Pilot Error Quotes

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

Any coward can sit in his home and criticize a pilot for flying into a mountain in a fog. But I would rather, by far, die on a mountainside than in bed. What kind of man would live where there is no daring? And is life so dear that we should blame men for dying in adventure? Is there a better way to die?

When I read that Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 had disappeared - a state-of-the-art Boeing 777, said to be an incredibly safe way to travel - I waited patiently for the chance to learn what happened.

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.

Aviation is the branch of engineering that is least forgiving of mistakes.

She said it had been hijacked shortly after takeoff. By this time, the plane had been in the air - again, I'm presuming that it took off on time - for over an hour.

The great thing about a pilot is you can make your mistakes and no-one sees them... Or they see them on iPlayer and it gets taken off a year later, to be disposed of or whatever's happened to it.

The way Leo figured it, he spent more time crashing than he did flying. If there was a rewards card for frequent crashers, he'd be, like, double platinum level.

Just had a close call landing in Tampa. The tires blew out upon landing.

The captain has just turned on the fasten-seat-belt-sign. He didn't mean to, but the joint he was smoking fell in his lap, and when he jumped up, his head hit the switch.

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

I used to be an airline pilot. I got fired because I kept locking the keys in the plane. They caught me on an 80 foot stepladder with a coat hanger.

Airplanes may kill you, but they ain't likely to hurt you.

Sloth is the failure to do what needs to be done when it needs to be done - like the kamikaze pilot who flew seventeen missions.

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

Pilots are not the threat.

There was nothing subtle about our landing. The pilot just pointed the nose at the ground and let her rip.

I don't have a fear of flying; I have a fear of crashing.

The 'modern' air-traffic-control system, and the FAA itself, was created in the aftermath of one of the most dramatic commercial midair bashes, way back in 1956.

I thought you were supposed to be flying this thing, not pleasuring it.

Those two pilots that sped 150 miles past their Minneapolis destination have been suspended. They got suspended because they were looking at their laptops instead of flying the plane. Think about this -- everybody else on the plane has to turn off their laptops except for the people flying the plane.

What if one of her father’s soldiers panicked and fired for no reason? Though pilots were carefully trained, mistakes happened and she didn’t want to be included in a statistics report under “uh-oh, my bad.”’ (Kiara)