Aircraft Safety Quotes

You can't have a helicopter fly over boiling lava. It would've exploded from the heat, and is just way too dangerous. The pilot of a helicopter would've flatly refused anyway.

Both Boeing and Ford are absolutely committed to safe and efficient transportation.

The experimental plane may well finish up a few fields from the end of the runway. If that is so, the voluntary occupants will have only inflicted bruises or worse upon themselves. But the reverse may occur and the experimental plane soar into the sky.

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.

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.

I am afraid of aeroplanes. I've been able to avoid flying for some time, but I suppose, if I had to, I would. Perhaps it's a case of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing. At one time, I had a pilot's licence and 160 hours of solo time on single-engine light aircraft. Unfortunately, all that seemed to do was make me mistrust large aeroplanes.

Mankind spends much more on training pilots of aircraft than it does to train the nuclear reactor operators.

I'm 100 percent sure I'm becoming a really good helicopter pilot.

Aviation is the branch of engineering that is least forgiving of mistakes.

If our planes were shot down, yes, they's wake me right away. If the other fellows' were shot down, why wake me up?

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.

The other day the plane that Barack Obama was on had some mechanical difficulties and was forced to land. Well, the National Transportation Safety Board did an inspection on the plane, and you know what they found? The bolts on the plane were fine, but apparently Jesse Jackson had taken some of the nuts off.

Flying back from New York, the flight attendant said 'God, I wished you were here yesterday, we had a stroke on the plane. I said, if I have a stroke on a plane, I hope the pretend doctor isn't the one on the plane. I want a real doctor.

I don't do small planes!

Just had a close call landing in Tampa. The tires blew out upon landing.

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?

If the black box flight recorder is never damaged during a plane crash, why isn’t the whole airplane made out of that stuff?

Why don't they make the whole plane out of that black box stuff.

You can't participate in agriculture or redesign of aircraft for making them safer if you know nothing about it. So, whenever a person says 'will I be participating in the new world?' Only in areas that you can participate it. Areas that you have competence in. I'm not talking about self confidence, I'm talking about the ability to solve problems. Electrical, chemical, technical. I don't know of any other kind of problem.

It wasn't that the X-1 would kill you, it was the systems in the X-1 that would kill you.

There is only so much negotiating and maneuvering that can be done while the aircraft is under siege in mid-air. Therefore, the best way to put a stop to hijacking is by having high levels of security implemented by qualified and trained personnel both on the ground and in the air.

Your fuselage shouldn't open more easily than your pretzel bag.

I feel like there's no reason to put myself through what I put myself through for 20-something years on airplanes, especially these days. You don't know whether your pilot is going to drop dead over the ocean; you don't know when you try to land whether the wheels are going to come down; you can be searched and seized and detained and quarantined.

Half the art of ballooning is to make your crashes so gentle that you can fool yourself into calling them landings.

Sweetie, nothing that flies looks safe, including birds.