Quotes on Great Aviation

Flying has torn apart the relationship of space and time: it uses our old clock but with new yardsticks.

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.

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

You'll be bothered from time to time by storms, fog, snow. When you are, think of those who went through it before you, and say to yourself, 'What they could do, I can do.'

My airplane is quiet, and for a moment still an alien, still a stranger to the ground, I am home.

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.

I hope you either take up parachute jumping or stay out of single motored airplanes at night.

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

Most pilots learn, when they pin on their wings and go out and get in a fighter, especially, that one thing you don't do, you don't believe anything anybody tells you about an airplane.

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.

Nobody who gets too damned relaxed builds up much flying time.

I sometimes still go out hunting for bad weather, flying low in simple airplanes to explore the inner reaches of the clouds. Less experienced pilots occasionally join me, not to learn formal lessons about weather flying, but with a more advanced purpose in mind - to accompany me in the slow accumulation of experience through circumstances that never repeat in a place that defies mastery.

Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?

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.

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

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.

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

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

For most gulls it was not flying that matters, but eating. For this gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight.