Pilot Experience Quotes

My father, a Vietnam War pilot, used to tell me that the only really bad decisions are the ones you stick to even when you get facts that support a change in the mission.

No wise pilot, no matter how great his talent and experience, fails to use his checklist.

I got my first pilot license, an airplane private pilot license, in 1997 for the purpose of going to pick up my kids, who were living with their mother in Arizona, and I was in L.A. It was easier than to put them on a commercial flight. It was purely practical.

My grandfather served as a pilot with the Army Air Corps, and he was shot down over Normandy in August 1944.

I am afraid of aeroplanes. I've been able to avoid flying for some time, but I suppose, if I had to, I would. Perhaps it's a case of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing. At one time, I had a pilot's licence and 160 hours of solo time on single-engine light aircraft. Unfortunately, all that seemed to do was make me mistrust large aeroplanes.

I definitely knew how to fly. That's something you don't forget. One spaceship is pretty much like another when it comes to flying.

The German Luftwaffe always fought without any reserves. This is also the reason why we have pilots with extremely high numbers of victories.

I left the Navy as a lieutenant after spending almost 10 years as a helicopter pilot.

Calling upon my years of experience, I froze at the controls.

For the first time I was flying by jet propulsion. No engine vibrations. No torque and no lashing sound of the propeller. Accompanied by a whistling sound, my jet shot through the air. Later when asked what it felt like, I said, "It felt as though angels were pushing".

I have flown in just about everything, with all kinds of pilots in all parts of the world - British, French, Pakistani, Iranian, Japanese, Chinese - and there wasn't a dime's worth of difference between any of them except for one unchanging, certain fact: the best, most skillful pilot has the most experience.

By day, or on a cloudless night, a pilot may drink the wine of the gods, but it has an earthly taste; he's a god of the earth, like one of the Grecian deities who lives on worldly mountains and descended for intercourse with men. But at night, over a stratus layer, all sense of the planet may disappear. You know that down below, beneath that heavenly blanket is the earth, factual and hard. But it's an intellectual knowledge; it's a knowledge tucked away in the mind; not a feeling that penetrates the body.

After reading ... accounts ... of minor accidents of light, it is little wonder that the average man would far rather watch someone else fly and read of the narrow escapes from death when some pilot has had a forced landing or a blowout, than to ride himself. Even in the postwar days of now obsolete equipment, nearly all of the serious accidents were caused by inexperienced pilots who where then allowed to fly or attempt to fly-without license or restrictions about anything they could coax into the air.

It was a mind-blowing experience, it really was-absolutely an awesome thing. . . . As I got to the top I released a bag of M&Ms in the cockpit. It was amazing . . . Looking out that window, seeing the white clouds in the LA Basin, it looked like snow on the ground.

With all the knowledge and skill acquired in thousands of flights in the last ten years, I would hardly think today of making my first flight on a strange machine in a twenty-seven mile wind, even if I knew that the machine had already been flown and was safe.

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

I had a flight trainer who is one of the biggest and most famous helicopter pilots the world.

I live in the sky as a pilot, so it has great meaning to me.

Astronauts working for the government will always need to be either pilots or mission specialists. Those who want to be pilots should have military experience - ideally, a test pilot background.

I've been put under 8.5G in a stunt aeroplane. I felt all right. Well, I lost my vision, but I was still conscious.

I once made myself black out by pulling G too quickly while flying an F-18. Being unconscious in a single-seat airplane is not good. Fortunately, I woke up in time. I learned how to better plug-in my anti-G suit.

Any pilot can describe the mechanics of flying. What it can do for the spirit of man is beyond description.

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.

You lived and died alone, especially in fighters. Fighters. Somehow, despite everything, that word had not become sterile. You slipped into the hollow cockpit and strapped and plugged yourself into the machine. The canopy ground shut and sealed you off. Your oxygen, your very breath, you carried into the chilled vacuum, in a steel bottle.

Having the opportunity to fly the first flight of something like a space shuttle was the ultimate test flight.