Aaron Diehl Quotes

We can make aircrafts that can navigate a maze of hallways.

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.

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.

As far as other instrumentalists, I used to love mellow sax players like Paul Desmond. I love piano.

The course of the flight up and down was exceedingly erratic, partly due to the irregularity of the air, and partly to lack of experience in handling this machine. The control of the front rudder was difficult on account of its being balanced too near the center.

It's been thrown up to me most of my life: Why don't I just concentrate on conducting or composing or my own playing or on jazz?

As a pilot, I can tell you drones may be a lot of things; airplanes they are not.

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

Every flying machine has its own unique characteristics, some good, some not so good. Pilots naturally fly the craft in such a manner as to take advantage of its good characteristics and avoid the areas where it is not so good.

Apollo was a big, unwieldy vehicle. I had a problem with the flight controllers over that. It would try to fare its way like an airplane.

Flying prevails whenever a man and his airplane are put to a test of maximum performance.

I live for that exhilarating moment when I'm in an airplane rushing down the runway and pull on the stick and feel lift under its wings. It's a magical feeling to climb toward the heavens, seeing objects and people on the ground grow smaller and more insignificant. You have left that world beneath you. You are inside the sky.

Aeronautics was neither an industry nor a science. It was a miracle.

Coaching is like flying an airplane, there is going to be a lot of turbulence, but your job is to land the plane safely.

Landing the airplane I think is the most difficult thing that I've every learned to do in my life.

The thing is, helicopters are different from planes. An airplane by it's nature wants to fly, and if not interfered with too strongly by unusual events or by a deliberately incompetent pilot, it will fly. A helicopter does not want to fly. It is maintained in the air by a variety of forces and controls working in opposition to each other, and if there is any disturbance in this delicate balance the helicopter stops flying; immediately and disastrously. There is no such thing as a gliding helicopter.

Now and then I miss the excitement about being in the cockpit of an airplane and doing new things.

I started [flying] by being scared. When I was an amateur I played a couple tournaments and I had to fly, and got into weather and stuff, and it scared me, and I decided that would not work, I had to learn to fly, I had to find out about airplanes and aeronautical engineering and what it was all about.

We always talk about how everyone is unifocal. You can't possibly be interested in jazz and Beethoven. Of course you can. You can't both be reading a newspaper and be online. Of course you can. We shouldn't be obsessed with a gun to your head, 'You either read a newspaper or die!'

I would not have been able to accomplish a lot of what I did professionally had I not learned to fly myself and owned an airplane. For example, I was able to fly to an exhibition for the day and be back home in time for dinner. I never would have been able to do that flying commercially.

There are no wrong notes in jazz: only notes in the wrong places.

For humans, flying isn't magic, it's physics.

I've always been shocked that people that I'm actually flying with say, 'Oh, I feel safer on the plane with you.' I'm thinking, 'You must not watch the show because everybody around me gets killed.'

External instruments are only extensions of the biological instrument.

This is why being a helicopter pilot is so different from being an airplane pilot, and why in generality, airplane pilots are open, clear-eyed, buoyant extroverts, and helicopter pilots are brooding introspective anticipators of trouble. They know if something bad has not happened it is about to.