and welcome to my collection of man’s best thoughts on flying, airplanes, and being a pilot.
On the web since 1996, published years ago as a couple of books, now completely updated, expanded, and formatted to work on modern devices. Over 2,000 quotations, fully searchable, with source information and a little context. All lovingly curated into broad topics for easy browsing:
Looking for something in particular? Use the search box. It’s amazing to see what comes up, maybe try some fun searches like Concorde, 747, Jetblue, Leonardo, Neil Armstrong — or Balls
I have social feeds on Facebook and BlueSky, plus Pinterest and Instagram, for updates and conversation. Talking of which …
Newest avquote:
PAT25 has the aircraft in sight, request visual separation.
PAT25
Last radio transmission from PAT25, an Army Black Hawk helicopter flying down the Potomac River before mid-air crash with American Airlines Flight 5342, a Bombardier CRJ700 regional jet turning to land at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, 29 January 2025.
Two quotes that seem relevant right now, both from the Safety page:
Everything is unpresedented until it happens for the first time.
Falsely attributed to 'Sully' Sullenberger
Also seen as “There is never any precedent until it happens for the first time”. Many internet quote sites, as well as the 2024 book Crisis-Ready Teams and 2023 book Toolkit for Turbulence, cite this as a Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger III line from his 9 June 2009 testimony to the NTSB investigation of the 'Miracle on the Hudson'. But the line does not appear anywhere in the official transcript. At all. It also isn’t in his 2009 book Highest Duty: My Search for What Really Matters.
However, it does appear in the script of the 2016 movie Sully, written by Todd Komarnicki, being said by Sully, played by Tom Hanks.
The movie does a fantastic job showing what it’s like to fly an A320. And with over 14,000 hours in Airbus cockpits, I sorta know what it looks and feels like! But the film waved goodbye to reality when it came to the NTSB investigation. Good drama yes, but all fakey fake invented conflict Hollywood movie magic.
The actual NTSB hearing did include testimony from Dr. Richard Dolbeer, U.S. Dept. of Agriculture expert on human-wildlife conflicts:
“So while, you know, double ingestion such as happened in the US Airways incident are not common, they certainly have occurred with some regularity, as we've documented in the database and of course, we know the database does not capture all of the strikes that occur in the United States, so it provides -- but it does provide insight into what's going on and I think it's important to recognize, given the large bird population increases and the flocking behavior of those, that these double engine ingestions are a real event that happens.”
See more Sully Sullenberger aviation quotes.
All the red flags are there, We are sounding the alarm bells and we need action. Frankly, I don’t want to hear about more meetings. I don’t want to hear about conferences. I don’t want to hear about summits. Goddamn, do something.
Jennifer Homendy
Chair of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), speaking to reporters after a Senate hearing about FAA controller shortages and several near-miss events. The Washington Post, 9 November 2023. Over a year before an airliner had a mid-air with a Army helicopter over the Potomac River.
The most misquoted avquote?
When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.
Wrongly attributed to Leonardo da Vinci.
This may be one of the most famous aviation quotes — but it wasn’t Leonardo! It’s attributed everywhere to him (including some Smithsonian publications, the Washington Post newspaper, a 2024 National Geographic movie, aviation magazines, and a couple of science quotation books), but he never said or wrote it. It's fakey fake fake. For the full story on who did, see my August 2020 article in Air Facts magazine The Famous Quote That Da Vinci Never Said.
Although … after that article was published, I unearthed these da Vinci drawings in the archives of the Universitas Ingeniorum Artis Artificialis in Florance, Italy. Are these the proof he tasted flight?
The Leonardo ‘tasted flight’ quotation now fuels my desire to discover the original source and correctly cite all the quotes. Like this one, penned by the real da Vinci, on flying and writing, birds and men:
Feathers shall raise men even as they do birds, towards heaven; that is by letters written with their quills.
Leonardo da Vinci
The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci: Arranged, Rendered into English and Introduced by Edward MacCurdy, 1938.
The object here is to capture man’s first-hand experiences with flight in all its forms, to collect and document our spoken and written words about aviation. It’s the ultimate online quotable flyer. It is not ‘under construction’, but it very much is a ‘work in progress’. If you can supply dates or sources for existing quotes, or correct my typos, or suggest further sources of quotations, or of course if you spot some cool new quotes, please send them in.
I started the site in 1996 using Netscape Navigator 3.0 Gold and hand-coded HTML in MS notepad. This was back when AOL was king and before Google even existed! Internet Archive has screenshots from 1997. It was featured in the LA Times (17 December 1996) and USA Today (17 April 1997) newspapers. Been a few changes over the years, got a grown-up URL, and now it’s made using a SQL database and Dreamweaver software.
Back then research meant college libraries and their dusty card indexes. Now with wholesale scanning and digitalization of old books and magazines, finding the exact original source of a quotation is finally possible. Plus, an airline pilot’s salary buys a lot of used books. Tons of corrections made over the decades to the sometimes third-hand quotes I first found reading flying books in the late 80’s.
The initial collection was published by McGraw-Hill, and became a bestseller back when books were sold in the Discovery Channel stores in malls. The back cover had this kind blurb from the wonderful pilot and educator Rod Machado, “… succinct, power-packed bits of wisdom which are easily digested by the reader. There’s much to be learned as well as enjoyed.” It was translated into Japanese and (as they say) by popular demand a second volume was also published.
The collection has been cited in several academic papers, been used as a resource for many books and movies, and was even liked by Chuck Yeager. Now spreading wings on Pinterest and Instagram.
It’s pretty neat that I’ve been able to share so many sky treasures, from the ‘special section on private bookshelves’:
Thousands of volumes have been written about aviation, but we do not automatically have thousands of true and special friends in their authors. That rare writer who comes alive on a page does it by giving of himself, by writing of meanings, and not just of fact or of things that have happened to him. The writers of flight who have done this are usually found together in a special section on private bookshelves.
Richard Bach
The Pleasure of Their Company, in Flying magazine, April 1968.
See more Richard Bach aviation quotes.
Airmanship is remarkable in that respect. There is something about it that shows almost immediately in the way a man behaves with airplanes; even in the way he merely talks about them at dinner. It shows in magazine articles; you often feel you can guess the exact number of hours the author has had, if any.
Wolfgang Langewiesche
I’ll Take the High Road, 1939.
See more Wolfgang Langewiesche aviation quotes.
Or like a poet woo the Moon,
Riding an armchair for my steed,
And with a flashing pen harpoon
Terrific metaphors of speed.
Roy Campbell
The Festivals of Flight, 1930.
I wish I could write well enough to write about aircraft. Falkner did it very well in Pylon but you cannot do something some one else has done though you might have done it if they hadn’t.
Ernest Hemingway
Letter to Harvey Breit, 3 July 1956.
See more Ernest Hemingway aviation quotes.
It isn’t often that a writer of superlative skills knows enough about flying to write well about it.
Samuel Hynes
A Teller of Tales Tells His Own, in The New York Times, 7 September 1997.