Cockpit Quotes

• I was always afraid of dying. Always. It was my fear that made me learn everything I could about my airplane and my emergency equipment, and kept me flying respectful of my machine and always alert in the cockpit.

  Chuck Yeager

  Airplane, Flying, Dying

  Chuck Yeager (1986). “Yeager: An Autobiography”, Bantam

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• Many pilots of the time were the opinion that a fighter pilot in a closed cockpit was an impossible thing, because you should smell the enemy. You could smell them because of the oil they were burning.

  Adolf Galland

  Impossible Things, Oil, Smell

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• I then realized my appearance was a bit odd. My right leg was no longer with me. It had caught somewhere in the top of the cockpit as I tried to leave my Spitfire.

  Douglas Bader

  Legs, Odd, Appearance

  Douglas Bader (2006). “Douglas Bader: Fight for the Sky”, p.41, Pen and Sword

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• Just before you break through the sound barrier, the cockpit shakes the most.

  Chuck Yeager

  Break Through, Sound, Shakes

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• I guess, when you get down to it, a loving touch compensates for an unskilled hand about everywhere except in an airplane cockpit.

  Robert Breault

  Love, Airplane, Hands

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• Formula one is very one-dimensional in terms of what we do in the cockpit.

  Mark Webber

  Term, Formulas, Formula One

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• If you don't like what you see, stop looking.

  Nancy Lopez

  Oleanders, Aviation, Bodybuilding Motivation

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• Now and then I miss the excitement about being in the cockpit of an airplane and doing new things.

  Neil Armstrong

  Airplane, Missing, Excitement

  "Neil Armstrong Dead: First Man On The Moon Dies At 82", www.huffingtonpost.com. August 25, 2012.

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• It was a mind-blowing experience, it really was-absolutely an awesome thing. . . . As I got to the top I released a bag of M&Ms in the cockpit. It was amazing . . . Looking out that window, seeing the white clouds in the LA Basin, it looked like snow on the ground.

  Mike Melvill

  Clouds, White, Space

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• You lived and died alone, especially in fighters. Fighters. Somehow, despite everything, that word had not become sterile. You slipped into the hollow cockpit and strapped and plugged yourself into the machine. The canopy ground shut and sealed you off. Your oxygen, your very breath, you carried into the chilled vacuum, in a steel bottle.

  James Salter

  Oxygen, Vacuums, Steel

  James Salter (2012). “The Hunters”, p.193, Counterpoint Press

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• I may be flying a complicated airplane, rushing through space, but in this cabin I'm surrounded by simplicity and thoughts set free of time. How detached the intimate things around me seem from the great world down below. How strange is this combination of proximity and separation. That ground - seconds away - thousands of miles away. This air, stirring mildly around me. That air, rushing by with the speed of a tornado, an inch beyond. These minute details in my cockpit. The grandeur of the world outside. The nearness of death. The longness of life.

  Charles Lindbergh

  Airplane, Rushing, Space

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• At work, conversation increases productivity. And yet people go into work, put on their headphones. In one interview, somebody called it - they become pilots in their own cockpits.

  Judy Woodruff

  People, Pilots, Interviews

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• The air is annoyingly potted with a multitude of minor vertical disturbances which sicken the passengers and keep us captives of our seat belts. We sweat in the cockpit, though much of the time we fly with the side windows open. The airplanes smell of hot oil and simmering aluminum, disinfectant, feces, leather, and puke ... the stewardesses, short-tempered and reeking of vomit, come forward as often as they can for what is a breath of comparatively fresh air.

  Ernest K. Gann

  Airplane, Sweat, Oil

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• If you're faced with a forced landing, fly the thing as far into the crash as possible.

  Bob Hoover

  Flying, Pilots, Aviation

  80 Copy quote

• Turbulence.” This is what pilots announce that you have encountered when your plane strikes an object in midair. You'll be flying along, and there will be an enormous, shuddering WHUMP, and clearly the plane has rammed into an airborne object at least the size of a water buffalo, and the pilot will say, “Folks, we're encountering a little turbulence.” Meanwhile they are up there in the cockpit trying desperately to clean water-buffalo organs off the windshield.

  Dave Barry

  Water, Flying, Trying

  "Dave Barry's Only Travel Guide You'll Ever Need". Book by Dave Barry, 1991.

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• Ottawa - a sub-arctic lumber-village converted by royal mandate into a political cockpit.

  Goldwin Smith

  Political, Ottawa, Royal

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• Before I went to the Mess I made the excuse I wanted to get something out of my aeroplane, and climbed into the cockpit; I did this, however, to be able to say good-bye to the old dear; and I really felt dreadfully sorry to part with her. I get very attached to aeroplanes, and I am one of those people who think that they aren't so inanimate as we are told they are.

  Charles Rumney Samson

  Sorry, Thinking, Bye

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• Suicide is like the ejector button in the cockpit of an F-15. If life goes into a permanent tail spin, it's nice to know the option is there.

  Dov Davidoff

  Suicide, Nice, Tails

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• I belong to a group of men who fly alone. There is only one seat in the cockpit of a fighter airplane. There is no space alotted for another pilot to tune the radios in the weather or make the calls to air traffic control centers or to help with the emergency procedures or to call off the airspeed down final approach. There is no one else to break the solitude of a long cross-country flight. There is no one else to make decisions.

  Richard Bach

  Country, Airplane, Men

  Richard Bach (2003). “Flying: The Aviation Trilogy”, p.101, Simon and Schuster

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• An engineer can look at the data, but he needs a translator from the cockpit - the driver - to understand it completely. For example, only the driver can tell you why he abruptly takes his foot off the gas pedal at a certain point. The data doesn't necessarily tell the engineer whether the driver made a mistake at that point or the car was acting up. The information the driver provides often helps determine the direction of development.

  Michael Schumacher

  Mistake, Data, Feet

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• There's a lot of Hollywood bullshit about flying. I mean, look at the movies about test pilots or fighter pilots who face imminent death. The controls are jammed or something really important has fallen off the plane, and these guys are talking like magpies; their lives are flashing past their eyes, and they're flailing around in the cockpit. It just doesn't happen. You don't have time to talk. You're too damn busy trying to get out of the problem you're in to talk or ricochet around the cockpit. Or think about what happened the night after your senior prom.

  Robin Olds

  Senior, Eye, Mean

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• I think that came out of watching all those serious movies for all that time. If you watch a movie like Zero Hour, Sterling Hayden is pretty funny, and so are the guys in the cockpit.

  David Zucker

  Movie, Zero, Thinking

  "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• If the designers of X Windows built cars, there would be no fewer than five steering wheels hidden about the cockpit, none of which followed the same principles – but you’d be able to shift gears with your car stereo. Useful feature that.

  Marcus J. Ranum

  Car, Able, Wheels

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• I have noticed that most men when they enter a barber shop and must wait their turn, drop into a chair and pick up a magazine. I simply sit down and pick up the thread of my sea wanderings, which began more than fifty years ago and is not quite ended. There is hardly a waiting room in the east that has not served as my cockpit, whether I was waiting to board a train or to see a dentist. And I am usually still trimming sheets when the train starts or drill begins to whine.

  E. B. White

  Men, Waiting Rooms, Years

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• It doesn't look nearly as big as it did the first time I saw one. Mickey McGuire and I used to sit hour after hour in the cockpit of the one that American used for training, at the company school in Chicago, saying to each other, 'My God, do you think we'll ever learn to fly anything this big?'

  Ernest K. Gann

  School, Thinking, After Hours

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