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One ship drives east and another drives west With the selfsame winds that blow. Tis the set of the sails And not the gales Which tells us the way to go. Like the winds of the seas are the ways of fate, As we voyage along through the life: Tis the set of a soul That decides its goal, And not the calm or the strife.
Oct 1, 2025
Let all who build beware The load, the shock, the pressure Material can bear. So, when the buckled girder Lets down the grinding span, The blame of loss, or murder, Is laid upon the man. Not on the Stuff - the Man!
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.
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?
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.
And if at times you renounce experience and mind's heavy logic, it seems that the world has rushed along on its orbit, leaving you alone flying above a forgotten cloud bank, somewhere in the solitude of interstellar space.
By day, or on a cloudless night, a pilot may drink the wine of the gods, but it has an earthly taste; he's a god of the earth, like one of the Grecian deities who lives on worldly mountains and descended for intercourse with men. But at night, over a stratus layer, all sense of the planet may disappear. You know that down below, beneath that heavenly blanket is the earth, factual and hard. But it's an intellectual knowledge; it's a knowledge tucked away in the mind; not a feeling that penetrates the body.
And he supposed it might not be the best of days. But then, he was flying the mails and was not expected to squat on the ground like a frightened canary every time there was a cloud in the sky. If a pilot showed an obvious preference for flying only in the best conditions he soon found himself looking for work. This was the way of his life and he had always ascended when others had found excuse to keep their feet on the ground.
It occurred to me that if I did not handle the crash correctly, there would be no survivors.
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!
The emergencies you train for almost never happen. It's the one you can't train for that kills you.
And let's get one thing straight. There's a big difference between a pilot and an aviator. One is a technician; the other is an artist in love with flight.
Flying without feathers is not easy: my wings have no feathers.
The lure of flying is the lure of beauty.
My senses of space, of distance, and of direction entirely vanished. When I looked for the ground I sometimes looked down, sometimes up, sometimes left, sometimes right. I thought I was very high up when I would suddenly be thown to earth in a near vertical spin. I thought I was very low to the ground and I was pulled up to 3,000 feet in two minutes by the 500-horsepower motor. It danced, it pushed, it tossed. . . . Ah! la la!
Anyone can do the job when things are going right. In this business we play for keeps.
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.
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.
Flying alone! Nothing gives such a sense of mastery over time over mechanism, mastery indeed over space, time, and life itself, as this.
If happy little bluebirds fly beyond the rainbow, why oh why can't I?
Navigating by the compass in a sea of clouds over Spain is all very well, it is very dashing, but - you want to remember that below the sea of clouds lies eternity.
It's when things are going just right that you'd better be suspicious. There you are, fat as can be. The whole world is yours and you're the answer to the Wright brothers' prayers. You say to yourself, nothing can go wrong ... all my trespasses are forgiven. Best you not believe it.
Nobody who gets too damned relaxed builds up much flying time.
The quality of the box matters little. Success depends upon the man who sits in it.
Electronics were rascals, and they lay awake nights trying to find some way to screw you during the day. You could not reason with them. They had a brain and intestines, but no heart.
Never fly anything that doesn't have the paint worn off the rudder Pedals.
A pilot must have a memory developed to absolute perfection. But there are two higher qualities which he also must have. He must have good and quick judgment and decision, and a cool, calm courage that no peril can shake.
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.
Why fly? Simple. I'm not happy unless there's some room between me and the ground.
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.
The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.
The bluebird carries the sky on his back.
Experience comes from bad judgment.
To put your life in danger from time to time... breeds a saneness in dealing with day-to-day trivialities.
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.
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.
An airplane might disappoint any pilot but it'll never surprise a good one.
The way I see it, you can either work for a living or you can fly airplanes. Me, I'd rather fly.
Thousands of volumes have been written about aviation, but we do not automatically have thousands of true and special friends in their authors. That rare writer who comes alive on a page does it by giving of himself, by writing of meanings, and not just of fact or of things that have happened to him. The writers of flight who have done this are usually found together in a special section on private bookshelves.
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.
The thing is, helicopters are different from planes. An airplane by it's nature wants to fly, and if not interfered with too strongly by unusual events or by a deliberately incompetent pilot, it will fly. A helicopter does not want to fly. It is maintained in the air by a variety of forces and controls working in opposition to each other, and if there is any disturbance in this delicate balance the helicopter stops flying; immediately and disastrously. There is no such thing as a gliding helicopter.
The air up there in the clouds is very pure and fine, bracing and delicious. And why shouldn't it be?--it is the same the angels breathe.
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.
The engine is the heart of an aeroplane, but the pilot is its soul.
The thing is helicopters are different from airplanes An airplane by it's nature wants to fly, and if not interfered with too strongly by unusual events or incompetent piloting, it will fly
I think there is something exhilarating in flying amongst clouds, and always get a feeling of wanting to pit my aeroplane against them, charge at them, climb over them to show them you have them beat, circle round them, and generally play with them; but clouds can on occasion hold their own against the aviator, and many a pilot has found himself emerging from a cloud not on a level keel.
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.
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.
He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.
And the winds and the waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.