Quotes & Sayings About Pilots

Very often when I go in to meet for movies or pilots, I'm put on videotape. I hate the notion that that tape is going to sit on a shelf and never get better. — David Ogden Stiers

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

There is a decided prejudice on the part of the general public against being piloted by a woman, and as great an aversion, partially because of this, by executives of those companies whose activities require employing pilots. — Louise Thaden

Post-adolescent Expert Syndrome
The tendency of young people around the age of eighteen, males especially, to become altruistic experts on everything, a state of mind required by nature to ensure warriors who are willing to die with pleasure on the battlefield. Also the reason why religions recruit kamikaze pilots and suicide bombers almost exclusively from the 18-21 range. Kyle, I never would have guessed that when you were up in your bedroom playing World of Warcraft all through your teens, you were, in fact, becoming an expert on the films of Jean-Luc Godard. — Douglas Coupland

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

Ninety-nine percent of pilots that go up never have engine failure, and the 1 percent that do usually land it. But if you're up in the air and something goes wrong, you pull that parachute, and the whole plane goes down slowly. — Cory Lidle

To test. Would weightlessness put them off their game? It did. The turtles moved "slowly and insecurely" and did not attack a piece of bait placed directly in front of them. Then again, the water in which they swam was repeatedly floating up out of the jar and forming an "ovoid cupola." Who could eat? Von Beckh quickly moved on from turtles to Argentinean pilots. Under the section heading "Experiments with Human Subjects" - a heading that, were I a doctor previously employed by Nazi Germany, I might have rephrased - von Beckh reports on the efforts of the pilots to mark X's inside small boxes during regular and weightless flight. During weightlessness, many of the letters strayed from the boxes, indicating that pilots might experience difficulties maneuvering their planes and doing crossword puzzles during air battles. The following year, von Beckh was recruited by the Aeromedical Research Laboratory at Holloman Air Force — Mary Roach

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

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 the time since I've done 'Bad Teacher,' I've produced an independent movie and directed two pilots. So I love to do all different types of things. — Jake Kasdan

So just as I want pilots on the planes that I fly, when it comes to monetary policy, I want to think that there is someone with sound judgement at the controls. — Martin Feldstein

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

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

Yes, yes, I know they make better pilots than men do; their reactions are faster, and they can tolerate more gee. They can get in faster, get out faster, and thereby improve everybody's chances, yours as well as theirs. But that still doesn't make it fun to be slammed against your spine at ten times your proper weight. But — Robert A. Heinlein

The German Luftwaffe always fought without any reserves. This is also the reason why we have pilots with extremely high numbers of victories. — Adolf Galland

The pilot channel is doing what was expected. It is abating dust and giving us an inkling of what the area will look like when it is restored . — John Wallace

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

Any idiot would know women's needs are simple. All we want is your basic millionaire brain surgeon criminal lawyer great dancer who pilots his own Lear Jet and owns seafront property. On the other hand, things being what they are today, most of us will settle for a guy who holds down a steady job and isn't carrying an infectious disease. — Linda Sunshine

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

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

It's a terrible process, what you go through, during pilot season. All the shows turn themselves in and there is a good four to six weeks before you get phone call. — Sarah Michelle Gellar

Fighter pilots. What idiot idea possessed me to put fighter pilots at the controls of starships? — Evan Currie

I have broken the blue boundary of color limits, come out into the white; beside me comrade-pilots swim in this infinity. — Kazimir Malevich

I can still remember them wheeling the black and white TV sets into our classroom at school so we could watch the men landing on the Moon, and that obviously had a huge impact. I later found out those people flying Apollo were ex-military test pilots, so I decided to join the Air Force and become a test pilot. — David Mackay

How many people, how many of us want to get on an airplane where you know only, only 20% of the pilots use the checklist? Why would you do that? I think we should be outraged because the technology is there, it's totally available. We're just not using it yet. — William Davis

Saw you walking barefoot
taking a long look
at the new moon's eyelid
later spread
sleep-fallen, naked in your dark hair
asleep but not oblivious
of the unslept unsleeping
elsewhere
Tonight I think
no poetry
will serve
Syntax of rendition:
verb pilots the plane
adverb modifies action
verb force-feeds noun
submerges the subject
noun is choking
verb disgraced goes on doing
now diagram the sentence — Adrienne Rich

What if airplane pilots said, 'my first three years were a wreck'? We worry about the safety of people at the hands of these other professions. Why don't we worry about children being at the hands of an adult, even a well-meaning adult, who doesn't know what he or she is doing? — Deborah

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

Had an audition for a pilot today, but realized I could save gas and help the environment by pissing up a rope here at home! — Dana Gould

Accuracy means something to me. It's vital to my sense of values. I've learned not to trust people who are inaccurate. Every aviator knows that if mechanics are inaccurate, aircraft crash. If pilots are inaccurate, they get lost-sometimes killed. In my profession life itself depends on accuracy. — Charles Lindbergh

In the summer of 2002, we had spent six weeks shooting the three pilots of Mythbusters, and Jamie[Hyneman] called me up afterward - well, first he called me up to tell me to clear my crap back out of his shop - and he said, "Well, that was kind of fun, wasn't it? I mean, I don't see where this could go, because we pretty much did everything. But it was fun." — Adam Savage

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

If there is a hell, then I'll be in good company with a lot of fighter pilots who also had to bomb innocents to win the war. — Timothy McVeigh

In our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and headlands, and if we go beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighboring cape; and not till we are completely lost, or turned round,
for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost,
do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. — Henry David Thoreau

My father was an interpreter for all the Latin American pilots at the naval base. He was very well educated. My mother was a hairdresser who sang every day. — Pepe Serna

You read a lot of pilots during pilot season, and not all of them really grab you. — Brandon Jay McLaren

An infantryman can fight only if somebody else delivers him to his zone; in a way I suppose pilots are just as essential as we are. — Robert A. Heinlein

Just as airplane pilots must maintain contact with air traffic control towers, you and I must stay in touch with God - the one who sees the big picture of our lives and who orchestrates everything that involves us. He — Joyce Meyer

There are pilots and there are pilots; with the good ones, it is inborn. You can't teach it. If you are a fighter pilot, you have to be willing to take risks. — Robin Olds

Skillful pilots gain their reputation from storms and tempest. — Epicurus

Few years ago I did a movie, Good Kill, about drone pilots and for four or five months I'm obsessed with the Air Force. — Ethan Hawke

Yet the apparent strength of this 3-G jihad belies its very weakness. Every day, its supporters post online thousands of revealing messages and videos, giving away much more useful information about themselves than was known about Al Qaeda after 9/11. Their freedom of action has encouraged acts of extreme cruelty, which risks provoking a backlash (consider, for example, the Jordanian government's reaction to the execution of one of its pilots) and alienating potential recruits. — Anonymous

Divas do it, golfers do it, pilots do it, violists do it, sprinters do it, soldiers do it, surgeons do it, astronauts do it ... only business people think it isn't necessary to train. — Tom Peters

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

Mankind spends much more on training pilots of aircraft than it does to train the nuclear reactor operators. — Abdus Salam

Pilot season in L.A. is just this blood bath. They make so many pilots, and such a small percentage are picked up. And then if you are picked up, there are so many variables. You have to get a good time slot, and you have to get promoted. And then you have to thrive in that time slot. — Michaela Conlin

read the brilliant compilation of testimonies in Leslie Kean's book: "UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record." The — John DeSouza

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

Started off local but thanks to all the haters, I know G4 pilots on a first name basis. — Drake

Arthur Scargill's leadership of the miners' strike has been a disgrace. The price to be paid for his folly will be immense. He will have destroyed the N.U.M. as an effective fighting force within British trade unionism for the next 20 years. If kamikaze pilots were to form their own union, Arthur would be an ideal choice for leader. — Jimmy Reid

(Looking at the letter in his hand) Then what is this if it isn't telling me? Sure, [Larry] was my son. But I think to him [the pilots killed] were all my sons. And I guess they were, I guess they were — Arthur Miller

I was a bombadier in WW 2. When you are up 30,000 feet you do not hear the screams or smell the blood or see those without limbs or eyes. It was not til I read Hersey's Hiroshima that I realized what bomber pilots do. — Howard Zinn

Spacemen - men who work in space, pilots and jetmen and astrogators and such - are men who like a few million miles of elbow room. — Robert A. Heinlein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Once embarked on a course of sensationalism, the composer is forced into a descending spiral spin from which only the most experienced pilot can flatten out in time. — Constant Lambert

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NO ONE starts a trip thinking that they might crash. Even though there is always a possibility, no one in their right mind ever begins a journey thinking that it's going to end in failure. There are only two types of people in the world who are aware and plan on crashing before they ever start : test pilots and teenage boys. — John Goode

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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