Early Aviation Quotes

I confess that in 1901 I said to my brother Orville that man would not fly for fifty years.

In the early days of aviation, there was a great deal of experimentation and a high death rate.

In the early 1930s, flying from England to Australia was the longest flight in the world. It was considered extremely dangerous and hazardous, pushing pilots to the limits of mechanical skills and human endurance. Aviation was young.

There was a wonderful little short four-year time period when marvelous things happened. It started in 1908, when the Wright brothers flew in Paris, and everybody said, 'Ooh, hey, I can do that.' There's only a few people that have flown in early 1908. In four years, 39 countries had hundreds of airplanes, thousands of pilots.

At that time [1909] the chief engineer was almost always the chief test pilot as well. That had the fortunate result of eliminating poor engineering early in aviation.

I think progress began to retrogress when Wilbur and Orville started tinkering around in Dayton and at Kitty Hawk, because I believe that two Wrights made a wrong.

Few people who know of the work of Langley, Lilienthal, Pilcher, Maxim and Chanute but will be inclined to believe that long before the year 2000 A.D., and very probably before 1950, a successful aeroplane will have soared and come home safe and sound.

And most of these pilots were lost during the first five flights.

In my early days of flying, if you flew on instruments, you were inevitably going to fly in thunderstorms. That was just a part of the business of flying.

If you go back to the early days of aviation, the guys designing it built it, and then they got in it and flew it. I mean, who does that anymore?

My father's an early aviator, and my first flight was with him at age two. Now, despite the fact that I got sick on the flight, I still enjoyed it, I believe.