Alan Mulally Quotes

The Americans cannot build aeroplanes. They are very good at refrigerators and razor blades.

I was interested in aerospace and flying, and the U.S. is really the best place in the world for flying.

I had a great life at Boeing. I'd been there for 37 years and contributed to all the Boeing airplanes as a designer: the 707, 727, 37, 47, 57, 67 and 'triple 7' and the 87.

In Wichita, the district I represent, the 'Air Capital of the World,' general aviation is critical to the proper functioning of our airspace and is a key driver of economic growth, innovation, and job creation.

Every day, I'm working on my aviation career so that I don't have to think about working as an actor.

I've always thought of Boeing as the premier aerospace company in the world, so as I was coming up through school, it was the company I aspired to work for.

I was stationed at the flight test center at Wright-Patterson, and I was flying a wide range of airplanes and giving them a lot of different tests. It was a job that I thoroughly enjoyed.

I have always loved aeroplanes and spacecraft and the design element.

I never intended to become a professional pilot. But, as I became more curious about aircraft, and, well, not being John Travolta, I realized that the only way I was ever going to fly a jet is if I got a job.

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

Then there was the challenge to keep doing better and better, to fly the best test flight that anybody had ever flown. That led to my being recognized as one of the more experienced test pilots, and that led to the astronaut business.

I made about fifty-four dollars a week and spent it on two flying lessons every week at the age of sixteen and was able to get a license then pretty early and knew that that's what I wanted to do, some kind of a career in aviation. I did know about space flight, but at that point, it was still pretty far out there.

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'm not an aviation historian, I'm not an Air Force aficionado, and I'm definitely not a ufologist. I'm not someone who studies UFOs.

At the Bangalore air show, we got a contract from Boeing for supplying structural components, and we are already supplying jet engine components to Rolls Royce. Both these are titanium-based, not steel components.

Fundamentally, we have broken our aerospace business into three parts - large parts which go into the wings and fuselage, components for jet engines, and specialised structural components for landing gear.

During the past 30 years, European governments have provided more than $15 billion in the form of low- and no-cost loans to Airbus for the specific purpose of developing new aircraft lines.

At various times over 20 years, I did preliminary designs for aircraft like the Stratolaunch. For that whole time I was encouraging us to do something that almost everyone else felt you could not do.

UTC Aerospace Systems has a couple of million dollars of content on every single aircraft that gets delivered. That's the chutes, the electric system, rotors, etc.

… to seek employment as a designer of large aircraft.

Somehow, I knew you had to have perfect eyesight to be a test pilot, and so that was it for my astronaut career.

I was a naval officer and aviator. I tested airplanes and got selected to be an astronaut later on.

I never thought that one day that this NAS Jax would be the center of aviation excellence in the Southeast and from pole to pole.

Boeing is a United States icon.

They don't hand out Ph.D.s in test piloting, but you pick up a tremendous amount of scientific and engineering knowledge along the way. After all, when you take up a brand new plane and put it through its paces to see if it will hang together, you are really flying somebody's theory.