GREAT AVIATION QUOTES
NEIL ARMSTRONG

I am, and ever will be, a white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer—born under the second law of thermodynamics, steeped in the steam tables, in love with free-body diagrams, transformed by Laplace, and propelled by compressible flow.

Neil Armstrong

The Engineered Century, speech to the National Press Club, 22 February 2000.

Pilots take no special joy in walking. Pilots like flying.

Neil Armstrong

A line he used several times. Quoted “as told a group of well-wishers at an air show who wanted to hear what it had been like to walk on the moon” by Kathy Sawyer in Armstrong’s Code, Washington Post Magazine, 11 July 1999.

Gliders, sailplanes, they’re wonderful flying machines. It’s the closest you can come to being a bird.

Neil Armstrong

Interview with Ed Bradley, First Man, CBS TV show 60 Minutes, aired 6 November 2005.

It's different, but it's very pretty out here. I suppose they are going to make a big deal of all this.

Neil Armstrong

Transmitting from the Moon.

This blowing dust became increasingly thicker. It was very much like landing in a fast-moving ground fog.

Neil Armstrong

During the Apollo 11 lunar landing.

Science has not yet mastered prophecy. We predict too much for the next year and yet far too little for the next ten.

Neil Armstrong

Speech to joint session of Congress, 16 September 1969. The idea is similar to 'a modern maxim' first cited by J. C. R. Licklider in the 1965 book Libraries of the Future:

“People tend to overestimate what can be done in one year and to underestimate what can be done in five or ten years.”

You’ve got to expect things are going to go wrong. And we always need to prepare ourselves for handling the unexpected.

Neil Armstrong

In 2005 documentary Magnificent Desolation: Walking On The Moon.

It's a strange, eerie sensation to fly a lunar landing trajectory - not difficult, but somewhat complex and unforgiving.

Neil Armstrong

In my own view, the important achievement of Apollo was a demonstration that humanity is not forever chained to this planet, and our visions go rather further than that, and our opportunities are unlimited.

Neil Armstrong

Every flying machine has its own unique characteristics, some good, some not so good. Pilots naturally fly the craft in such a manner as to take advantage of its good characteristics and avoid the areas where it is not so good.

Neil Armstrong

Quoted in Popular Mechanics magazine, June 2009.

Houston, that may have seemed like a very long final phase. The autotargeting was taking us right into a … crater, with a large number of big boulders and rocks … and it required … flying manually over the rock field to find a reasonably good area.

Neil Armstrong

Apollo 11, after landing on the Moon.

The view of the Moon that we've been having recently is really spectacular. It fills about three-quarters of the hatch window, and of course we can see the entire circumference even though part of it is in complete shadow and part of it is in earthshine. It's a view worth the price of the trip.

Neil Armstrong

The surface is fine and powdery. I can kick it up loosely with my toe. It does adhere in fine layers, like powdered charcoal, to the sole and sides of my boots. I only go in a small fraction of an inch, maybe an eighth of an inch, but I can see the footprints of my boots and the treads in the fine, sandy particles. There seems to be no difficulty in moving around, as we suspected.

Neil Armstrong

Apollo 11, first description of the lunar surface after stepping onto the Moon.

Fate has ordained that the men who went to the Moon to explore in peace will stay on the Moon to rest in peace. These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice. These two men are laying down their lives in mankind's most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding. They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by their nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown. In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man. In ancient days, men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood. Others will follow, and surely find their way home. Man's search will not be denied. But these men were the first, and they will remain the foremost in our hearts. For every human being who looks up at the Moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.

William Safire

In the event of Moon disaster, a speech drafted for President Richard M. Nixon to give to the nation should Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin not be able to rejoin the command module and be faced with death on, or around, the Moon. The White House memo was sent to H. R. Haldeman and dated 18 July 1969. This text remained secret for thirty years.

There are two of them up here.

Neil Armstrong

Apollo 11, after Charlie Duke said there were smiling faces in Mission Control and all over the world.

Roger, we copy. It was beautiful from here, Tranquility. Over.

Charlie Duke

CapCom, Mission Control, replying to Neil Armstrong after the Apollo 11 landing.

See three other Charlie Duke great aviation quotes.

He did it alone. We had a cast of a million.

Attributed to Neil Armstrong

Regards Charles Lindbergh.

In flying, the probability of survival is inversely proportional to the angle of arrival.

Falsely attributed to Neil Armstrong

Listed in many online quote sites, but I’ve never found a source or citation.