GREAT AVIATION QUOTES
WILBUR WRIGHT

Like all novices we began with the helicopter in childhood, but soon saw that the helicopter had no future, and dropped it. The helicopter does with great labor only what the balloon does without labor, and is no more fitted than the balloon for rapid horizontal flight. If its engine stops, it must fall with deathly violence, for it can neither glide like the aeroplane or float like the balloon. The helicopter is much easier to design than the aeroplane, but is worthless when done.

Wilbur Wright

Letter written in 1907. Quoted in the 1954 book Miracle at Kitty Hawk: The Letters of Wilbur and Orville Wright.

Now, there are two ways of learning to ride a fractious horse: one is to get on him and learn by actual practice how each motion and trick may be best met; the other is to sit on a fence and watch the beast a while and then retire to the house and at leisure figure out the best way of overcoming his jumps and kicks. The latter system is the safer, but the former, on the whole, turns out the larger proportion of good riders. It is very much the same thing in learning to ride a flying machine.

Wilbur Wright

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

There was something strange about the tall, gaunt figure. The face was remarkable, the head suggested that of a bird, and the features, dominated by a long, prominent nose that heightened the birdlike effect were long and bony… . From behind the greyish blue depths of his eyes there seemed to shine something of the light of the sun. From the first moments of my conversation with him I judged Wilbur Wright to be a fanatic of flight, and I had no longer any doubt that he had accomplished all he claimed to have done. He seemed born to fly.

Daily Mail newspaper

17 August 1908.

No airship will ever fly from New York to Paris. That seems to me to be impossible. What limits the flight is the motor. No known motor can run at the requisite speed for four days without stopping, and you can’t be sure of finding the proper winds for soaring. The airship will always be a special messenger, never a load-carrier. But the history of civilization has usually shown that every new invention has brought in its train new needs it can satisfy, and so what the airship will eventually be used for is probably what we can least predict at the present.

Wilbur Wright

Interview in the Cairo, Illinois Bulletin, 25 March 1909. This is often mis-quoted to say no ‘flying machine’ will make the journey. But the quote is about airships, blimps or Zeppelins, not the much faster airplane.

Although a general invitation had been extended to the people living within five or six miles, not many were willing to face the rigors of a cold December wind in order to see, as they no doubt thought, another flying-machine not fly. The first flight lasted only twelve seconds, a flight very modest compared with that of birds, but it was, nevertheless, the first in the history of the world in which a machine carrying a man had raised itself by its own power into the air in free flight, had sailed forward on a level course without reduction of speed, and had finally landed without being wrecked.

Orville and Wilbur Wright

The Wright Brothers’ Aeroplane, The Century Magazine, September 1908.



See 15 other Orville Wright great aviation quotes.

Considered as a sport, flying possesses attractions which will appeal to many persons with a force beyond that exercised by any of the similar sports, such as boating, cycling, or automobiling. There is a sense of exhilaration in flying through the free air, an intensity of enjoyment, which possibly may be due to the satisfaction of an inborn longing transmitted to us from the days when our early ancestors gazed wonderingly at the free flight of birds and contrasted it with their own slow and toilsome progress through the unbroken wilderness …

Once above the tree tops, the narrow roads no longer arbitrarily fix the course. The earth is spread out before the eye with a richness of color and beauty of pattern never imagined by those who have gazed at the landscape edgewise only. The view of the ordinary traveler is as inadequate as that of an ant crawling over a magnificent rug. The rich brown of freshly-turn earth, the lighter shades of dry ground, the still lighter browns and yellows of ripening crops, the almost innumerable shades of green produced by grasses and forests, together present a sight whose beauty has been confined to balloonists alone in the past. With the coming of the flyer, the pleasures of ballooning are joined with those of automobiling to form a supreme combination.

The sport will not be without some element of danger, but with a good machine this danger need not be excessive. It will be safer than automobile racing, and not much more dangerous than football. The motor flyers will always be somewhat expensive, as the best of materials and workmanship will be required in their construction, but there is a possibility that men will eventually learn to fly without motors, after the manner of soaring birds, which sail for hours on motionless wings. In such case the flyer would be so small and simple that the original cost would be very moderate, and the fuel expense done away with entirely. Then flying will become an every-day sport for thousands.

Wilbur Wright.

Scientific American, 29 February 1908.

It is a realization of a dream so many persons have had of floating in the air. More than anything else the sensation is one of perfect peace mingled with an excitement that strains every nerve to the utmost, if you can conceive of such a combination.

Wilbur Wright

Quoted in Successful in Flying, the Wrights Guard Their Secret Well, in New York Herald newspaper, 25 November 1906. But it may have been reporter's paraphrase.