Chris Hadfield Quotes

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

The flying? I'm not worried about it. I'm safe up there. I feel very comfortable with my abilities flying an airplane.

All astronauts, even civilians like me without pilot experience, have to learn how to co-pilot a jet called a T-38.

After reading ... accounts ... of minor accidents of light, it is little wonder that the average man would far rather watch someone else fly and read of the narrow escapes from death when some pilot has had a forced landing or a blowout, than to ride himself. Even in the postwar days of now obsolete equipment, nearly all of the serious accidents were caused by inexperienced pilots who where then allowed to fly or attempt to fly-without license or restrictions about anything they could coax into the air.

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.

When you design it, think how you would feel if you had to fly it! Safety first!

When you're asked to fly a 747 you better at least be able to fly a Piper cub.

Nothing focuses your mind quite like flying a jet. That's one reason NASA requires that astronauts fly T-38s: it forces us to concentrate and prioritize in some of the same ways we need to in a rocket ship.

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.

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

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.

Nine g's is good, if the pilot can stand it. We couldn't stand it. Not in the airplanes of World War II.

I think aerobatic flying is athletic. I don't do aerobatic flying, but I would put that in a category of a sport. I would put regular flying in the category of an art or machine-type thing.

They say any landing you can walk away from is a good one.

I've spent an awful lot of my time in the air. I've had everything happen to me in a plane that could happen. Except a crash.

It's almost an out of body experience to see things that First Officer Jeff Skiles and I said in the cockpit together, played by actors.

As astronauts know better than anyone else, risks, incidents, and mishaps are inevitable in the development of any high-performance vehicle. The emergence of supersonic flight during the 1940s and of the Century Series of fighters in the 1950s came with the loss of several test pilots. Still, it was a glorious time.

I had never been so challenged in an airplane that I doubted the outcome.

I never did get hit, and neither did any of the leaders that I flew wing for.

To be absolutely alone for the first time in the cockpit of a plane hundreds of feet above the ground is an experience never to be forgotten.

I left the Navy as a lieutenant after spending almost 10 years as a helicopter pilot.

One thing I quickly discovered as a female pilot - ditch the heels!

I've been put under 8.5G in a stunt aeroplane. I felt all right. Well, I lost my vision, but I was still conscious.

If a natural disaster like a flock of birds or a bolt of lightning causes a plane's engines to fail, you know what should be expected? That the pilot will keep his or her wits about them and do their best to save each and every soul on board. That's precisely what Captain 'Sully' Sullenberger and the rest of his crew did.