New Year Inspiration for Pilots and Aviation Professionals

To help kick off 2017 on a positive note, we present you with another compilation of inspirational, wise, and downright funny, quotes on aviation, aircraft and flying. These are consistently one of our most popular features—we hope you enjoy and wish you a very Happy New Year!

Inspiration and insights

“My soul is in the sky.” — William Shakespeare

“The desire to fly is an idea handed down to us by our ancestors who, in their grueling travels across trackless lands in prehistoric times, looked enviously on the birds soaring freely through space, at full speed, above all obstacles, on the infinite highway of the air.” — Wilbur Wright

“The engine is the heart of an airplane, but the pilot is its soul.” — Walter Raleigh

“The bluebird carries the sky on his back.” — Henry David Thoreau

“The Wright Brothers created the single greatest cultural force since the invention of writing. The airplane became the first World Wide Web, bringing people, languages, ideas, and values together.” — Bill Gates

“In flying I have learned that carelessness and overconfidence are usually far more dangerous than deliberately accepted risks.” — Wilbur Wright in a letter to his father, September 1900 

“There are only two emotions in a plane: boredom and terror.” — Orson Welles

“Learning to fly an airplane taught me a way of thinking, an approach to problem-solving that was applicable and effective. Pilots are very methodical and meticulous, and artists tend not to be.” — Chris Carter

“Whenever we safely land in a plane, we promise God a little something.” — Mignon McLaughlin

“Sometimes, flying feels too godlike to be attained by man. Sometimes, the world from above seems too beautiful, too wonderful, too distant for human eyes to see.” — Charles A. Lindbergh

“The modern airplane creates a new geographical dimension. A navigable ocean of air blankets the whole surface of the globe. There are no distant places any longer: the world is small and the world is one.” — Wendell Willkie

“O! for a horse with wings!” — William Shakespeare

“I pick the prettiest part of the sky and I melt into the wing and then into the air, till I’m just soul on a sunbeam.” — Richard Bach

“Bicycling is the nearest approximation I know to the flight of birds. The airplane simply carries a man on its back like an obedient Pegasus; it gives him no wings of his own.” — Louis J. Helle

“The air up there in the clouds is very pure and fine, bracing and delicious. And why shouldn’t it be? It is the same the angels breathe.” — Mark Twain

“When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.” — Leonardo Da Vinci

“A pilot who doesn't have any fear probably isn’t flying his plane to its maximum.” — Astronaut and pilot, Jon A. McBride

“Pilots are a rare kind of human. They leave the ordinary surface of the word, to purify their soul in the sky, and they come down to earth, only after receiving the communion of the infinite.” — José María Velasco Ibarra

“I think it is a pity to lose the romantic side of flying and simply to accept it as a common means of transport.” — Amy Johnson

“Lovers of air travel find it exhilarating to hang poised between the illusion of immortality and the fact of death.” — Alexander Chase

“If happy little bluebirds fly beyond the rainbow, why oh why can’t I?” — E.Y. Harburg

“Once you have learned to fly your plane, it is far less fatiguing to fly than it is to drive a car. You don’t have to watch every second for cats, dogs, children, lights, road signs, ladies with baby carriages and citizens who drive out in the middle of the block against the lights. Nobody who has not been up in the sky on a glorious morning can possibly imagine the way a pilot feels in free heaven.” — William T. Piper

“Never fly in the same cockpit with someone braver than you.” — Richard Herman, Jr., ‘Firebreak’

“Never fly the ‘A’ model of anything.” — Ed Thompson 

Quotes courtesy of thefreshquotes.com.

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