GREAT AVIATION QUOTES
RIGHT STUFF

There are no accidents and no fatal flaws in the machines; there are only pilots with the wrong stuff.

Tom Wolfe

The Right Stuff, 1979.



See three other Tom Wolfe great aviation quotes.

The unspoken premise was that you either had the right stuff or you didn’t, and no other variables mattered.

Tom Wolfe

The Right Stuff, 1979.



See three other Tom Wolfe great aviation quotes.

What is it that makes a man willing to sit up on top of an enormous Roman candle, such as a Redstone, Atlas, Titan or Saturn rocket, and wait for someone to light the fuse?

Tom Wolfe

The Right Stuff, 1979.

See three other Tom Wolfe great aviation quotes.

The main thing to know about an astronaut, if you want to understand his psychology, is not that he’s going into space but that he is a flyer and has been in that game for 15 or 20 years. It’s like a huge and very complex pyramid, miles high, and the idea is to prove at every foot of the way up that pyramid that you are one of the elected and anointed ones that have the right stuff.

The right stuff is not bravery in the simple sense; it is bravery in the most sophisticated sense. Any fool can put his hide on the line and throw his life away in the process. The idea is to be able to put your hide on the line — and then to have the moxie, the reflexes, the talent, the experience, to pull it back in at the last yawning moment — and then to be able to go out again the next day and do it all over again — and, in its best expression, to be able to do it in some cause, in some calling that means something.

Walter Cunningham

Apollo 7 astronaut and Marine Corps fighter pilot, writting in his 1977 book All American Boys, An Insider’s Look at the U.S. Space Program.



See one other Walter Cunningham great aviation quote.

Who’s the best pilot you ever saw? … You’re lookin’ at him.

Gordon 'Gordo' Cooper

Played by Dennis Quaid, in the 1983 movie The Right Stuff, written by Philip Kaufman. The line is not in the original book by Tom Wolfe, but does sum up the fun-loving gung-ho attitude of the youngest of the original Mercury 7 astronauts.



See three other Gordon 'Gordo' Cooper great aviation quotes.

After about 30 minutes I puked all over my airplane. I said to my self, “Man, you made a big mistake.”

Chuck Yeager

Regards his first flight. Quoted in CNN report 50 years later, Yeager proves he still has 'the right stuff', 14 October 1997.

See 11 other Chuck Yeager great aviation quotes.

I went up with Yeager in a Piper Cub. I figured if I died while flying with the world’s greatest pilot, it would be OK.

Sam Shepard

Who played Chuck Yeager in the 1983 movie The Right Stuff. Quoted in An Oral History of the Epic Space Film The Right Stuff, Wired magazine, November 2014.

When I posted this quote on Twitter, Chuck remembered flying Sam and wrote that “He barely fit in it”. @GenChuckYeager, Twitter, 21 Janurary 2020.

It doesn't really require a pilot, and besides, you'd have to sweep the monkey shit off the seat before you could sit down.

Chuck Yeager

Quoted in 1979 book The Right Stuff. Yeager was first man to fly Mach 1 and vocal critic of the original astronauts. Regards the use of monkeys to test space vehicles and the unknown dangers of the space environment.

See 11 other Chuck Yeager great aviation quotes.

In flying, you’re always preparing for an alternative. So I went to my alternative. I’m still kicking in doors to keep on going.

Wally Funk

One of the original women of Mercury 13 denied her chance of a spaceflight in the 1960’s — right stuff wrong sex — Wally went on to teach 3,000 people to fly, logged over 19,000 hours, became the first female FAA inspector and the first female NTSB air safety investigator.

She did get to go into space, with Jeff Bezos in Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket on 20 July 2021. Quote from The Dallas Morning News, 20 September 1998.



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Military pilots and then, soon, airline pilots, pilots from Maine and Massachusetts and the Dakotas and Oregon and everywhere else, began to talk in that poker-hollow West Virginia drawl, or as close to it as they could bend their native accents. It was the drawl of the most righteous of all the possessors of the right stuff: Chuck Yeager.

Tom Wolfe

The Right Stuff, 1979.

See three other Tom Wolfe great aviation quotes.

There was a demon that lived in the air. They said whoever challenged him would die. His controls would freeze up, his plane would buffet wildly, and he would disintegrate. The demon lived at Mach 1 on the meter, seven hundred and fifty miles an hour, where the air could no longer move out of the way. He lived behind a barrier through which they said no man would ever pass. They called it the sound barrier.

Jackie 'Jack' Ridley

Chief of the USAF Flight Test Engineering Laboratory, played by Levon Helm, in the 1983 movie The Right Stuff, written by Philip Kaufman.

Straighten up and fly right.

Song written by Nat 'King' Cole

First written down in a hotel room in Omaha, Nebraska, in the winter of 1943. One of the first vocal hits for the King Cole Trio, reaching number one on the U.S. Harlem Hit Parade for ten nonconsecutive weeks and peaking at number nine on the pop charts. The song was based on a black folk tale that Cole's father had used as a theme for one of his sermons. In the tale, a buzzard takes different animals for a joy ride. When he gets hungry, he throws them off on a dive and eats them for dinner. A monkey who had observed this trick goes for a ride; he wraps his tail around the buzzard's neck and gives the buzzard a big surprise by nearly choking him to death.

The song has been covered many times, for example The Andrews Sisters in 1944, Sammy David Jr., Diana Krall, and Robbie Williams. It was used in the 1983 movie The Right Stuff and the 1995 movie The Tuskegee Airmen. It was added to the National Registry in 2005.

Freedom 7 is still go, the trajectory is A-OK. Mission is still A-OK, full go.

John 'Shorty' Powers

NASA Public Affairs Officer, the voice of Mercury Control, at launch of rocket carrying America’s first man in space, 5 May 1961. Often attributed to Alan Shepard, but the astronaut’s didn't like the phrase, and the NASA publication, This New Ocean: A History of Project Mercury, says in a footnote that a replay of the flight voice communications tape disclosed that Shepard himself did not use the term. Flight Controller Gene Kranz said in the 2000 book Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond:

“Shorty Powers announced to the world that “everything is A-OK,” a phrase hated by the controllers and crews as “too Hollywood,” but one that soon became a part of the American vocabulary. It seems quaint now, all these years later, virtually unused, almost forgotten.”

The 1979 book The Right Stuff says Powers had borrowed the expression from NASA engineers who used it during radio transmission tests because “the sharper sound of A cut through the static better than O”. It became a spaceage idiom for ‘everything is going smoothly’.