GREAT AVIATION QUOTES

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Newest addition to the database, relevant to Artemis 2:

You’ll never leave the planet earth if you worry about everything.

Chris Cassidy

SEAL, NASA astronaut, and Chief of the Astronaut Office. Quoted in the 2019 book The Mission of a Lifetime: Lessons from the Men Who Went to the Moon.

On this day, 81 years ago:

A hundred years ago, a ship’s survival depended almost solely on the competence of her master and on his constant alertness to every hint of change in the weather. To be taken aback or caught in full sail on by even a passing squall might mean the loss of spars or canvas; and to come close to the center of a genuine hurricane or typhoon was synonymous with disaster. While to be taken by surprise was thus serious, the facilities for avoiding it were meager. Each master was dependent wholly on himself for detecting the first symptoms of bad weather, for predicting its seriousness and movement, and for taking the appropriate measures to, to evade it if possible and to battle through it if it passed near to him. There was no radio by which weather data could be collected from all over the oceans and the resulting forecasts by expert aerologists broadcasted to him and to all afloat. There was no one to tell him that the time had now come to strike his light sails and spars, and snug her down under close reefs and storm trysails. His own barometer, the force and direction of the wind, and the appearance of sea and sky were all that he had for information. Ceaseless vigilance in watching and interpreting signs, plus a philosophy of taking no risk in which there was little to gain and much to be lost, was what enabled him to survive.

Both seniors and juniors alike must realize that in bad weather, as in most other situations, safety and fatal hazard are not separated by any sharp boundary line, but shade gradually from one into the other. There is no little red light which is going to flash on and inform commanding officers or higher commanders that from then on there is extreme danger from the weather, and that measures for ships' safety must now take precedence over further efforts to keep up with the formation or to execute the assigned task. This time will always be a matter of personal judgment. Naturally no commander is going to cut thin the margin between staying afloat and foundering, but he may nevertheless unwittingly pass the danger point even though no ship is yet in extremis. Ships that keep on going as long as the severity of wind and sea has not yet come close to capsizing them or breaking them in two, may nevertheless become helpless to avoid these catastrophes later if things get worse. By then they may be unable to steer any heading but in the trough of the sea, or may have their steering control, lighting , communications, and main propulsion disabled, or may be helpless to secure things on deck or to jettison topside weights. The time for taking all measures for a ship's safety is while still able to do so. Nothing is more dangerous than for a seaman to be grudging in taking precautions lest they turn out to have been unnecessary. Safety at sea for a thousand years has depended on exactly the opposite philosophy.

Admiral Chester A. Nimitz,

Commander in Chief, U.S. Pacific Fleet. Parts of his Pacific Fleet Confidential Letter 14CL-45 (now declassified) following typhoon damage to many ships, 13 February 1945.

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 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. Internet Archive has screenshots from 1997. It was featured in the LA Times (17 December 1996) and USA Today (17 April 1997) newspapers. Now the quotes are organized in a SQL database, on a website built using Dreamweaver.

Back then research meant college libraries and 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, by popular demand, a second volume was also published.

The collection has been cited in several academic papers, 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, many from a ‘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.

The planes, the weather, the foreign fields, the crashes, and most of all that special pilot's world, the earth as seen from above, and the pleasure of being up there. It isn't often that a writer of superlative skills knows enough about flying to write well about it; Saint-Exupery was one; Salter is another.

Samuel Hynes

A Teller of Tales Tells His Own, in The New York Times, 7 September 1997.