Steven Johnson Quotes

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

There's always a possibility that you can have a catastrophic failure, of course. This could happen on any flight.

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.

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.

There are downsides to a lot of things. There are downsides to flying - people die every now and then. Do you want to stop all air flights? There are downsides to pharma; sometimes they're misused. Do you want to stop using pills?

The men and women who make up a plane's crew put their lives in jeopardy each time they fly. It's our job as much as anyone's to make sure we make it as safe as possible up there for them.

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.

Ninety-nine percent of pilots that go up never have engine failure, and the 1 percent that do usually land it. But if you're up in the air and something goes wrong, you pull that parachute, and the whole plane goes down slowly.

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

Death by plane crash scares me. I travel a lot, and when you hit turbulence, and post 9/11, that's in the back of my mind a bit.

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.

Everybody pays lip service to the safety of the aeroplane, but nobody is prepared to pay for it.

Pilots are not the threat.

Airplanes may kill you, but they ain't likely to hurt you.

Now we are using the body scanner to scan the pilots. They became the dangerous people of this country?

Had I not become a professional golfer, I think I would have pursued some type of career in aviation.

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.

The disappearance of MH370 has tested our collective resolve.

You can't imagine a world, quite frankly, without a safe and secure aviation system. And so our job is to really focus on that, and what we need to do to keep it safe and secure.

We are strangely biased, as individuals and media institutions, to focus on big sudden changes, whether good or bad - amazing breakthroughs, such as a new gadget that gets released, or catastrophic failures, like a plane crash.

In the early 1930s, flying from England to Australia was the longest flight in the world. It was considered extremely dangerous and hazardous, pushing pilots to the limits of mechanical skills and human endurance. Aviation was young.

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.

She said it had been hijacked shortly after takeoff. By this time, the plane had been in the air - again, I'm presuming that it took off on time - for over an hour.

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