Aviation Engineering Quotes

I'd manufactured more gearboxes probably in the aviation industry than anybody else.

I thought that automobiles were going to have mufflers and go fast and airplanes were going to fly fast.

I don't know if I could rebuild an airplane engine, but I know a little bit about rotors and rivets.

I spent about seven years during the Vietnam War flight-testing airplanes for the Air Force. And then I went in and I had a lot of fun building airplanes that people could build in their garages. And some 3,000 of those are flying. Of course, one of them is around-the-world Voyager.

The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery and known forms of force, can be united in a practical machine by which men shall fly along distances through the air, seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the demonstration to be.

Like the Spitfire it was immensely strong: a pilot had no need to fear the danger of pulling the wings off, no matter how desperate the situation became.

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

Airplanes were invented by natural selection. Now you can say that intelligent design designs our airplanes of today, but there was no intelligent design really designing those early airplanes. There were probably at least 30,000 different things tried, and when they crash and kill the pilot, don't try that again.

Flight without feathers is not easy.

I can't stop watching 'Pan Am.' When I was growing up, my father worked as an engineer in Turkey, and we always flew Pan Am. The stewardesses were so glamorous! When they gave me a set of those golden wings, I felt very grown-up. Not only is the show's plot full of mystery and infidelity, they get the period details just right.

Every time I've flown an aircraft, or visited a steelworks, or watched a panel-beater at work, I've learned something new that can be applied to buildings.

The Hercules' was a monumental undertaking. It is the largest aircraft ever built... I put the sweat of my life into this thing.

It is appearances, characteristics and performance that make a man love an airplane, and they, are what put emotion into one. You love a lot of things if you live around them, but there isn't any woman and there isn't any horse, nor any before nor any after, that is as lovely as a great airplane, and men who love them are faithful to them even though they leave them for others. A man has only one virginity to lose in fighters, and if it is a lovely plane he loses it to, there his heart will ever be.