Flying
Gear down switch—runway noise suppressor.
Kevin Garrison
Superior pilots use their superior judgment to avoid situations in which they have to use their superior skills.
There are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots.
W. W. Windstaff, circa WWI
In flying I have learned that carelessness and overconfidence are usually far more dangerous than deliberately accepted risks.
Wilbur Wright in a letter to his father, September 1900
There are no new types of air crashes-only people with short memories. Every accident has its own forerunners, and every one happens either because somebody did not know where to draw the vital dividing line between the unforeseen and the unforeseeable or because well-meaning people deemed the risk acceptable.
Stephen Barlay
Nobody who gets too relaxed builds up much flying time.
Ernest K. Gann
Mix ignorance with arrogance at low altitude and the results are almost guaranteed to be spectacular.
Bruce Landsberg, Executive Director of the AOPA Air Safety Foundation
Rule books are paper—they will not cushion a sudden meeting of stone and metal.
Ernest K. Gann
Usually it is because someone does too much too soon, followed very quickly by too little too late.
Steve Wilson, NTSB investigator, when asked about the cause of most aviation accidents
No matter how many times we have landed or taken a machine up into the air, we can never afford to do it half awake, or by habit.
Richard Bach
Altitude equals time.
It’s better to be on the ground wishing you were in the air than in the air wishing you were on the ground.
I’ve got the most expensive car that Cadillac makes, and I can’t stand up in it either!
Bill Lear about the Learjet
I'd let my ex-wife fly with him any time.
Todd
I think the compass, pilotage, dead reckoning, timers, and the E6B are here to stay. Funding has not been taken away from them yet.
Mike Kunde remarking about the demise of Loran C
Part of the pleasure of airplane ownership, is the opportunity to see your assets depreciate
Guy A. Edwards—1963 Cessna 182
Flying the aircraft is more important than radioing your plight to a person on the ground incapable of understanding or doing anything about it.
There's a lot of intellectual and highly skilled work in aircraft maintenance. It's not all blood and cursing.
Aviatrix
And the things that non pilots take for granted during their workday: access to water, restroom facilities, food, oxygen, heat, not having a mountain come through your office window… they all have to be planned.
Aviatrix
You don't fly an airplane, the airplane flies itself, you merely set it up to go where you want.
John Grady Green
Paul, are you sure you are a pilot? You started your post with, "In hindsight, I was wrong."
Bill Greenwood
No matter what the plane does to you, fly the plane. When you stop flying the plane, you aren’t a pilot anymore. You’re baggage.
Basic Flying Rules
Try to stay in the middle of the air.
Do not go near the edges of it.
The edges of the air can be recognized by the appearance of ground, buildings, sea, and trees.
It is much more difficult to fly there.
W.W.II Undergraduate Pilot Training Sign
The flight went really well, the only issue was when it landed.
Hybrid Air Vehicles spokesperson after the crash landing.
We’re not inventing new ways to crash planes.
If you take night flying and bad weather flying out of the equation you have to try to kill yourself in an airplane.
The airplane flies because of Bernoulli, not Marconi. Aviate! Navigate! Communicate!
In the good old days almost all of the pilot error accidents were just that—pilot error. In most, though, the basic error had more to do with the decision to start the flight than anything else.
Richard Collins
Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.
Leonardo da Vinci
That which is legal is not always safe, and that which is safe is not always legal.
John Deakin
Aircraft maintenance people are typically incredibly generous. I'm very fortunate to be in a symbiotic relationship with this profession. (I break airplanes, so that they can be employed fixing them; they maintain airplanes, so I can be employed flying them).
Aviatrix
There are two kinds of pilots: those who know they have faulty memories and those who don’t remember that they do.
I’m sure there is money in aviation because I put it there.
Ebby Lunken
The GUMP acronym does not stand for “Gas, Undercarriage, Mixture, Prop” as you may think, but “Gear down, Undercarriage down, Main wheels down, Put the gear down”.
alioth
Only you can prevent helmet fires!
Investigators from the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board go immediately to accident sites to begin assessing evidence. After months or even years of research, their detailed reports try to lay out the “accident chain” and explain what went wrong. In deciding whether to fly if I’m tired or if the weather is marginal, I rely on a tie-breaking question: How would this look in an NTSB report?
James Fallows
An airplane might disappoint any pilot, but it’ll never surprise a good one.
Len Morgan Braniff DC-3 Pilot
I drive an old car so I can fly an old airplane.