GREAT AVIATION QUOTES
FRANK BORMAN

We were raped!

Frank Borman

CEO of Eastern Airlines. Quote to reporters after capitulating to Charlie Bryan’s $170 million wage demands. In his 1988 autobiography Countdown.

Deregulation [will] lead to the creation of a couple of General Motors of the airlines.

Frank Borman

President of Eastern Airlines, in The New York Times newspaper, 9 May 1976.

There has always been a certain romanticism associated with the airline business. We must avoid its perpetuation at Eastern at all costs.

Frank Borman

Memo to senior Eastern Airlines executives after becoming chairman. Quoted in the 1995 book Hard Landing: The Epic Contest for Power and Profits That Plunged the Airlines into Chaos.

Well, Frank, my thoughts are very similar. The vast loneliness up here of the Moon is awe-inspiring, and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth. The Earth from here is a grand oasis in the big blackness of space.

Jim Lovell

Live Apollo 8 lunar-orbit television broadcast, Christmas Eve, 24 December 1968. Frank is Frank Borman. Many quote sites use "the big vastness of space" but the NASA transcript has "big blackness of space".

See two other Jim Lovell great aviation quotes.

This is Apollo 8, coming to you live from the Moon. The Moon is a different thing to each one of us… I know my own impression is that it’s a vast, lonely, forbidding type existence, great expanse of nothing, that looks rather like clouds and clouds of pumice stone, and it certainly would not appear to be a very inviting place to live or work.

Frank Borman

Live Apollo 8 lunar-orbit television broadcast, 24 December 1968. Sourced from the NASA transcript of the Apollo 8 telecast.

We are now approaching lunar sunrise, and for all the people back on Earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message that we would like to send to you.

In the beginning, God created the Heaven and the Earth. And the Earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep…

…And God saw that it was good.

And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas and God bless all of you—all of you on the good Earth.

Flight crew of Apollo 8

Bill Anders, Jim Lovell, and Frank Borman, Live Apollo 8 Christmas Eve television broadcast, lunar orbit, 24 December 1968. The Apollo Flight Journal transcript gives Anders’ opening at 086:06:40, then Anders reading Genesis 1:1–4, Lovell taking over at 086:07:29, and Borman taking the final verses and closing at 086:08:07