Pilots Quotes

We were flying on a winged vehicle that would do reentry different than we had ever done before. So all of those were firsts. Test pilots truly love firsts.

Then there was the challenge to keep doing better and better, to fly the best test flight that anybody had ever flown. That led to my being recognized as one of the more experienced test pilots, and that led to the astronaut business.

For fear of dropping the troops in the sea, the pilots tended to drop them too far inland - some of them actually in the British lines. The weapon containers often fell wide of the troops, which was another handicap that contributed to our excessive casualties.

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

Now we are using the body scanner to scan the pilots. They became the dangerous people of this country?

Later, after flying in the Navy for four or five years, spending some time on an aircraft carrier, I applied to and was accepted in a program where I went to graduate school first and then to the Naval Test Pilots School.

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.

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.

Pilots are not the threat.

And so, I was not a military test pilot, but as soon as NASA expressed an interest in flying scientists and people who were not military test pilots, that was an epiphany that just came like a stroke of lightning.

My first movie was this independent that I did on the Erie Canal in 1995, called Erie, that I don't know if you could even get, actually with Felicity Huffman. And then from that I did this film that was eventually called The Broken Giant later that fall. And then I kind of started getting into doing pilots.

The successful pilots succeeded because they did not open fire until they were close to the target.

The greater the difficulty the more glory in surmounting it. Skillful pilots gain their reputation from storms and tempests.

Many pilots of the time were the opinion that a fighter pilot in a closed cockpit was an impossible thing, because you should smell the enemy. You could smell them because of the oil they were burning.