Airplanes And Flying Quotes

A plane is a bad place for an all-out sleep, but a good place to begin rest and recovery from the trip to the faraway places you've been, a decompression chamber between Here and There. Though a plane is not the ideal place really to think, to reassess or reevaluate things, it is a great place to have the illusion of doing so, and often the illusion will suffice.

It will free man from the remaining chains, the chains of gravity which still tie him to this planet.

The Wright Brothers created the single greatest cultural force since the invention of writing. The airplane became the first World Wide Web, bringing people, languages, ideas, and values together.

Our passionate preoccupation with the sky, the stars, and a God somewhere in outer space is a homing impulse. We are drawn back to where we came from.

Whether outwardly or inwardly, whether in space or time, the farther we penetrate the unknown, the vaster and more marvelous it becomes.

To put your life in danger from time to time... breeds a saneness in dealing with day-to-day trivialities.

The airplane is just a bunch of sticks and wires and cloth, a tool for learning about the sky and about what kind of person I am, when I fly. An airplane stands for freedom, for joy, for the power to understand, and to demonstrate that understanding. Those things aren't destructable.

The way I see it, you can either work for a living or you can fly airplanes. Me, I'd rather fly.

Flying. Whatever any other organism has been able to do man should surely be able to do also, though he may go a different way about it.

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

Aeronautics was neither an industry nor a science. It was a miracle.

Unlike the boundaries of the sea by the shorelines, the "ocean of air" laps at the border of every state, city, town and home throughout the world.

We want the air to unite the peoples, and not to divide them.

What can you conceive more silly and extravagant than to suppose a man racking his brains, and studying night and day how to fly?

Flying prevails whenever a man and his airplane are put to a test of maximum performance.

There are two kinds of airplanes - those you fly and those that fly you . . . You must have a distinct understanding at the very start as to who is the boss.

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

I fly because it releases my mind from the tyranny of petty things.

Man must rise above the Earth - to the top of the atmosphere and beyond - for only thus will he fully understand the world in which he lives.

Of all the inventions that have helped to unify China perhaps the airplane is the most outstanding. Its ability to annihilate distance has been in direct proportion to its achievements in assisting to annihilate suspicion and misunderstanding among provincial officials far removed from one another or from the officials at the seat of government.

Women must pay for everything. They do get more glory than men for comparable feats, but, they also get more notoriety when they crash.

The reason birds can fly and we can't is simply that they have perfect faith, for to have faith is to have wings.

Travelers are always discoverers, especially those who travel by air. 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.

Flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.

The most beautiful dream that has haunted the heart of man since Icarus is today reality.

I wish I could write well enough to write about aircraft. Faulkner did it very well in Pylon but you cannot do something someone else has done though you might have done it if they hadn't.

There are no distant places any longer: the world is small and the world is one.

The modern airplane creates a new geographical dimension. A navigable ocean of air blankets the whole surface of the globe. There are no distant places any longer: the world is small and the world is one.

Flying is hours and hours of boredom sprinkled with a few seconds of sheer terror.

I like terra firma; the more firma, the less terra.

I feel about airplanes the way I feel about diets. It seems to me that they are wonderful things for other people to go on.

If I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes.

I was always afraid of dying. Always. It was my fear that made me learn everything I could about my airplane and my emergency equipment, and kept me flying respectful of my machine and always alert in the cockpit.

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.

The airplane has unveiled for us the true face of the earth.

Every flyer who ventures across oceans to distant lands is a potential explorer; in his or her breast burns the same fire that urged adventurers of old to set forth in their sailing-ships for foreign lands.

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