Flight Operations Quotes

We've flown the president since Eisenhower, and we're going to continue to fly the president for generations to come. This is something we're very proud of.

The air transportation system consists of three components: Airports, Air Traffic Control, and airlines. The three work together like a dysfunctional family.

Flying was as necessary to my business as fiddles and footlights.

Running an airline is a normal job. Racing is more.

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.

I employ 20 people in Vienna. The other 130 coworkers are pilots and flight companions. The Overhead is limited with me. Reduces naturally the costs of my fliers.

I feel most comfortable in the hangars and ramps.

When people asked me what I did for a living, I told them I make pilots. They thought I was a stewardess.

When I was training to be a pilot, there was a large section in the book on how to drop mail from the plane.

Somebody said that carrier pilots were the best in the world, and they must be or there wouldn't be any of them left alive.

I was a flight engineer on my second flight, which is the most senior position a non-American can have aboard the shuttle. We're the cockpit crew. We fly the vehicle up to space, dock the vehicle to the space station, undock it at the end of the mission, and return it to the ground.

I tell my employees that we're in the service business, and it's incidental that we fly airplanes.

If you take one of the first flights out in the morning, typically the airplane and the crew have arrived the night before. When you're not waiting on an inbound flight, there are fewer delays.

I want to find a nice decent job as a helicopter pilot.

Peter Rodrick was one of only around 4,000 men in the world qualified to land jets on a carrier after dark.

UF is Utilization Flight. That got put in the manifest quite some time ago.

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.

whhheeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! The scream of jet engines rises to a crescendo on the runways of the world. Every second, somewhere or other, a plane touches down, with a puff of smoke from scorched tyre rubber, or rises in the air, leaving a smear of black fumes dissolving in its wake. From space, the earth might look to a fanciful eye like a huge carousel, with planes instead of horses spinning round its circumference, up and down, up and down. Whhheeeeeeeeeee!

What do I tell the pilots to do?

But a lot of that kind of work is done pre-flight, coordinating efforts with the flight directors and the ground teams, and figuring out how you're going to operate together.

One of the constraints on the U.S. business is the pilot shortage. There's not an abundance of pilots. There may be an abundance of cheap fuel and airplanes. There probably isn't an abundance of gates at popular airports, either.

We turned our planes around after landing and got them off again in 20 minutes back in the early days; 15 minutes in many cases. That gave us a huge cost advantage because we could do more flying in a day with a single plane than anybody else.

The passengers were on my aircraft, and I have to take responsibility for that.

I don't know: Why aren't people fascinated by air traffic controllers?

There's a lot of interest there in the missions that I fly on and the ones my brother's involved with.