Aerial Exploration Quotes

Flying was a very tangible freedom. In those days, it was beauty, adventure, discovery - the epitome of breaking into new worlds.

I love helicopters. In fact, my wife and my friends, the myth of the chopper in the sky is that Len's going to stop and look at it. I love, probably, destroying them, yes. You know, It's the big elements, the big toys, the trucks the helicopters, and things like that. You have a few tools to play with.

I would actually love to fly. I think that that would be probably the most exhilarating feeling, and as close as you can get to true freedom.

It seems to me that the conquest of the air is the only major task for our generation.

But we must admit the possibility that continued investigation and experience will bring us ever nearer to that solemn moment, when the first man will rise from earth by means of wings, if only for a few seconds, and mark that historical moment which heralds the inauguration of a new era in our civilization.

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

Aviation will give new nourishment to the religious sprit of mankind. It will add airspace to those other great heighteners of the cosmic mood: the wood, the sea, the desert.

It was a mind-blowing experience, it really was-absolutely an awesome thing. . . . As I got to the top I released a bag of M&Ms in the cockpit. It was amazing . . . Looking out that window, seeing the white clouds in the LA Basin, it looked like snow on the ground.

The airplane is just a bunch of sticks and wires and cloth, a tool for learning about the sky and about what kind of person I am, when I fly. An airplane stands for freedom, for joy, for the power to understand, and to demonstrate that understanding. Those things aren't destructable.

Real flight and dreams of flight go together. Both are part of the same movement. Not A before B, but all together.

I'm very comfortable in the air. And if you're really in love with flight, you're in love to a certain extent with being outside of the body, not grounded. The problem is, if you're not in your body, you can't actually feel anything particularly authentically.

I have often said that the lure of flying is the lure of beauty.

One way to understand light in the ocean of air is by flying it. Life in the air is an extension of perceiving.

We are too feeble and sluggish to make our way out to the upper limit of the air. If someone could reach the summit, or put on wings and fly aloft, when he put up his head he would see the world above, just as fishes see our world when they put up their heads out of the sea; and if his nature were able to bear the sight, he would recognize that that is the true heaven.

I am delighted, one more time, by the daring of my species and the audacity of our flying machines. There is poetry and music in our technology, a beauty as touching as that of eagle, moss campion, raven or yonder limestone boulder shining under the Arctic sun.