Flight Safety Quotes

My grandmother was, back when they called them 'stewardesses,' a flight attendant. I actually had a ball wearing that little uniform and making sure everything was under control.

Dwelling on an engine failure for a pilot as he rolls down the runway is NOT what he should be thinking about - it's obtaining a smooth liftoff! But in the back of his mind, he knows exactly what to do (or pretty much) and in many cases, if he's alone in the fighter aircraft, he has to leave that aircraft in an ejection seat in a big hurry!

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.

I was in Cairo, Egypt, where Sinai - ISIS conducted the Russian airliner downing. We're concerned about safety and security at these last point-of-departure airports flying directly into the United States - in that case, JFK.

Pushing Tin,' I went to air traffic control school in Toronto for that. Passed with flying colors, by the way. If I ever become an air traffic controller and I'm the guy in charge of your plane, you're in good hands.

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

The thing is helicopters are different from airplanes An airplane by it's nature wants to fly, and if not interfered with too strongly by unusual events or incompetent piloting, it will fly.

At United, I will dedicate myself to making our airline flyer-friendly.

The most horrifying thing I ever did was work as a steward on an airplane. I wanted to get hired by United. I thought, 'With my languages, this will be amazing; I will work in First Class.' But I could only get a job with an airline going from Newark, New Jersey to Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

This was 1978, when flying was still an occasion, a special grand event that took planning and care. I worked as a TWA flight attendant then. I stood in my Ralph Lauren uniform at the boarding door and smiled at the passengers through lips coated with lipstick that perfectly matched the stripe on my jacket. Mostly, the passengers smiled back.

I was so scared the first time I flew the flight attendant called me Whitey.

Whenever we were on a plane, we had a family.

The safety of the flying public should not be for sale. Handing air traffic control over to a private entity partly governed by the airlines is both a risk and liability we can't afford to take.

Louis Freeh said on national TV that actionable intelligence could have allowed us to stop the hijackings.

They don't hand out Ph.D.s in test piloting, but you pick up a tremendous amount of scientific and engineering knowledge along the way. After all, when you take up a brand new plane and put it through its paces to see if it will hang together, you are really flying somebody's theory.

I have often been asked what I think about at the moment of take-off. Of course, no pilot sits and feels his pulse as he flies. He has to be part of the machine. If he thinks of anything but the task in hand, then trouble is probably just around the corner.

To fly or not to fly, that's the question.

The airplane I usually fly has 450 horse power, and it's all made out of carbon fibre - you can't break it; your body will break before the airplane does.

'Boldface' is a pilot term, a magic word to describe the procedures that could, in a crisis, save your life. We say that 'boldface is written in blood' because often it's created in response to an accident investigation. It highlights the series of steps that should have been taken to avoid a fatal crash, but weren't.

On both of my flights, everything went very well.

There's always a possibility that you can have a catastrophic failure, of course. This could happen on any flight.

As a military pilot and a test pilot, handling unusual situations and aircraft malfunctions was part of the business.

When counting on learning from innovation, there are great successes but also failures. The Wright Brothers invented the aircraft and started an amazing process of innovation, where we now have planes that carry 500 passengers. Along the way there were some silly looking vehicles that crashed early on.

This is your captain speaking. Welcome aboard flight...one, from...here to there. We'll be cruising at a height of ten feet, going up to twelve and a half feet if we see anything big. And our copilot today is a flask of coffee.

If we announced threats [to airlines and flights] as we received them, we would be catering to the terrorists' goals.