GREAT AVIATION QUOTES
Boeing

There are 53 quotes matching Boeing in the collection:

Beautiful. A little turbulance but she soaks it up.

Jack Waddell

Boeing test pilot, radio transmission during the first test flight of the B747, 9 Feburary 1969, six years to the day of the first flight of the B727. The test pilots deliberately wore business suits rather than flight suits to visually demonstate the safety of the new airliner. Reported as 747 Goes Aloft for First Time; It’s Beautiful, The Seattle Times, 10 February 1969.



See one other Jack Waddell great aviation quote.

When you have two engines, you have two engines that can fall to bits. When you have four, you have four that can fall to bits. The less engines you have, the safer you are.

Attributed to Frank Fickeisen

Chief engineer for Boeing, replying (with tongue in cheek) to a complaint made by the American Airlines Allied Pilots' Association about the dangers of flying two-engine airplanes like the B-777 across the Pacific.

When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm. It is a great engineering firm, but people invest in a company because they want to make money.

Harry Stonecipher

Boeing CEO, in an interview with Patricia Callahan, So why does think he can turn around Boeing?, Chicago Tribune newspaper, 29 Feburary 2004. It’s an insightful piece about Stonecipher, Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, and safety culture.

I would like to apologize, on behalf of all of our Boeing associates spread throughout the world, past and present, for your losses. And I apologize for the grief that we have caused.

Dave Calhoun

Boeing CEO, standing up, turning around to face the families who lost relatives in the 2018 and 2019 crashes of the company’s Max 8 planes, at the start of a public U.S. Senete hearing into Boeing, 18 June 2024.

He said on record that, “I accept that MCAS and Boeing are responsible for those crashes”.



The New York Times reported: “The family members who attended the hearing said they were unimpressed and unmoved by Mr. Calhoun’s apology and his stated commitment to safety and transparency. One of them told reporters that Mr. Calhoun avoided making eye contact and quickly left after the hearing concluded.”

See one other Dave Calhoun great aviation quote.

Some newspapers have an adversarial approach to the Boeing Company that actually nauseates me and I’ve stopped reading them. I spent fifteen years on the Boeing crash investigation committee, and I learned first hand the difference between what gets reported in the paper and what the facts are. I concluded that there was almost no relationship between what was written there and the facts, and it kind of made me nervous about reading anything else. I just quit taking the papers.

Granville 'Granny' Frazier

Director of engine programs, Boeing commercial division. Quoted in the 1996 book Twenty-First-Century Jet: The Making and Marketing of the Boeing 777.

Nobody is going to drown. The plane is pressurized.

Capt Don Gallagher

Pilot of Stevens Flight 23, a Boeing 747 that crashed and sunk under the Atlantic Ocean, 1977.

To be clear, this is all in the movie Airport '77. was played by Jack Lemmon, screenplay by Michael Scheff and David Spector, based on the 1970 movie Airport, itself based on the novel by Arthur Hailey. It was the third movie in the Airport franchise, and actually received two Acadamy Award nominations. The premise is of course Bravo Sierra, but the plane used in filming was real, an ex American Airlines B747-123, N9667.

Engineering is the science of doing things over again.

John E. 'Jack' Steiner

Chief engineer on the Boeing 727. A ‘summary he had once invented for a speech’, quoted in the 1965 book Billion Dollar Battle: The Story Behind the “Impossible” 727 Project.

One of the things that we do, in the basic design, is the pilot always has the ultimate authority of control. There’s no computer on the airplane that he can not override. Or turn off if the ultimate comes … If something in the box should inappropriately think it’s stalling when it isn’t the pilot can say this is wrong, and he can override it. That’s a fundamental difference in philosophy that we have verses some of the competition.

John Cashman

Chief Test Pilot Boeing 777. Interview in 1996 PBS TV show 21st Century Jet: Building the Boeing 777, Episode 1.

There isn’t much to that machine of Maroney’s. I think we could build a better one.

William Boeing

Who had studied engineering at Yale University, and was a welthy timber heir who also owned a shipyard, to his friend Conrad Westervilt, after they flew in a barnstormers seaplane at the 1914 Fourth of July fair on Seattle’s Lake Washington. Conrad replied,

“Of course we could. Would you like me to make some inquires?”

This is the origin story of the Boeing Company. Told for example in Boeing magazine, a publication of the Boeing Public Relations Office, July 1956. Condensed from the first chapter of Harold Mansfield 1956 book Vision: A Saga of the Sky.

If it ain’t Boeing — I ain’t going.

Cliché

I’ve tried to make the men around me feel, as I do, that we embarked as pioneers upon a new science and industry in which our problems are so new and unusual that it behooves no one to dismiss any novel idea with the statement that “it can't be done!". Our job is to keep everlasting at research and experimentation, to adapt our laboratories to production as soon as possible, and to let no new improvement in flying and flying equipment pass us by.

William E. Boeing

Founder The Boeing Company, 1929. Inscribed on his memorial at the Boeing Developmental Center, Tukwila, WA.

She flew like a bird, only faster.

Alvin 'Tex' Johnston

Boeing test pilot, climbing down from the cockpit of the Boeing Model 367-80 after its first flight, 15 July, 1954. It would become the B707 for the airlines and the KC-135 for the USAF.

Selling airplanes.

Alvin 'Tex' Johnson

Boeing test pilot, asked by Boeing President William Allen what he thought he was doing the day before after two surprise barrel rolls of the new Dash 80 (later the B-707) airliner over a crowd of 250,000 people at the Seattle Gold Cup, 8 August 1955.

Tex explained the maneuver was harmless, performed at one G. In his book Tex Johnston: Jet-Age Test Pilot he says “the airplane does not recognize attitude, providing a maneuver is conducted at one G. It knows only positive and negative imposed loads and variations in thrust and drag. The barrel roll is a one G maneuver and quite impressive, but the airplane never knows it’s inverted.” Allen responded:

“You know that. Now we know that. But just don’t do it anymore.”

We’re going to make the best impression on the traveling public, and we’re going to make a pile of extra dough just from being first.

C. R. Smith

American Airlines, on the introduction of the Boeing 707, in Forbes magazine, 1956.

See three other C. R. Smith great aviation quotes.

The SST is ‘inevitable’—the next logical step in the development of air transport; the progress of aviation is tied to speed, and so is U.S. leadership. The technical challenge is good for us, they say.

Wallace Cloud

Can We Build a 2,000-m.p.h. Airliner?, Popular Science, April 1964. “Top men in U.S. aviation are sweating to make a decisionon how guys like you and me, as fare-paying passengers, will fly like test pilots of the 2000-m.p.h. A-11 interceptor.” The cover showed designs from Boeing, Lockhead and North American. The story inside did mention the British/French Concorde.

A great weapon for peace, competing with intercontinental missiles for mankind’s destiny.

Juan Trippe

Pan Am’s founder, on the B747, at the ceremonial 747 contract-signing banquet in Seattle on Boeing’s 50th Anniversary. April 1966. Quoted in the 2014 book The Airbus A380: A History and others.



See three other Juan Trippe great aviation quotes.

It handled magnificently. It’s a pilot’s dream.

Jack Waddell

Test pilot, press intervew following the first flight of the Boeing 747, 9 February 1969. Reported for example in ‘Jumbo Jet’ Flies First Time; Flaw in Flap Noted, The New York Times, 10 February 1969.



See one other Jack Waddell great aviation quote.

The plane has a very light, responsive touch. I'd call it a two-finger airplane.

Waddell Wallick

Boeing 747 test pilot, describing the first flight to the press, 9 February 1969. Asked which two fingers, he “obligingly held up his left hand with forefinger and thumb curled as if gripping the control wheel”, Boeing magazine, March 1969.

Pilot Jack Waddell eased throttles forward; Co-Pilot Brian Wygle called out speeds as a gentle giant of the air began to move; Flight Engineer Jess Wallick kept eyes glues to the gauges. The Boeing Model 747 Superjet gathered speed. The nose lifted. After 4,300 feet—less than half the 9,000 foot runway—main gear of the plane left the concrete. At 11:34 a.m., with a speed of 164 miles an hour, quietly and almost serenely, the age of spacious jets began.

Boeing Magazine

First Flight, March 1969.

Kansas City Center, this is Air Force One. Would you please change our call sign to SAM 27000.

Colonel Ralph Albertazzie, USAF

39,000 feet over Missouri after being informed that passenger Richard Nixon was no longer president since Gerald Ford had been sworn into office. 9 Aug 1974.

They were heading from Washington D.C. to Nixon’s home, La Casa Pacifica in San Clemente, California.

SAM 27000 was the second of two Boeing VC-137C United States Air Force aircraft that were specifically configured and maintained for the use of the President of the United States. SAM 27000 comes from 'Special Air Mission' and its serial number 72-7000. It's on display now at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.

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