Dave Reichert Quotes

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.

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.

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.

Air travel survived decades of terrorism, including attacks which resulted in the deaths of everyone on the plane. It survived 9/11. It'll survive the next successful attack. The only real worry is that we'll scare ourselves into making air travel so onerous that we won't fly anymore.

As the head of security for an airline, I can't ask my passengers to risk their lives and jump on a terrorist. This is why we need air marshals on every flight.

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.

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

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.

After 9/11, new security measures not only added longer lines and earlier check-ins, but took away our privilege of carrying knitting needles or our favorite moisturizer on board with us. Although we want to be safe when we fly, in some ways it all just adds to the misery of our experience.

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?

It is extraordinary how safe flying has become. You are now statistically more likely to be elected president of the United States in your lifetime than you are to die in a plane crash. What an amazing achievement as a society! But what we end up focusing on are the catastrophic failures that are incredibly rare but happen every now and then.

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.

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

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.

Sweetie, nothing that flies looks safe, including birds.

It may be annoying, but the rash of hijackings by Connecticut WASP girls surely explains the time-consuming - but still somehow completely useless - examination of my personal effects. We all have to make sacrifices for airline safety.

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!

There is a worry about a bomb being implanted in a human being and placed on an airplane. So, I think there is a lot to worry about.

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.

They tryna shoot down my flight before it lands

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.

I take four planes a week, honestly. You know, I am for intelligence screening.

If you don't trust the pilot, don't go.

If we announced threats [to airlines and flights] as we received them, we would be catering to the terrorists' goals.