Chuck Yeager Quotes

I think aerobatic pilots make the best pilots because you know, you're just so confident in an aeroplane. If you're gonna get into trouble, I'd rather be with someone that's a skilled aerobatic pilot.

The thing is helicopters are different from airplanes An airplane by it's nature wants to fly, and if not interfered with too strongly by unusual events or incompetent piloting, it will fly.

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

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

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.

Pilots enjoy the fun and challenge of handling the fancy machine.

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.

I once made myself black out by pulling G too quickly while flying an F-18. Being unconscious in a single-seat airplane is not good. Fortunately, I woke up in time. I learned how to better plug-in my anti-G suit.

The guy in the airplane goes with you. So he has self-interest to do the good things, too, and I don't know of any pilots that don't have a self-interest in staying alive.

By 1931, after a few years' experience of flying scheduled airlines, those planes were operating at roughly 600 times the safety of the space shuttle. I look at safety not in terms of fatalities per passenger-mile, but when you get in and close the door, what is the risk of dying on this flight?

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.

My ears are huge. If there's ever a problem with a plane I'm on, they could just put me on the wing and I'll land the sucker.

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

Aviation is the branch of engineering that is least forgiving of mistakes.

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

As a military pilot and a test pilot, handling unusual situations and aircraft malfunctions was part of the business.

It's much like playing jazz, flying. It's multitasking in real time. You have a number of instruments that alone won't tell you exactly what the airplane is doing but together give you a picture of everything that's going on.

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.

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.

Every time you go to an airport and get on a plane, you are basically taking advantage of the work that was done at Langley. Between World War I and World War II, they did just tremendous amount of fundamental research into basically making airplanes safer, making them more stable.

The other day the plane that Barack Obama was on had some mechanical difficulties and was forced to land. Well, the National Transportation Safety Board did an inspection on the plane, and you know what they found? The bolts on the plane were fine, but apparently Jesse Jackson had taken some of the nuts off.

If the black box flight recorder is never damaged during a plane crash, why isn’t the whole airplane made out of that stuff?

A superior pilot uses his superior judgment to avoid situations which require the use of his superior skill.

If you must flie, flie well.

Did you hear about this genius that got on a plane and set fire to his feet? Turns out he had bombs in his shoes and the problem all started when the flight attendants asked him nicely to extinguish his feet. He was wearing exploding sneakers. The new Nike Air-Jihads!