Nevil Shute Quotes

I love the look of planes and the idea of how a plane flies. The more I learn about it the better I feel; while I still may not like it, I have a sense of what is really happening.

We returned home, after these experiments, with the conviction that sailing flight was not the exclusive prerogative of birds.

Aeronautics was neither an industry nor a science. It was a miracle.

...when the little boy discovered, at four, the same thing Mr. Smith had learned earlier -- that only birds and planes could fly -- he lost all interest in himself.

I lay no claim to advancing scientific data other than advancing flying knowledge. I can only say that I do it because I want to.

....a perfect paper airplane.

Aerodynamics is mathematics for those who haven't learned to do calculus. In my case, too, for one who hasn't learned to add or multiply, at least the first time.

Designing aircraft and racing cars is an extremely exciting thing.

Boeing just took $20 billion and 10 years to improve the efficiency of their planes by 10 percent. That's pretty lame. I have a design in mind for a vertical liftoff supersonic jet that would be a really big improvement.

… to seek employment as a designer of large aircraft.

It is difficult to fly without wings.

I thought jet planes were just trucks with more wings and less wheels.

The aeroplane is an invention of the devil and will never play any part in such a serious business as the defence of the nation, my boy!

Howard Hughes innovation was in the aviation field. His designs and spirit of experimentation was at the forefront. As far as his work as film producer, he certainly went after a bigger and more ambitious kind of filmmaking, even if he wasn't necessarily a cinema artist.

I was interested in flying beginning at age 7, when a close family friend took me in his little airplane. And I remember looking at the wheel of the airplane as we rolled down the runway, because I wanted to remember the exact moment that I first went flying... the other thing growing up is that I was always interested in science.

The Americans cannot build aeroplanes. They are very good at refrigerators and razor blades.

A bird is an instrument working according to mathematical law, which instrument it is within the capacity of man to reproduce with all its movements, but not with a corresponding degree of strength, though it is deficient only in the power of maintaining equilibrium. We may therefore say that such an instrument constructed by man is lacking in nothing except the life of the bird, and this life must needs be supplied from that of man.

My objective is and has been for years to make the lightest and most compact flying machine that would carry me at 25 or 30 miles per hour for 10 minutes or a quarter of an hour. Current events show this is not at all an ambitious project. Want of an elementary knowledge of oil machines baulks me and causes much misdirected effort. I doubt my ability to acquire that knowledge, and feel like a fireman trying to hew out a donkey pump.

Just just because there are flaws in aircraft design that doesn't mean flying carpets exist.

In order to arrive at knowledge of the motions of birds in the air, it is first necessary to acquire knowledge of the winds, which we will prove by the motions of water in itself, and this knowledge will be a step enabling us to arrive at the knowledge of beings that fly between the air and the wind.

The first plane ride was in a homemade glider my buddy and I built. Unfortunately we didn't get more than four feet off the ground, because it crashed.

I'm not an aviation historian, I'm not an Air Force aficionado, and I'm definitely not a ufologist. I'm not someone who studies UFOs.

At various times over 20 years, I did preliminary designs for aircraft like the Stratolaunch. For that whole time I was encouraging us to do something that almost everyone else felt you could not do.

Aerodynamics are for people who can't build engines.

I don't know why I always liked aerospace engineering. I was in the 10th grade when I figured that's what I wanted to do.