Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?
Most gulls don't bother to learn more than the simplest facts of flight - how to get from shore to food and back again
We can lift ourselves out of ignorance, we can find ourselves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and skill.
For most gulls it was not flying that matters, but eating. For this gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight.
There's a lot of Hollywood bullshit about flying. I mean, look at the movies about test pilots or fighter pilots who face imminent death. The controls are jammed or something really important has fallen off the plane, and these guys are talking like magpies; their lives are flashing past their eyes, and they're flailing around in the cockpit. It just doesn't happen. You don't have time to talk. You're too damn busy trying to get out of the problem you're in to talk or ricochet around the cockpit. Or think about what happened the night after your senior prom.
Never stop being a kid, Richard. Never stop feeling and seeing and being excited with great things like air and engines and sounds of sunlight within you. Wear your little mask if you must to protect you from the world but if you let that kid disappear you are grown up and you are dead.
My airplane is quiet, and for a moment still an alien, still a stranger to the ground, I am home.
There are no distant places any longer: the world is small and the world is one.
In flying, the probability of survival is inversely proportional to the angle of arrival.
The natural function of the wing is to soar upwards and carry that which is heavy up to the place where dwells the race of gods. More than any other thing that pertains to the body it partakes of the nature of the divine.
Let's get one thing straight: there's no such thing as the Bristol sound.
And the winds and the waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.
The lure of flying is the lure of beauty.
I have often said that the lure of flying is the lure of beauty. That the reasons flyers fly, whether they know it or not, is the aesthetic appeal of flying.
Instead of our drab slogging forth and back to the fishing boats, there's reason to live! We can lift ourselves out of ignorance, we can find ourselves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and skill. We can learn to be free! we can learn to fly!
It's wonderful to climb the liquid mountains of the sky. Behind me and before me is God and I have no fears.
I owned the world that hour as I rode over it. free of the earth, free of the mountains, free of the clouds, but how inseparably I was bound to them.
It is not only fine feathers that make fine birds.
Buttons ... check. Dials ... check. Switches ... check. Little colored lights ... check.
Sometimes, flying feels too godlike to be attained by man. Sometimes, the world from above seems too beautiful, too wonderful, too distant for human eyes to see .
The engine is the heart of an aeroplane, but the pilot is its soul.
Flying without feathers is not easy: my wings have no feathers.
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 you 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 to close.
I've learned that it is what I do not know that I fear, and I strive, outwardly from pride, inwardly from the knowledge that the unknown is what will finally kill me, to know all there is to be known about my airplane. I will never die.
We who fly do so for the love of flying. We are alive in the air with this miracle that lies in our hands and beneath our feet.
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