the cloud canyons he had gazed at as a child. Adventure lay in each puff of wind.

  Charles Lindbergh

  Children, Adventure, Flames

  Charles Lindbergh, “Untitled”

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• I decided that if I could fly for ten years before I was killed in a crash, it would be a worthwhile trade for an ordinary life time.

  Charles Lindbergh

  Years, Flying, Ordinary

  Charles A. Lindbergh, Reeve Lindbergh (2003). “The Spirit of St. Louis”, p.262, Simon and Schuster

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• It is not the visions but the activity which makes you happy, and the joy and glory of the flier is the flight itself.

  Isak Dinesen

  Joy, Vision, Aviation

  Isak Dinesen (1987). “Out of Africa”, Crown Pub

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• Splutter, splutter. Yes - we're off - we're rising. But why start off with an engine like that? But it smooths out now, like a long sigh, like a person breathing easily, freely. Like someone singing ecstatically, climbing, soaring - sustained note of power and joy. We turn from the lights of the city; we pivot on a dark wing; we roar over the earth. The plane seems exultant now, even arrogant. We did it, we did it!

  Anne Morrow Lindbergh

  Dark, Light, Climbing

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• Nowadays a businessman can go from his office straight to the airport, get into his airplane and fly six hundred or seven hundred miles without taking off his hat. He probably will not even mention this flight, which a bare twenty-five years ago would have meant wearing leather jacket and helmet and goggles and risking his neck every minute of the way.

  Percy Knauth

  Airplane, Airports, Years

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• No, he probably wouldn't mention it - except to another flier. Then they will talk for hours. They will re-create all the things seen and felt in that wonderful world of air: the sense of remoteness from the busy world below, the feeling of intense brotherhood formed with those who man the radio ranges and control towers and weather stations that bring the pilot home, the clouds and the colors, the surge of the wind on their wings.

  Percy Knauth

  Home, Men, Clouds

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• Are we lost, or are we found at last? On earth we strive for our various needs, because so goes the fundamental law of man. Aloft, at least for a little while, the needs disappear. Likewise the striving. In the thoughts of man aloft, food and evil become mixed and sometimes reversed. This is the open door to wisdom. Aloft, the earth is ancient and man is young, regardless of his numbers, for there, aloft he may reaffirm his suspicions that he may not be so very much. This is the gateway to humility.

  Ernest K. Gann

  Humility, Men, Doors

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• As the years go by, he returns to this invisible world rather than to earth for peace and solace. There also he finds a profound enchantment, although he can seldom describe it. He can discuss it with others of his kind, and because they too know and feel its power they understand. But his attempts to communicate his feelings to his wife or other earthly confidants invariable end in failure.

  Ernest K. Gann

  Years, Profound, Wife

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• Remember that the Clerget lands very fast, at over forty miles an hour, and with that great engine in the nose the tail was light. Watch it... Lovely.

  Nevil Shute

  Light, Land, Lovely

  Nevil Shute (1958). “The RAINBOW and the ROSE”

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• I think it is love of that blue vault of sky that becomes your playground if, and only if, you are a fighter pilot. You don't understand it if you fly from A to B in straight and level, and merely climb and descend. You're moving through the basement of that bolt of blue.

  Robin Olds

  Moving, Thinking, Blue

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• I had that morning gone to say my farewells to Broadhurst and to the RAF. I had made a point of going to HQ at Schleswig in my 'Grand Charles.' Coming back I had taken him high up in the cloudless summer sky, for it was only there that I could fittingly take my leave. Together we climbed for the last time straight towards the sun. We looped once, perhaps twice, we lovingly did a few slow, meticulous rolls, so that I could take away in my finger-tips the vibration of his supple, docile wings.

  Pierre Clostermann

  Summer, Morning, Farewell

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• And should I not, had I but known, have flung the machine this way and that, once more to feel it live under my hand, have sported in the sky and laughed and sung, knowing that never after should I feel so free, so sure in hazard, so secure, riding the daylight in the pride of youth? No more horizons wider than Hope! No more the franchise of the sky, the freedom of the blue! No more! Farewell to wings! Down to the little earth!

  Cecil Arthur Lewis

  Farewell, Pride, Knowing

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• That distant day had a significance I could not give it then. So we wheeled and came back south towards the city. The Temple of Heaven slipped by underneath, that perfect pattern in its ample park. Then the wide plain ruled to the far horizon. Soon the aerodrome.

  Cecil Arthur Lewis

  Cities, Giving, Perfect

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• So let us raise a cheer ... for the insatiable spirit of Man eager for all new things! What a tale could have been written by that far off man who first saw a tree trunk roll and made a wheel and cart and harnessed in his mare and cracked his whip and drove away to disappear beyond the hill! Or that first man who made a boat and raised a sail and disappeared hull down to unknown shores!

  Cecil Arthur Lewis

  Cheer, Men, Tree

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• These bright roofs, these steep towers, these jewel-lakes, these skeins of railroad line - all spoke to her and she answered. She was glad they were there. She belonged to them and they to her.

  Anne Morrow Lindbergh

  Lakes, Jewels, Railroads

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• I don't understand these people anymore, that travel the commuter-trains to their dormitory towns. These people that call themselves human, but, by a pressure they do not feel, are forced to do their work like ants. With what do they fill their time when they are free of work on their silly little Sundays? I am very fortunate in my profession. I feel like a farmer, with the airstrips as my fields. Those that have once tasted this kind of fare will not forget it ever. Not so, my friends?

  Antoine de Saint-Exupery

  Silly, Sunday, People

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• It is not a question of living dangerously. That formula is too arrogant, too presumptuous. I don't care much for bull-fighters. It's not the danger I love. I know what I love. It is life itself.

  Antoine de Saint-Exupery

  Arrogant, Bulls, Care

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• It may be that the invention of the aeroplane flying-machine will be deemed to have been of less material value to the world than the discovery of Bessemer and open-hearth steel, or the perfection of the telegraph, or the introduction of new and more scientific methods in the management of our great industrial works. To us, however, the conquest of the air, to use a hackneyed phrase, is a technical triumph so dramatic and so amazing that it overshadows in importance every feat that the inventor has accomplished.

  Waldemar Kaempffert

  Air, Discovery, Perfection

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• I belong to a group of men who fly alone. There is only one seat in the cockpit of a fighter airplane. There is no space alotted for another pilot to tune the radios in the weather or make the calls to air traffic control centers or to help with the emergency procedures or to call off the airspeed down final approach. There is no one else to break the solitude of a long cross-country flight. There is no one else to make decisions.

  Richard Bach

  Country, Airplane, Men

  Richard Bach (2003). “Flying: The Aviation Trilogy”, p.101, Simon and Schuster

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• He is an exceptional talent. I still think Diego Maradona is the best player I have ever seen but Messi is closing in fast. He's a wonderful sight in full flight and we are lucky to have him around.

  Ander Herrera

  Player, Thinking, Sight

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• I was surprised at the silence and the absence of movement which our departure caused among the spectators, and believed them to be astonished and perhaps awed at the strange spectacle; they might well have reassured themselves. I was still gazing when M. Rozier cried to me - "You are doing nothing, and the balloon is scarcely rising a fathom."

  Francois Laurent d'Arlandes

  Silence, Departure, Might

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• "If you look at the river in that fashion you will be likely to bathe in it soon," cried Rozier. "Some fire, my dear friend, some fire!"

  Francois Laurent d'Arlandes

  Fashion, Fire, Rivers

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• This machine was a failure to the extent that it could not fly. In other respects it was a very important and necessary stepping stone.

  Igor Sikorsky

  Important, Machines, Stones

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• 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".

  Adolf Galland

  Angel, Air, Flying

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• At 42,000' in approximately level flight, a third cylinder was turned on. Acceleration was rapid and speed increased to .98 Mach. The needle of the machmeter fluctuated at this reading momentarily, then passed off the scale. Assuming that the off-scale reading remained linear, it is estimated that 1.05 Mach was attained at this time.

  Chuck Yeager

  Reading, Cylinders, Levels

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