GREAT AVIATION QUOTES
Right Stuff

There are 8 quotes matching Right Stuff in the collection:

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 nine other Chuck Yeager 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.

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.

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.

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

Gordon Cooper

Played by Dennis Quaid, in the 1983 movie The Right Stuff.

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 two other Tom Wolfe great aviation quotes.

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 two other Tom Wolfe great aviation quotes.

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 two other Tom Wolfe great aviation quotes.

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