Famous Aviation Quotes

I ask people who don't fly, "How can you not fly when you live in a time in history when you can fly?"

— William Langewische, 2001

I have lifted my plane . . . for perhaps a thousand flights and I have never felt her wheels glide from the Earth into the air without knowing the uncertainty and the exhilaration of first-born adventure.

— Beryl Markham

The way I see it, you can either work for a living or you can fly airplanes. Me, I'd rather fly.

— Len Morgan

The fascination of flight can't be expressed with words. But it really lies beyond the capabilities of human endeavor. Once you've experienced it, you'll never be able to forget it.

— Friedrich Oblessor, 127 victories WWII

I've never known an industry that can get into people's blood the way aviation does.

— Robert Six, founder of Continental Airlines

To most people, the sky is the limit. To those who love aviation, the sky is home.

— anon

We who fly do so for the love of flying. We are alive in the air with this miracle that lies in our hands and beneath our feet.

— Cecil Day Lewis

Pilots are a rare kind of human. They leave the ordinary surface of the word, to purify their soul in the sky, and they come down to earth, only after receiving the communion of the infinite.

— José Maria Velasco Ibarra, President of Ecuador

Until now I have never really lived! Life on earth is a creeping, crawling business. It is in the air that one feels the glory of being a man and of conquering the elements. There is an exquisite smoothness of motion and the joy of gliding through space. It is wonderful!

— Gabriele D'Annunzio, 1909

You can always tell when a man has lost his soul to flying. The poor guy is hopelessly committed to stopping whatever he is doing long enough to look up and make sure the aircraft purring overhead continues on course and does not suddenly fall out of the sky. It is also his bound duty to watch every aircraft within view take off and land.

— Ernest K Gann, 'Fate is the Hunter

I can't remember the time when airplanes were not a part of my life and can't remember ever wanting anything so much as to fly one. Once I had started I had to keep flying...I felt I had come to the place where I belonged in the world.  The air to me was what being on the ground was to other people. When I felt nervous it pulled me together. Things could get too much for me on the ground, they never got that way in the air.

— Major Don S. Gentile, USAAF

Why fly? Simple. I'm not happy unless there's some room between me and the ground.

— Richard Bach, 'A Gift of Wings,' 1974

Pilots track their lives by the number of hours in the air, as if any other kind of time isn't worth noting.

— Michael Parfit, 'The Corn was Two Feet Below the Wheels', Smithsonian Magazine, May 2000

Flight is the only truly new sensation than men have achieved in modern history.

— James Dickey, 'New York Times Book Review,' 15 July 1979

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

— Barry M. Goldwater, US senator

Rather routine.

— Frank Collbohm, Douglas Aircraft Company flight engineer, notation in the flight log during the first ever flight of the DC-3 Clover Field in Santa Monica, California, 17 December 1935