Quotes & Sayings About Flight Safety

Spaceflight will never tolerate carelessness, incapacity, and neglect. Somewhere, somehow, we screwed up. It could have been in design, build, or test. Whatever it was, we should have caught it. We were too gung ho about the schedule and we locked out all of the problems we saw each day in our work. Every element of the program was in trouble and so were we. The simulators were not working, Mission Control was behind in virtually every area, and the flight and test procedures changed daily. — Gene Kranz

Should everything pass away,
it couldn't happen without You.
This heart of mines bears Your imprint;
it has nowhere else to turn.
The eye of the intellect is drunk with You,
the wheeling galaxy is humble before You,
the ear of ecstasy is in Your hand;
nothing happens without You.
The soul is bubbling with You,
the heart imbibes from You,
the intellect bellows in rapture;
nothing happens without You.
You, my grape wine and my intoxication,
my rose garden and my springtime,
my sleep and repose;
nothing happens without You.
You are my grandeur and glory,
you are my possessions and prosperity,
you are my purest water;
nothing happens without You — Rumi

But seat-back video screens and the hard frames that surround them pose a safety challenge, partly because of the potential for injuries caused by head strikes, and partly because the computers and the electrical systems that serve them have to be both fireproof and fully isolated from the plane's - so that crossed wires in somebody's seat don't allow a ten-year-old playing a video game to suddenly take control of the cockpit. Largely as a result, in-flight entertainment systems are almost unbelievably expensive. The rule of thumb, I was told, is "a thousand dollars an inch" - meaning that the small screen in the back of each economy seat can cost an airline ten thousand dollars, plus a few thousand for its handheld controller. — Anonymous

To allow public access to orbit, we would need breakthroughs that would lower the cost by a lot more than an order of magnitude and increase safety by a factor of 100 as compared to every launch system used since the first manned space flight. I think airborne launch will be a significant part of the safety solution. — Burt Rutan

Blood is everywhere..
Vultures take shelter beneath the tanks;
for the fumed sky is unsafe for their avian flight to prey on the Palestinian flesh. — Munia Khan

The worship of God is not a rule of safety - it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable. — Alfred North Whitehead

In a series of experiments, safety officials ran regular people through mock evacuations from planes. The trials weren't nearly as stressful as real evacuations, of course, but it didn't matter. People, especially women, hesitated for a surprisingly long time before jumping onto the slide. That pause slowed the evacuation for everyone. But there was a way to get people to move faster. If a flight attendant stood at the exit and screamed at people to jump, the pause all but disappeared, the researchers found. In fact, if flight attendants did not aggressively direct the evacuation, they might as well have not been there at all. A study by the Cranfield University Aviation Safety Centre found that people moved just as slowly for polite and calm flight attendants as they did when there were no flight attendants present. — Amanda Ripley

Space flight still had a long way to go to catch up with the safety record of the milkshake industry. — Kevin Fong

Safety is not a destination that we reach for, rather it is a retreat that we escape to. And if our lives are marked by the incessant search for safety, we will live the whole of it going in reverse. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

People developed planes first and then took care of flight safety. If people were focused on safety first, no one would ever have built a plane. — Mark Zuckerberg

The perils of aviation in the period are neatly encapsulated in the experience of Harold C. Brinsmead, the head of Australia's Civil Aviation Department in the first days of commercial aviation. In 1931, Brinsmead was on a flight to London, partly for business and partly to demonstrate the safety and reliability of modern air passenger services, when his plane crashed on takeoff in Indonesia. No one was seriously hurt, but the plane was a write-off. Not wanting to wait for a replacement aircraft to be flown in, Brinsmead boarded a flight with the new Dutch airline, KLM. That flight crashed while taking off in Bangkok. On this occasion, five people were killed and Brinsmead suffered serious injuries from which he never recovered. He died two years later. Meanwhile, the surviving passengers carried on to London in a replacement plane. That plane crashed on the return trip. Daly — Bill Bryson

We are constantly emphasizing to people that they need to address anything that affects flight safety or mission success - many pathways to do that. We need to understand better what may be preventing people from using those pathways. — Ellen Ochoa

By 1931, after a few years' experience of flying scheduled airlines, those planes were operating at roughly 600 times the safety of the space shuttle. I look at safety not in terms of fatalities per passenger-mile, but when you get in and close the door, what is the risk of dying on this flight? — Burt Rutan

If God had wanted women to have giant, fake boobs he'd be a lot like my brother. — Dana Gould

I think I live in this mythical world where doing the parts I do is not going to hurt me, and telling people my age is not going to hurt me. And it actually does. It's a bit sick-making but, you know, I can't change who I am. — Jennifer Jason Leigh

To speak impartially, the best men that I know are not serene, a world in themselves. For the most part, they dwell in forms, andflatter and study effect only more finely than the rest. — Henry David Thoreau

You can almost see voters nodding their heads at home: The public's faith in politicians and political institutions has been on a steep and dangerous decline for decades, because elected leaders fail to deliver. — Ron Fournier

Networks do not offer a miracle drug, a strategy that makes you invincible in any business environment. The truly important role networks play is in helping existing organizations adapt to rapidly changing market conditions. The very concept of network implies a multidimensional approach. — Albert-Laszlo Barabasi

What we have seen with Islamist extremism, whether it is in Mali or Somalia or Afghanistan, is that the disease is not necessarily the individual country. The disease is the Islamist extremism, and that's what we have to fight; that's the narrative that we have to beat. — David Cameron

Only realistic flight schedules should be proposed, schedules that have a reasonable chance of being met. If in this way the government would not support them, then so be it. NASA owes it to the citizens from whom it asks support to be frank, honest, and informative. — Richard P. Feynman

If I can tell you anything today, it is that you should never, ever believe your eyes. Or your mind, for that matter. — James Dashner

To hope for safety in flight, when you have turned away from the enemy the arms by which the body is defended, is indeed madness. In battle those who are most afraid are always in most danger; but courage is equivalent to rampart. — Sallust

Although no definite reason for the accident has been established, modifications are being embodied to cover every possibility that imagination has suggested as a likely cause of the disaster. When these modifications are completed and have been satisfactorily flight tested, the Board sees no reason why passenger services should not be resumed. — John Moore-Brabazon, 1st Baron Brabazon Of Tara

There are two critical points in every aerial flight-its beginning and its end. — Alexander Graham Bell

Everything begins with failing. If you stop to fail, then your failing to stop, to try and try again, and bring success. — Anthony Liccione

You find what you love and you learn everything about it. You bet your life on what you know and run from safety, off your mountain into the air, trusting the Principle of Flight to bring you soaring up on lift you cannot see with your eyes. — Richard Bach

Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight. — Pico Iyer

In the centre of Bond was a hurricane-room, the kind of citadel found in old-fashioned houses in the tropics. These rooms are small, strongly built cells in the heart of the house, in the middle of the ground floor and sometimes dug down into its foundations. To this cell the owner and his family retire if the storm threatens to destroy the house, and they stay there until the danger is past. Bond went to his hurricane room only when the situation was beyond his control and no other possible action could be taken. Now he retired to this citadel, closed his mind to the hell of noise and violent movement, and focused on a single stitch in the back of the seat in front of him, waiting with slackened nerves for whatever fate had decided for B. E. A. Flight No. 130. — Ian Fleming