quotations about aviation
The forces of Hannibal, Drake and Napoleon moved at best with the horses' gallop or the speed of wind on sail. Now, aviation brings a new concept of time and distance to the affairs of men. It demands adaptability to change, places a premium on quickness of thought and speed of action.
CHARLES LINDBERGH
"Aviation, Geography, and Race", Reader's Digest, November 1939
Governments might argue that sustaining aviation is also a great infrastructural burden, and warrants a tax, but ... without aviation our economies and our societies would be radically different.
MARISA GARCIA
"IATA CEO Interview: Aviation Is a Huge Enabler for Social Development", Skift, March 30, 2016
I'm a nervous flyer, and it doesn't make it any easier when I get to the airport and see the sign TERMINAL.
ANONYMOUS
Aviation is a way of life. But it is also a part of our fabric and economy that touches many parts of our life that many people do not realize. Those power lines that keep our electricity flowing are maintained by helicopters and aircraft. Patients are flown to trauma and rehabilitation centers using aircraft and airports and our businesses use our air transportation network to keep parts and people moving all day and night.
JAKE GARN
"Op Ed: The power of flight is critical", The Davis Clipper, March 25, 2016
Sometimes, flying feels too godlike to be attained by man. Sometimes, the world from above seems too beautiful, too wonderful, too distant for human eyes to see.
CHARLES LINDBERGH
The Spirit of St. Louis
Within all of us is a varying amount of space lint and star dust, the residue from our creation. Most are too busy to notice it, and it is stronger in some than others. It is strongest in those of us who fly and is responsible for an unconscious, subtle desire to slip into some wings and try for the elusive boundaries of our origin.
K. O. ECKLAND
Footprints on Clouds
I began to feel that I lived on a higher plane than the skeptics of the ground; one that was richer because of its very association with the element of danger they dreaded, because it was freer of the earth to which they were bound. In flying, I tasted a wine of the gods of which they could know nothing. Who valued life more highly, the aviators who spent it on the art they loved, or these misers who doled it out like pennies through their antlike days? I decided that if I could fly for ten years before I was killed in a crash, it would be a worthwhile trade for an ordinary life time.
CHARLES LINDBERGH
The Spirit of St. Louis
The air up there in the clouds is very pure and fine, bracing and delicious. And why shouldn't it be? --it is the same the angels breathe.
MARK TWAIN
Roughing It
Problems look mighty small from 150 miles up.
ROGER CHAFFEE
attributed, When the Moon Slips Away
In the century since Orville Wright and Thomas Selfridge fell from the sky, humanity has toiled with impressive focus to make flying the safest mode of transport. We needed to justify our hubris, to prove to ourselves, and maybe to the gods, that our conquest of the sky was no foolish pursuit. We have largely succeeded, but once in a while, those gods take their toll.
ALEXANDER NAZARYAN
"Move Over, Angels: Flying Is Our Everyday Miracle", Newsweek, November 8, 2015
The modern airplane creates a new geographic dimension ... the world is small, the world is one.
WENDELL WILKIE
attributed, When the Moon Slips Away
We can all agree that modern-day commercial flying is often a horribly unpleasant experience. From the groping at the security checkpoint to the inhumane delays to the sheer weirdness of screaming across the sky in a tightly packed aluminum tube at 30,000 feet, there's little to recommend the experience beyond getting to your destination much more quickly than by car. One of the reasons flying can be so terrible is that airlines are cramming passengers into ever smaller spaces to wring the most profit out of each flight. And given the airlines' current research into unorthodox seating arrangements, the trend is likely to continue.
CHRISTOPHER INGRAHAM
"Why flying is awful, explained using your sad, lonely apartment", Washington Post, March 18, 2016
Death is just nature's way of telling you to watch your air-speed.
ANONYMOUS
My airplane is quiet, and for a moment still an alien, still a stranger to the ground, I am home.
RICHARD BACH
Stranger to the Ground
Most gulls don't bother to learn more than the simplest facts of flight--how to get from shore to food and back again. For most gulls, it is not flying that matters, but eating. For this gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight. More than anything else, Jonathan Livingston Seagull loved to fly.
RICHARD BACH
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
I used to despise flying. I won't bore you with the details, because the fear isn't an original one. Let's just say this: I once took a train from San Francisco to New York. I want to pretend the journey was worth it, but anyone who has traversed rural Illinois will know better.
ALEXANDER NAZARYAN
"Move Over, Angels: Flying Is Our Everyday Miracle", Newsweek, November 8, 2015
Long before it became common to board a flight in sweatpants, the world was a mystery, and the airplane was a means of revelation.
ALEXANDER NAZARYAN
"Move Over, Angels: Flying Is Our Everyday Miracle", Newsweek, November 8, 2015
By day, or on a cloudless night, a pilot may drink the wine of the gods, but it has an earthly taste; he's a god of the earth, like one of the Grecian deities who lives on worldly mountains and descended for intercourse with men. But at night, over a stratus layer, all sense of the planet may disappear. You know that down below, beneath that heavenly blanket is the earth, factual and hard. But it's an intellectual knowledge; it's a knowledge tucked away in the mind; not a feeling that penetrates the body. And if at times you renounce experience and mind's heavy logic, it seems that the world has rushed along on its orbit, leaving you alone flying above a forgotten cloud bank, somewhere in the solitude of interstellar space.
CHARLES LINDBERGH
The Spirit of St. Louis
Lovers of air travel find it exhilarating to hang poised between the illusion of immortality and the fact of death.
ALEXANDER CHASE
Perspectives, 1966
What is it that makes a man willing to sit up on top of an enormous Roman candle, such as a Redstone, Atlas, Titan or Saturn rocket, and wait for someone to light the fuse?
TOM WOLFE
The Right Stuff