Rick Riordan Quotes

You know, being a test pilot isn't always the healthiest business in the world.

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.

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

I read, studied, and learned everything I could find about aviation. It was my greatest desire to become a pilot. I could already picture myself in the cockpit of an airliner or in a military fighter plane. I felt deep in my heart this was my thing!

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.

I did want to be a pilot. I wanted to be a military pilot because I liked airplanes. I was interested in modeling airplanes.

From a very early age, I wanted to fly aeroplanes.

Aircraft do not crash of themselves. They come to grief because men are foolish, or vain, or lazy, or irresolute or reckless. One crash in a thousand may be unavoidable because God wills it so - not more than that.

It's almost an out of body experience to see things that First Officer Jeff Skiles and I said in the cockpit together, played by actors.

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

The great thing about a pilot is you can make your mistakes and no-one sees them... Or they see them on iPlayer and it gets taken off a year later, to be disposed of or whatever's happened to it.

I did a little bit of flying in high school, but I've just always been inspired and excited about airplanes.

When you're asked to fly a 747 you better at least be able to fly a Piper cub.

And, I wouldn't consider myself to be a natural pilot; I've had to work at it.

I had a flight trainer who is one of the biggest and most famous helicopter pilots the world.

Flying is one of the safest jobs in the Army as long as you don't drop out. If you do drop out, you are a dead man, and dropping out means, usually, that you have made a mistake or let go of your grip.

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.

Nothing focuses your mind quite like flying a jet. That's one reason NASA requires that astronauts fly T-38s: it forces us to concentrate and prioritize in some of the same ways we need to in a rocket ship.

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

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 learned to fly an airplane, and had my own airplane during the 1960s.

And most of these pilots were lost during the first five flights.

I wanted to be a pilot. I loved flying and I loved all the technology and the equipment and the sense of adventure that came with it. I think that feeling still bleeds over into everything I do today.

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

I realized how important it was to know something about aviation, and it was something I was interested in, so I followed my brother's footsteps and obtained my pilot's license.