Sully Sullenberger Quotes

Flying small airplanes is not like being on airlines.

When you're asked to fly a 747 you better at least be able to fly a Piper cub.

During my career as an airline pilot, I had the opportunity to be a check and training captain. Part of this job was to train and test experienced pilots to ensure that they had the necessary knowledge and skills to safely and efficiently operate those magnificent big jets.

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

Dad endorsed my learning to fly so he would have a live-in pilot, one he could get in touch with at any time.

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

They say any landing you can walk away from is a good one.

The flying? I'm not worried about it. I'm safe up there. I feel very comfortable with my abilities flying an airplane.

There's simply no substitute for experience in terms of aviation safety.

The men and women who make up a plane's crew put their lives in jeopardy each time they fly. It's our job as much as anyone's to make sure we make it as safe as possible up there for them.

When you design it, think how you would feel if you had to fly it! Safety first!

I feel very confident that Americans flying in the air are safe and that only under the most dire of circumstances would our pilots ever even request permission to do that.

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

I learned to fly an airplane, and had my own airplane during the 1960s.

Ninety-nine percent of pilots that go up never have engine failure, and the 1 percent that do usually land it. But if you're up in the air and something goes wrong, you pull that parachute, and the whole plane goes down slowly.

I fly my own airplane, and I have since 1960. I rarely fly anywhere other than my own airplane.

The more you fly, the more unsettling it is, because you realize how much more likely it will be for you to crash. I am getting better at it, though.

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.

I've spent my life as an airplane mechanic, pilot, aircraft manufacturer and airline CEO who never lost a life or an airplane. I am considerate of the risk we take every time we fly. I also know we need to fly and always to improve safety.

It is extraordinary how safe flying has become. You are now statistically more likely to be elected president of the United States in your lifetime than you are to die in a plane crash. What an amazing achievement as a society! But what we end up focusing on are the catastrophic failures that are incredibly rare but happen every now and then.

Aircraft do not crash of themselves. They come to grief because men are foolish, or vain, or lazy, or irresolute or reckless. One crash in a thousand may be unavoidable because God wills it so - not more than that.

I fly an aeroplane, and I think a lot about how much I do not want ever to run into an optimistic air traffic controller. I just don't. I want a guy down there who's just waiting for the worst crash possible and petrified that it's going to happen on his watch. And then I feel safe flying into his territory.

I never did get hit, and neither did any of the leaders that I flew wing for.

Turbulence.” This is what pilots announce that you have encountered when your plane strikes an object in midair. You'll be flying along, and there will be an enormous, shuddering WHUMP, and clearly the plane has rammed into an airborne object at least the size of a water buffalo, and the pilot will say, “Folks, we're encountering a little turbulence.” Meanwhile they are up there in the cockpit trying desperately to clean water-buffalo organs off the windshield.

I was thirty-seven then, strapped in my seat as the huge 747 plunged through dense cloud cover on approach to the Hamburg airport.