Best Pilots Quotes & Sayings

Whenever you get on the plane, the flight attendant will always tell you the name of your pilot. Like anyone goes, Oh, he's good. — David Spade

I remembered what Mr. Hall had told me when I first asked him for a lesson: the kids who watch planes are destined to be pilots. — Jennifer Echols

The general's staff is a handpicked collection of killers, spies, geniuses, patriots, political operators and outright maniacs. There's a former head of British Special Forces, two Navy Seals, an Afghan Special Forces commando, a lawyer, two fighter pilots and at least two dozen combat veterans and counterinsurgency experts. They jokingly refer to themselves as Team America, taking the name from the South Park-esque sendup of military cluelessness, and they pride themselves on their can-do attitude and their disdain for authority. — Michael Hastings

She's decisive, she's aggressive, she's proven she's capable with high-performance jets. We look for people with the capability to think on their feet and to be able to lead a team of people. We look for the best pilots out there, and if they happen to be women, great, but we're just looking for the best. — David Leestma

I've had a long line of failed television programs, pilots that were never picked up, series that didn't go very long. I've learned that there's really nothing you can do. If it's not in my control, I try not to worry about it. — Nathan Fillion

The best pilots fly more than the others; that's why they're the best. — Chuck Yeager

I've done a lot of pilots. A lot of shows. You're young and you do a job just because you know someone gave you a job. — John Slattery

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

There's this funny thing with pilots that you have to sign the contract to do the whole job before you're even offered the part. And they make about a million pilots a year, but hardly any of them get turned into series. — Eve Best

It was a unique childhood, to say the least. My father was born in Patiala to refugee parents and was a part of the Indian Air Force. The talented few amongst the Air Force pilots are made test pilots. Test pilots are best suited to look at the space programme as they are trained to expect the unexpected. — Kapil Sharma

I have flown in just about everything, with all kinds of pilots in all parts of the world - British, French, Pakistani, Iranian, Japanese, Chinese - and there wasn't a dime's worth of difference between any of them except for one unchanging, certain fact: the best, most skillful pilot has the most experience. — Chuck Yeager

'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' ends with the spaceship lands and Richard Dreyfuss' character best on, but a bunch of pilots and sailors from the 1940s get off. You kind of wanted to know what happened next. — Jonathan Nolan

I once heard an air force commander tell his pilots that every second, they are making a decision to change course or to stay their course, and that they should always think about their actions as active choices. The problem is that very few of us think about our decisions this way. We think that moving, getting married, changing jobs, etc., as decisions, but we don't think about staying in the same place, staying single, keeping the same job etc., as decisions. Or at least we don't think of them as decisions to the same degree. — Dan Ariely

I've heard that George Clooney did something like nine pilots before 'ER' was picked up, way back when he was doing TV. It's just the way the business works. There are a lot of pilots that we've never seen. It's protocol. — Andie MacDowell

Today it is even more important to dominate the ... highly sophisticated weapon systems, perhaps even more important than being a good pilot; to make the best use of this system. — Adolf Galland

I never trust the airlines from those countries where the pilots believe in the afterlife. You are safer when they don't. — Muriel Spark

It sucked, but it was way cool at the same time," Gazzy said. "I felt like the Blue Angels!"
"Yeah, except the blue Angels are an extremely well funded, well equipped, well trained, well fed, and no doubt squeaky-clean group of crack navy pilots," I said. "And we're a bunch of unfunded, unequipped, semitrained, not nearly well fed enough, and filthy mongrel avian-human hybrids. But other than that, it's exactly the same. — James Patterson

I've been asked to direct pilots for a lot of shows. — M. Night Shyamalan

You had to come back to learn how to lose yourself, to be pilot and stray-witch, Hansel and Gretel in one. — Seamus Heaney

Tom's Navy SEAL team nicknamed him 'Tailspin', especially after sustaining his knee injury, but Joe likes to call him his 'Lucky Charm' -- saved his tail too many times to count. — L.A. Kragie

Disney has been such a big part of my early career. I've done two pilots for Disney, and I've been working with them since I was 16, and I just turned 21. — Spencer Boldman

I did some commercials and a couple of B movies, then a few pilots that didn't go anywhere. Eventually I did the pilot for Beverly Hills, 90210. The rest is history. — Brian Austin Green

I had done 'Die Hard' and it was somebody's franchise. I actually just got done with the 'Hawaii Five-O' pilot and I was developing some things of my own. So 'Total Recall' one of those projects that I read wanting more not to like it. — Len Wiseman

Any pilot can describe the mechanics of flying. What it can do for the spirit of man is beyond description. — Barry Goldwater

I employ 20 people in Vienna. The other 130 coworkers are pilots and flight companions. The Overhead is limited with me. Reduces naturally the costs of my fliers. — Niki Lauda

You get more out of doing a web series than a pilot, in some ways, especially when we were interviewing for writers. They had already seen what our show looked like, rather than something that we wrote that doesn't get picked up and they never see it. — Jillian Bell

I'm an Air Force officer first, a pilot second and then Nicole. The female part is last ... My job is to be the best right wingman that I can be. — Nicole Malachowski

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

I think aerobatic pilots make the best pilots because you know, you're just so confident in an aeroplane. If you're gonna get into trouble, I'd rather be with someone that's a skilled aerobatic pilot. — Janine Shepherd

Corran: "I thought Commander Antilles was in that TIE. I mean it had to be someone as good as him to get you three"
Nawara: "Apparently he is that good"
Rhysati: "He flew circles around me"
Ooryl: "At least you saw him. He caught Ooryl as Ooryl fixed on his wingman. Ooryl is free hydrogen in simspace. That man is very good."
Corran: "Sure, but who is he?"
Rhysati: "What difference does it make who he is?"
Corran: "Rhys, he shot up three of our best pilots, had me dead in space, and he says he's a bit RUSTY! — Michael A. Stackpole

I am the best bodyguard, because I'll take a bullet, I'll take a stab wound, I'll take a hit upside the head; I'm like a kamikaze pilot. — Mr. T

The mandate for the CTO's office is to unleash the power of technology, data, and innovation on behalf of the nation. The CTO's office is really trying to bring best practices, possibilities, pilots, and policy advising. — Megan Smith

At best, the true philosopher can fulfil his mission very imperfectly, which is to pilot himself, or at most a few voluntary companions who may find themselves in the same boat. — George Santayana

The best pilots have need of mariners, besides sails, anchor and other tackle. — Ben Jonson

As a physician and as a pilot, I think it lets me be a pretty good translator having one foot in the medical world and one foot in the flying world. Sometimes when the medical guys come in and speak medical stuff to the pilots, the pilots really don't know what they're saying. — David M. Brown

This is why being a helicopter pilot is so different from being an airplane pilot, and why in generality, airplane pilots are open, clear-eyed, buoyant extroverts, and helicopter pilots are brooding introspective anticipators of trouble. They know if something bad has not happened it is about to. — Harry Reasoner

An excellent weapon and luck had been on my side. To be successful, the best fighter pilot needs both. — Adolf Galland

Then there was the challenge to keep doing better and better, to fly the best test flight that anybody had ever flown. That led to my being recognized as one of the more experienced test pilots, and that led to the astronaut business. — Alan Shepard

We love surfers for the same reasons we have always admired doctors and pilots and firemen and shamans, for the same reasons we admire excellent soldiers: because despite themselves they have bowed to a force much greater than themselves, which in this case is the wave, and submitted to the gnarly rigors of its discipline. They have allowed themselves to be shaped and polished by the sea. They have given themselves up to this greater force, day after day, year after year. Crushed and punished, battered into something tempered and resilient, and sharpened to an edge by constant refinement. They are warriors in the best sense: by bending to the often brutal demands of surfing they have transformed themselves into beings who can respond to great violence with grace and humility. And beauty. — Peter Heller

For 'Breaking Bad,' it was like, that's one of the best pilots, probably the best pilot I have ever read. — Betsy Brandt

It's a funny thing. I'll be in my home town of Columbus at a restaurant or something, and the waiter maybe asks, 'What do you do?' and I say, 'Oh, I'm in a band ... Twenty One Pilots,' and he'll say, 'Cool, I'll check it out. I never heard of them.' And then I say, 'In September we're playing the Schottenstein Center,' and it's like, 'What?!' — Tyler Joseph

Who was the best pilot I ever saw? You're lookin' at 'im. — Gordon Cooper

It seems incredible to those who knew Mark Twain in his later years - dreamy, unpractical, and indifferent to details - that he could have acquired so vast a store of minute facts as were required by that task. Yet within eighteen months he had become not only a pilot, but one of the best and most careful pilots on the river, intrusted with some of the largest and most valuable steamers. He continued in that profession for two and a half years longer, and during that time met with no disaster that cost his owners a single dollar for damage. Then — Mark Twain

Something else emerges from this discussion about us as human individuals: we're not fixed, stable intellects riding along peering at the world through the lenses of our eyes like the pilots of people-shaped spacecraft. We are affected constantly by what's going on around us. Whether our flexibility is based in neuroplasticity or in less dramatic aspects of the brain, we have to start acknowledging that we are mutable, persuadable and vulnerable to clever distortions, and that very often what we want to be is a matter of constant effort rather than attaining a given state and then forgetting about it. Being human isn't like hanging your hat on a hook and leaving it there, it's like walking in a high wind: you have to keep paying attention. You have to be engaged with the world. — Nick Harkaway

Somebody said that carrier pilots were the best in the world, and they must be or there wouldn't be any of them left alive. — Ernie Pyle

It's scary to sign a six-year contract for something that you don't necessarily know about. And yet I did that most every year. I've done a lot of failed pilots. — Lizzy Caplan

Listen up, Nic," she said firmly, looking straight into his gray-blue eyes. "If you die on me out here, so help me I'll hold seances and pester you. I won't give you a moment's peace in the hereafter," she threatened in a fierce whisper. Gabrielle O'Hara, River of Dreams — Sharon K. Garner

This creature's career could produce but one result, and it speedily followed. Boy after boy managed to get on the river. The minister's son became an engineer. The doctor's and the post-master's sons became 'mud clerks;' the wholesale liquor dealer's son became a barkeeper on a boat; four sons of the chief merchant, and two sons of the county judge, became pilots. Pilot was the grandest position of all. The pilot, even in those days of trivial wages, had a princely salary - from a hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty dollars a month, and no board to pay. Two months of his wages would pay a preacher's salary for a year. Now some of us were left disconsolate. We could not get on the river - at least our parents would not let us. — Mark Twain

Pilots take no special joy in walking. Pilots like flying. — Neil Armstrong

Beauty is the pilot of the young soul. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Dolly'd given him a white silk scarf as a parting present. He didn't know how she'd managed the money for it and she wouldn't let him ask, just settled it round his neck inside his flight jacket. Somebody'd told her the Spitfire pilots all wore them, to save the constant collar chafing, and she meant him to have one. It felt nice, he'd admit that. Made him think of her touch when she'd put it on him. He pushed the thought hastily aside; the last thing he could afford to do was start thinking about his wife, if he ever hoped to get back to her. And he did mean to get back to her. Where — Diana Gabaldon

Most pilots learn, when they pin on their wings and go out and get in a fighter, especially, that one thing you don't do, you don't believe anything anybody tells you about an airplane. — Chuck Yeager

For fear of dropping the troops in the sea, the pilots tended to drop them too far inland - some of them actually in the British lines. The weapon containers often fell wide of the troops, which was another handicap that contributed to our excessive casualties. — Kurt Student

We asked Jane Fonda if she would like to meet American pilots in Hanoi, but she refused, she didn't want to. — Hanoi Hannah

While flying with several other USAF pilots over Germany in 1957, we sighted numerous radiant flying discs above us. We couldn't tell how high they were. We couldn't get anywhere near their altitude. — Gordon Cooper

Death is the handmaiden of the pilot. Sometimes it comes by accident, sometimes by an act of God. — Albert Scott Crossfield

Nearly one-quarter of all orcas captured for display during the late sixties and early seventies showed signs of bullet wounds. Royal Canadian fighter pilots used to bomb orcas during practice runs, and in 1960, private fishing lodges on Vancouver Island persuaded the Canadian government to install a machine gun at Campbell River to cull the orca population. — David Kirby

You are supposed to know how to fly or you would not be here. You will now learn to fly all over again. Our way. I have examined your logbooks. They contain some interesting and clever lies. If you are lucky and work a good solid eighteen hours a day in this school, it is barely possible that a few of you may succeed in actually going out on the line-that is, if the company is still in such desperate need of pilots that it will hire anybody who wears his wings in his lapel and walks slowly past the front door. — Ernest K. Gann

This is an especially good time for you vacationers who plan to fly, because the Reagan administration, as part of the same policy under which it recently sold Yellowstone National Park to Wayne Newton, has "deregulated" the airline industry. What this means for you, the consumer, is that the airlines are no longer required to follow any rules whatsoever. They can show snuff movies. They can charge for oxygen. They can hire pilots right out of Vending Machine Refill Person School. — Dave Barry

I intend to be the greatest golfer in the world, the finest film producer in Hollywood, the greatest pilot in the world, and the richest man in the world. — Howard Hughes

We have to pilot our own dreams - we cannot entrust them to anyone else. — John C. Maxwell

Your heart pilots you to a far better life than you could have ever dreamed of. That's how the heart works. — Sonia Choquette

I market for the same reason a pilot keeps his engines running once he is off the ground. — William Wrigley Jr.

It is wonderful how cheered a pilot becomes after he shoots down his first machine; his morale increases by at least 100 percent. — James Ira Thomas Jones

For all professional pilots there exists a kind of guild, without charter and without by-laws. it demands no requirements for inclusion save an understanding of the wind, the compass, the rudder, and fair fellowship. — Beryl Markham

The only mystery in life is why the kamikaze pilots wore helmets. — Al McGuire

As I slowly managed to take what I had learned into a transition from contestant to announcer and warm-up, I first had to prove myself on pilots. And as you know, many pilots are taped for each show that is lucky enough to breakthrough to being a series. — Randy West

Prior to providing their freedom UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi, apparently sensing a change in the tide, said that the two pilots were released, 'to show Cuba that we are also men, revolutionaries and human. — Peter Polack

Pilots have their names painted just beneath the canopy of their aircraft. This gives the pilot a sense of ownership for his or her jet. What's more, like cars, each aircraft has its own personality, so it's important for a pilot to get to know and love his aircraft. — Simon Sinek

A short, glorious life in service of a greater good - say, the life of the Spartans at Thermopylae, or the pilots in the Battle of Britain, of whom Winston Churchill said 'Never have so many owed so much to so few,' - that is worth praising. But for glory alone? I think not. — Tim O'Reilly

Any girl who has flown at all grows used to the prejudice of most men pilots who will trot out any number of reasons why women can't possibly be good pilots ... The only way to show the disbelievers, the snickering hangar pilots, is to show them. — Cornelia Fort

The channel is known only to the natives; so that if any stranger should enter into the bay without one of their pilots he would run great danger of shipwreck. — Thomas More

For pilots sometimes see behind the curtain, behind the veil of gossamer velvet, and find the truth behind man, the force behind a universe. — Richard Bach

In aviation they have auto pilot and color radar and a lot of other instrumentation that is a backup for pilots. It's really brought the incidents of plane crashes way down. Same thing ought to happen in the medical industry, I think. — Dennis Quaid