Supersonic Flight Quotes

When I was picked to fly the X-1, it was my duty to fly it, and I did.

In the Space Age, man will be able to go around the world in two hours—one hour for flying, and one hour to get to the airport.

I had to tell somebody, anybody, that we’d busted straight through the sound barrier. But the transmissions were restricted. ‘Hey Ridley!’ I called. ‘Make another note. There’s something wrong with this Machmeter. It’s gone completely screwy!’

It still amazes me, when I go out and fly the T-38, and I'm looking at those little, short, skinny little wings, and that thing's flying. It's just amazing to me, even now.

Supersonic airplanes have carried men at more than 2,000 miles per hour and there are reasons to believe that this speed will be doubled by 1960 or so.

I did a film called Dracula and it was very nice because I had lots of trips to New York on Concorde.

All at once the cockpit lit up with a sort of white glow because your entry was at 25,000 miles an hour and it was ionising some of the first particles of air you had. So it was kinda a little bit like being inside a weak neon bulb.

To jump and break the sound barrier will not be a mere record breaking experience or another extreme event that ends once the mission is accomplished.

I used to be the third person in the secret jets we had - they were secret at the time - a jet bomber that flew at immense heights carrying atomic bombs.

We're constantly buying airplane tickets; we travel on the Concorde.

At 42,000' in approximately level flight, a third cylinder was turned on. Acceleration was rapid and speed increased to .98 Mach. The needle of the machmeter fluctuated at this reading momentarily, then passed off the scale. Assuming that the off-scale reading remained linear, it is estimated that 1.05 Mach was attained at this time.

Later, I realized that the mission had to end in a let-down because the real barrier wasn't in the sky but in our knowledge and experience of supersonic flight.

Quite likely the twentieth century is destined to see the natural forces which will enable us to fly from continent to continent with a speed far exceeding that of a bird.

One measure of twentieth-century time is the supersonic three and three-quarter hours it takes the Concorde to fly from New York to Paris, gate to gate. Other measures come with the waits on the expressways and the runways.

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.

I was lucky enough to fly in Concorde, and you get up to 65,000 feet, and I could see the curvature of the Earth.

I was commanding officer of a supersonic fighter squadron, F-8 Crusaders.

That spin became so violent, it was hard to know how to get out of it. I was able to get it under control and break the speed of sound...I could feel myself break the speed of sound. I could feel the air building up and then I hit it.

Leveling off at 42,000 feet, I had thirty percent of my fuel, so I turned on rocket chamber three and immediately reached .96 Mach. I noticed that the faster I got, the smoother the ride. Suddenly the Mach needle began to fluctuate. It went up to .965 Mach - then tipped right off the scale ... We were flying supersonic. And it was a smooth as a baby's bottom; Grandma could be sitting up there sipping lemonade.

As we went through mach one, the nose started dropping, so we just cranked that horizontal stabilizer down to keep the nose up. We got it above mach one, and once we got it above the speed of sound, then you have supersonic flow over the whole airplane, so you have no more shock waves on it that are causing buffeting...You really don't think about the outcome of any kind of a flight, whether it's combat, or any other kinds of flights, because you really have no control over it.

As astronauts know better than anyone else, risks, incidents, and mishaps are inevitable in the development of any high-performance vehicle. The emergence of supersonic flight during the 1940s and of the Century Series of fighters in the 1950s came with the loss of several test pilots. Still, it was a glorious time.

Law Number XLIV: Aircraft flight in the 21st century will always be in a westerly direction, preferably supersonic, crossing time zones to provide the additional hours needed to fix the broken electronics.

Boeing just took $20 billion and 10 years to improve the efficiency of their planes by 10 percent. That's pretty lame. I have a design in mind for a vertical liftoff supersonic jet that would be a really big improvement.

There's a real opportunity to have a vertical takeoff and landing electric supersonic jet.