Burt Rutan Quotes

Despite living in this post-9/11 age of transnational terrorism, the risk of death during air travel has plummeted to the point where we now measure it in the 'per billions' of passengers.

Never board a commercial aircraft if the pilot is wearing a tank top.

I've spent my life as an airplane mechanic, pilot, aircraft manufacturer and airline CEO who never lost a life or an airplane. I am considerate of the risk we take every time we fly. I also know we need to fly and always to improve safety.

Air travel survived decades of terrorism, including attacks which resulted in the deaths of everyone on the plane. It survived 9/11. It'll survive the next successful attack. The only real worry is that we'll scare ourselves into making air travel so onerous that we won't fly anymore.

Scissors, screwdrivers and the like pose an unacceptable risk to flight crews as well passengers.

I flew everywhere for the first 10 years of my career, and I started to not like commercial transport. I just don't feel safe.

Sweetie, nothing that flies looks safe, including birds.

No, you sort of have to put that out of your mind. There's always a possibility that you can have a catastrophic failure, of course. This can happen on any flight. It can happen on the last one as well as the first one. You just plan as best you can to take care of all these eventualities, and you get a well-trained crew, and you go fly.

In the early days of aviation, there was a great deal of experimentation and a high death rate.

There's simply no substitute for experience in terms of aviation safety.

As the head of security for an airline, I can't ask my passengers to risk their lives and jump on a terrorist. This is why we need air marshals on every flight.

Pilots are not the threat.

If you can walk away from a landing, it's a good landing. If you use the airplane the next day, it's an outstanding landing.

Of course, you always have to be concerned about hijacking. But with the measures that are in place right now, I'd say that probably the airways are as safe as they've been in a good number of years.

It does not make sense that we are allowing known potential weapons, not unlike those the 9-11 hijackers used to overcome the crews of four airplanes, to be taken aboard passenger aircraft.

The bottom line is, if somebody doesn't go through proper security screening, they're not going to go on the flight.

I feel very confident that Americans flying in the air are safe and that only under the most dire of circumstances would our pilots ever even request permission to do that.

It wasn't that the X-1 would kill you, it was the systems in the X-1 that would kill you.

Flying, for some reason, has never been my favorite thing, but after taking some aviation classes and reading about it and learning about it... They've been doing this for over a hundred years, they've been to the moon and back; they kind of have a good system going here.

As an astronaut, especially during launch, half of the risk of a six-month flight is in the first nine minutes.

And so we try to address those concerns in every way possible, recognizing, again, in the final analysis, everybody on that flight wants to be assured with the highest level of confidence that everybody else on that flight has been properly screened, and including me and you and everybody.

If you want to grow old as a pilot, you've got to know when to push it, and when to back off.

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.

After the loss of Columbia a couple of years ago, I think we were reminded of the risk. All of us, though, have always known that the Space Shuttle is a very risky vehicle, much more risky than even flying airplanes in combat.

The real challenge of being a flight attendant is getting people out. The training requires that they demonstrate they can evacuate an aircraft within 90 seconds, but of course, a lot of stuff that is easy to do in training turns out to be tough in practice.