GREAT AVIATION QUOTES
WILBUR WRIGHT

What is chiefly needed is skill rather than machinery.

Wilbur Wright

Second paragraph of the first letter the brothers wrote to Octave Chanute, 13 May 1900.

I know of only one bird — the parrot — that talks; and it can’t fly very high.

Wilbur Wright

When asked to speak at a dinner given in his honor at the Aero Club de la Sarthe, 24 September 1908. He declined, saying only this one sentence. He had expressed similar thoughts about self-promotion to the Wright’s financial agent Charles Flint several times:

“Wilbur said to me, Mr. Flint, the best talker and the worst flier among the birds is the parrot.” (Quoted in The Sport of Flying, The Outing Magazine, May 1909.)

The moment Wilbur stood up in Paris to give his now famous ‘parrot speech’ was captured in a photograph:

When gliding operators have attained greater skill, they can, with comparative safety, maintain themselves in the air for hours at a time in this way.

Wilbur Wright

Some Aeronautical Experiments, presented to the Western Society of Engineers 18 September 1901.

As to the distance we can travel, we do not regard twenty-four miles as the limit. The new machines will carry sufficient fuel for a five-hundred-mile trip.

Wilbur Wright

Quoted by Herbert N. Casson, At Last We Can Fly, in The American Magazine, volume 63, 1906.

It is not really necessary to look too far into the future [of aviation]; we see enough already to be certain that it will be magnificent. Only let us hurry and open the roads.

Wilbur Wright

Speech accepting the Gold Medal from the Aero Club of France in Paris, 5 November 1908.

I’ve seen him! I’ve seen him! Yes, I have today seen Wilbur Wright and his great white bird, the beautiful mechanical bird. There is no doubt! Wilbur and Orville Wright have well and truly flown.

Le Figaro

11 August 1908.

See three other Le Figaro great aviation quotes.

There is no sport in the world quite equal to that which aviators enjoy while being carried through the air on great white wings. Compared with the motion of a jolting automobile is not flying real poetry?

Wilbur Wright

Private letter to the Italian soaring enthusiast Aldo Corazza, December 1905. Quoted in the 2003 book To Conquer the Air: The Wright Brothers and the Great Race for Flight.

If you are looking for perfect safety, you will do well to sit on a fence and watch the birds; but if you really wish to learn, you must mount a machine and become acquainted with its tricks by actual trial.

Wilbur Wright

From an address to the Western Society of Engineers in Chicago, 18 September 1901.

The man who wishes to keep at the problem long enough to really learn anything positively cannot take dangerous risks. Carelessness and overconfidence are usually more dangerous than deliberately accepted risks.

Wilbur Wright

Letter to his father, 3 September 1900.

Don’t go out [flying] even for all the officers of the government unless you would go equally if they were absent. Do not let yourself be forced into doing anything before you are ready. Be very cautious and proceed slowly.

Wilbur Wright

Letter to Orville about flying in front of crowds. After some technical discussion about the rudder, he added, “I can only say be extraordinarily cautious”. 25 August 1908.

I confess that, in 1901, I said to my brother Orville that men would not fly for 50 years. Two years later, we were making flights. This demonstration of my inability as a prophet gave me such a shock that I have ever since refrained from all prediction.

Wilbur Wright

Speech accepting the Gold Medal from the Aéro Club de France in Paris, 5 November 1908.

It is possible to fly without motors, but not without knowledge and skill. This I conceive to be fortunate, for man, by reason of his greater intellect, can more reasonably hope to equal birds in knowledge than to equal nature in the perfection of her machinery.

Wilbur Wright

Letter to Octave Chanute, 13 May 1900.

I know him well and he is just the kind of man to accomplish such an undertaking. He is apparently without fear and what he sets out to do he generally accomplishes. This recklessness makes him anything but a good aviator, however, for he lacks entirely the element of caution.

Wilbur Wright

Cited as 'American Aeronat', on receiving the news that Louis Blériot had crossed the English Channel, the first to do so in an aeroplane. Quoted in Lays Aside Crutches to Fly Across Channel, Automobile Topics Illustrated, 31 July 1909.

Those who understand the real significance of the conditions under which we worked will be surprised rather at the length than the shortness of the flights made with an unfamiliar machine after less than one minute’s practice. The machine possesses greater capacity of being controlled than any of our former machines.

Wilbur Wright

Letter to Octave Chanute, from Kitty Hawk, 8 December 1903.

We are thinking of building a machine next year with 500 sq.ft. surface, about 40 ft x 6 ft 6 inches. This will give us the opportunity to work out problems connected with the management of large machines both in the air and on the ground, such as starting, etc. If all goes well the next step will be to apply a motor.

Wilbur Wright

Letter to George Spratt, 29 December 1902.

I sometimes think that the desire to fly after the fashion of birds is an ideal handed down to us by our ancestors who, in their grueling travels across trackless lands in prehistoric times, looked enviously on the birds soaring freely through space, at full speed, above all obstacles, on the infinite highway of the air.

Wilbur Wright

Letter to the Aéro-Club de France, 5 November 1908.

For some years I have been afflicted with the belief that flight is possible to man. The disease has increased in severity and I feel it will soon cost me an increased amount of money, if not my life. I have been trying to arrange my affairs in such a way that I can devote my entire time for a few months to experiment in this field.

Wilbur Wright

Beginning of his first letter to Octave Chanute, 13 May 1900. The letter also included the prediction:

“If the plan will enable me to remain in the air for practice by the hour instead of by the second, I hope to acquire skill sufficient to overcome both these difficulties and those inherent in flight.”

Four days after receiving this extraordinary letter, what the Library of Congress has called “one of the most remarkable letters in the history of science”, Chanute wrote Wilbur a serious yet encouraging reply. In that 17 May 1900 letter, Chanute wrote he was, “quite in sympathy with your proposal to experiment”, and proceeded to offer detailed advice. They would exchange several hundred more letters over the next decade, a correspondence that only ended with Chanute’s death in May 1910.

If only some of our people in England could see or imagine what Mr. Wright is now doing I am certain it would give them a terrible shock. A conquest of the air by any nation means more than the average man is willing to admit or even think about. That Wilbur Wright is in possession of a power which controls the fate of nations is beyond dispute.

Major B. F. S. Baden-Powell

President of the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain, following the Wright Brothers public flying demonstrations in Le Mans, France, 1908. He was brother of Robert Baden-Powell, who founded the Boy Scouts. Quoted in the Paris edition of the New York Herald, 6 October 1908.

All who are practically concerned with aerial navigation agree that the safety of the operator is more important to successful experimentation than any other point. The history of past investigations demonstrates that greater prudence is needed rather than greater skill. Only a madman would propose taking greater risks than the great constructors of earlier times.

Wilbur Wright

July 1901. First published as Die wagerechte Lage Während des Gleitfluges in Illustrierte Aeronautische Mitteilungen. Wilbur’s original unpublished English manuscript did not survive. This translation from The Papers of Wilbur and Orville Wright.

I am intending to start out in a few days for a trip to the coast of North Carolina in the vicinity of Roanoke Island, for the purpose of making some experiments with a flying machine. It is my belief that flight is possible, and while I am taking up the investigation for pleasure rather than profit, I think there is a slight possibility of achieving fame and fortune from it.

Wilbur Wright

Letter to his father, 3 September 1900.