CHUCK YEAGER

I was always afraid of dying. Always. It was my fear that made me learn everything I could about my airplane and my emergency equipment, and kept me flying respectful of my machine and always alert in the cockpit.

The one word you use in military flying is duty. It's your duty. You have no control over outcome, no control over pick-and-choose. It's duty.

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.

Later, I realized that the mission had to end in a let-down because the real barrier wasn't in the sky but in our knowledge and experience of supersonic flight.

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

In 1966, NASA took over in space, and it has been a bureaucratic mess ever since.

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

Most pilots learn, when they pin on their wings and go out and get in a fighter, especially, that one thing you don't do, you don't believe anything anybody tells you about an airplane.

There's no such thing as a natural-born pilot.

Rules are made for people who aren't willing to make up their own.

You don't concentrate on risks. You concentrate on results. No risk is too great to prevent the necessary job from getting done.

What good does it do to be afraid? It doesn't help anything. You better try and figure out what's happening and correct it.

When I was picked to fly the X-1, it was my duty to fly it, and I did.

You do what you can for as long as you can, and when you finally can't, you do the next best thing. You back up but you don't give up.

It's really difficult for fanatic churchgoers to understand God can't help me. I'm the only one who can help me.

Never wait for trouble.

I had to tell somebody, anybody, that we’d busted straight through the sound barrier. But the transmissions were restricted. ‘Hey Ridley!’ I called. ‘Make another note. There’s something wrong with this Machmeter. It’s gone completely screwy!’

As we went through mach one, the nose started dropping, so we just cranked that horizontal stabilizer down to keep the nose up. We got it above mach one, and once we got it above the speed of sound, then you have supersonic flow over the whole airplane, so you have no more shock waves on it that are causing buffeting...You really don't think about the outcome of any kind of a flight, whether it's combat, or any other kinds of flights, because you really have no control over it.

There is no kind of ultimate goal to do something twice as good as anyone else can. It's just to do the job as best you can. If it turns out good, fine. If it doesn't, that's the way it goes.

The secret of my success is that I always managed to live to fly another day.

There is no such thing as a natural born pilot. Whatever my aptitudes or talents, becoming a proficient pilot was hard work, really a lifetime's learning experience. For the best pilots, flying is an obsession, the one thing in life they must do continually. The best pilots fly more than the others; that's why they're the best. Experience is everything. The eagerness to learn how and why every piece of equipment works is everything. And luck is everything, too.

The best pilots fly more than the others; that's why they're the best.

It's your duty to fly the airplane. If you get killed in it, you don't know anything about it anyway. Duty is paramount. It's that simple if you're a military guy. You don't say 'I'm not going to do that - that's dangerous.' If it's your duty to do it, that's the way it is.

At 42,000' in approximately level flight, a third cylinder was turned on. Acceleration was rapid and speed increased to .98 Mach. The needle of the machmeter fluctuated at this reading momentarily, then passed off the scale. Assuming that the off-scale reading remained linear, it is estimated that 1.05 Mach was attained at this time.

Everybody that I've ever seen that enjoyed their job was very good at it.