Great Aviation Quotes - Page 5

• 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.

  Richard Bach

  Airplane, Pride, Aviation

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• The odds against there being a bomb on a plane are a million to one, and against two bombs a million times a million to one. Next time you fly, cut the odds and take a bomb.

  Benny Hill

  Funny, Airplane, Cutting

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Sometimes I watch myself fly. For in the history of human flight it is not yet so very late; and a man may still wonder once in a while and ask: how is it that I, poor earth-habitituated animal, can fly?

  Wolfgang Langewiesche

  Animal, Men, Watches

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• I began to feel that I lived on a higher plane than the skeptics of the ground; one that was richer because of its very association with the element of danger they dreaded, because it was freer of the earth to which they were bound. In flying, I tasted a wine of the gods of which they could know nothing. Who valued life more highly, the aviators who spent it on the art they loved, or these misers who doled it out like pennies through their antlike days? 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

  Art, Wine, Years

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• I wanted to go higher than Rockefeller Center, which was being erected across the street from Saks Fifth Avenue and was going to cut off my view of the sky. . . . Flying got into my soul instantly but the answer as to why must be found somewhere back in the mystic maze of my birth and childhood and the circumstances of my earlier life. Whatever I am is elemental and the beginnings of it all have their roots in Sawdust Road. I might have been born in a hovel, but I determined to travel with the wind and stars.

  Jacqueline Cochran

  Stars, Cutting, Views

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• There is no excuse for an airplane unless it will fly fast!

  Roscoe Turner

  Airplane, Aviation, Flight

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• Real flight and dreams of flight go together. Both are part of the same movement. Not A before B, but all together.

  Thomas Pynchon

  Dream, Real, Flying

  Thomas Pynchon (2012). “Gravity's Rainbow”, p.126, Penguin

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• I was sold on flying as soon as I had a taste for it.

  John Glenn

  Flying, Taste, Aviation

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• Flying alone! Nothing gives such a sense of mastery over time over mechanism, mastery indeed over space, time, and life itself, as this.

  Cecil Day-Lewis

  Space, Giving, Flying

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• Pilots are a rare kind of human. They leave the ordinary surface of the word, to purify their soul in the sky, and they come down to earth, only after receiving the communion of the infinite.

  Jose Maria Velasco Ibarra

  Sky, Flying, Soul

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• The highest art form of all is a human being in control of himself and his airplane in flight, urging the spirit of a machine to match his own.

  Richard Bach

  Art, Airplane, Machines

  Richard Bach (2012). “A Gift of Wings”, p.102, Dell

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• What freedom lies in flying, what Godlike power it gives to men . . . I lose all consciousness in this strong unmortal space crowded with beauty, pierced with danger.

  Charles Lindbergh

  Strong, Lying, Men

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• Hours and hours passed, with nothing to do but keep the compass on its course and the plane on a level keel. This sounds easy enough, but its very simplicity becomes a danger when your head keeps nodding with weariness and utter boredom and your eyes everlastingly try to shut out the confusing rows of figures in front of you, which will insist on getting jumbled together.

  Amy Johnson

  Eye, Boredom, Simplicity

  Amy Johnson (1939). “Sky Roads of the World”

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• Tired of trying to sort them out, you relax for a second, then your head drops and you sit up with a jerk, Where are you? What are you doing here? Oh yes, of course, you are somewhere in the middle of the North Atlantic, with hungry waves below you like vultures impatiently waiting for the end.

  Amy Johnson

  Tired, Waiting, Trying

  Amy Johnson (1939). “Sky Roads of the World”

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• Any pilot can describe the mechanics of flying. What it can do for the spirit of man is beyond description.

  Barry Goldwater

  Men, Flying, Pilots

  Barry Morris Goldwater (1980). “With No Apologies”, Berkley Publishing Group

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• This is why being a helicopter pilot is so different from being an airplane pilot, and why in generality, airplane pilots are open, clear-eyed, buoyant extroverts, and helicopter pilots are brooding introspective anticipators of trouble. They know if something bad has not happened it is about to.

  Harry Reasoner

  Airplane, Ironic, Different

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• Can the magic of flight ever be carried by words? I think not.

  Michael Parfit

  Thinking, Magic, Aviation

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• It's all right if your automobile goes wrong while you are driving it. You can get out in the road and tinker with it. But if your airplane breaks down, you can't sit on a convenient cloud and tinker with that!

  Katherine Stinson

  Airplane, Clouds, Aviation

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• He moves not through distance, but through the ranges of satisfaction that come from hauling himself up into the air with complete and utter control; from knowing himself and knowing his airplane so well that he can come somewhere close to touching, in his own special and solitary way, that thing that is called perfection.

  Richard Bach

  Distance, Moving, Airplane

  Richard Bach (2012). “A Gift of Wings”, p.209, Dell

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• But accuracy means something to me. It's vital to my sense of values. I've learned not to trust people who are inaccurate. Every aviator knows that if mechanics are inaccurate. aircraft crash.

  Charles Lindbergh

  Mean, People, Pilots

  "The Spirit of St. Louis".

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• A pilot's business is with the wind, and with the stars, with night, with sand, with the sea. He strives to outwit the forces of nature. He stares with expectancy for the coming of the dawn the way a gardener awaits the coming of spring. He looks forward to port as a promised land, and truth for him is what lives in the stars.

  Antoine de Saint-Exupery

  Stars, Spring, Night

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• No matter how important a man at sea may consider himself, unless he is fundamentally worthy the sea will some day find him out.

  Felix Riesenberg

  Men, Sea, Important

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• To be alone in the air at night is to be very much alone indeed. . . cut off from everything and everyone . . . nothing is 'familiar' any longer . . . . I think that unfamiliarity is the most difficult thing to face; one feels rather like Alice in Wonderland after she has nibbled the toadstool that made her grow smaller - and like Alice, one hopes that the process will stop while there is still something left!

  Pauline Gower

  Cutting, Night, Thinking

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• The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.

  Antoine de Saint-Exupery

  Nature, Science, Technology

  "Wind, Sand and Stars" by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, translated by Lewis Galantière, (Ch. III), 1939.

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• The happily married man with a large family is the test pilot for me.

  Nevil Shute

  Men, Pilots, Tests

  Nevil Shute (1954). “Slide rule: the autobiography of an engineer”

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