Robert Crandall Quotes

There was a wonderful little short four-year time period when marvelous things happened. It started in 1908, when the Wright brothers flew in Paris, and everybody said, 'Ooh, hey, I can do that.' There's only a few people that have flown in early 1908. In four years, 39 countries had hundreds of airplanes, thousands of pilots.

If the Wright brothers hadn't put their lives on the line, we would not be flying around the world these days. So we need pioneers.

When counting on learning from innovation, there are great successes but also failures. The Wright Brothers invented the aircraft and started an amazing process of innovation, where we now have planes that carry 500 passengers. Along the way there were some silly looking vehicles that crashed early on.

Among all the marvels of modern invention, that with which I am most concerned is, of course, air transportation. Flying is perhaps the most dramatic of recent scientific attainment. In the brief span of thirty-odd years, the world has seen an inventor's dream first materialized by the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk become an everyday actuality.

The Wright brothers flew right through the smoke screen of impossibility.

Something I'll always remember - when I was a kid, I shook hands with Orville Wright. Forty years later, I shook hands with Neil Armstrong. The guy that invented the airplane and the guy that walked on the moon. In a lifetime, that's kinda wild when you think about it.

I confess that in 1901 I said to my brother Orville that man would not fly for fifty years.

Successful technologies often begin as hobbies. Jacques Cousteau invented scuba diving because he enjoyed exploring caves. The Wright brothers invented flying as a relief from the monotony of their normal business of selling and repairing bicycles.

Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.

The century of airplanes has a right to its own music.

Aerial flight is one of that class of problems with which men will never have to cope.

Efficiency innovations are a natural part of the economic cycle, but these are the innovations that streamline process and actually reduce the number of available jobs.

The Wright brothers flew through the smoke screen of impossibility.

All in all, for someone who was immersed in, fascinated by, and dedicated to flight, I was disappointed by the wrinkle in history that had brought me along one generation late. I had missed all the great times and adventures in flight.

Growing up, I was fascinated with Buck Rogers' airplanes. As I began to mature in World War II, it became jets and rocket planes. But it was always in the air.

The very, very beginning is that my mother and father were aviators.

What the history of aviation has brought in the 20th century should inspire us to be inventors and explorers ourselves in the new century.

The glamour of twentieth-century air travel helped to persuade once-fearful travelers to take to the skies and encouraged parochial Americans to go out and see the world.

To invent an airplane is nothing. To build one is something. But to fly is everything.

These airplanes we have today are no more than a perfection of a child's toy made of paper.

The fact that the great scientist believed in flying machines was the one thing that encouraged us to begin our studies.

The introduction of machinery is turning into idleness thousands, faster than new industries are founded

A miracle is something unexpected which we do not understand. A hundred years ago, the jumbo jet would have been a miracle.

Job displacement is so huge, I'm tempted to not talk about anything other than that.

My biggest worry is that no one seems to notice that we are not going to stop the technical progress that is going to continue to displace people through automation.