Quote of the day

"I think we can build a better plane."  
- William Boeing, 1914 (phrase later became company's motto) "IFR: I Follow Roads."  
- cliché (seriously, IFR means this...) "Up in the sky, look! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's Superman!"  
- Narrator, 1941 movie Superman "Now I know what a dog feels like watching TV."  
- A DC-9 captain trainee attempting to check out on the 'glass' A320. "Flying is not dangerous. Crashing is dangerous."  
- cliché
"If black boxes survive air crashes - why don't they make the whole plane out of that stuff?"   - George Carlin (and here's the answer...) "To most people, the sky is the limit. To those who love aviation, the sky is home."   - Anonymous "No need to teach an eagle to fly."  
- Greek proverb "A commercial aircraft is a vehicle capable of supporting itself aerodynamically and economically at the same time."  
- William B. Stout, designer of the Ford Tri-Motor "Most executives don't have the stomach for this stuff."  
- Robert W. Baker, American Airlines "My wings are a thousand books"  
- Gill Robb Wilson "Man's flight through life is sustained by the power of his knowledge."  
- Austin 'Dusty' Miller, quote on Eagle & Fledgling statue, USAF Academy. "In thrust I trust."  
- cliché "Flying a plane is no different from riding a bicycle. It's just a lot harder to put baseball cards in the spokes."  
- Capt. Rex Kramer in the 1980 movie Airplane! "Citation 123, if you quit calling me center, I'll quit calling you twin Cessna."  
- actual transmission heard at the O'Hare TRACON "Twenty-five per cent of the passengers of almost any aircraft show white knuckles on take-off."   - Colin Marshall, CEO British Airways "Talking about airplanes is a very pleasant mental disease."  
- Sergei Sikorsky, AOPA Pilot magazine, Feb. 2003. "Motor cut. Forced landing. Hit cow. Cow died. Scared me."   - Dean Smith, telegraph to his chief, quoted by Amelia Earhart, The Fun of It, 1932. "The whole history of the Canadian North can be divided into two periods - before and after the aeroplane."   - Hugh L. Keenleyside, Deputy Canadian Minister of Mines and Resources, Oct 1949. "Words are heavy like rocks. They weigh you down. If birds could talk, they wouldn't be able to fly."  
- Marilyn, from the TV show Northern Exposure "The state of our airline industry is a national embarrassment."  
- Tom Plaskett, Chairman Pan Am, following the airline's collapse "Why is it turning?... Yes it is."  
- El'dar Kudrinsky, 15 year-old (son of Capt., Aeroflot 593, last recorded words, crashed Mar. 22, 1994) "Simplicate and Add Lightness"  
- design philosophy of Ed Heinemann, Douglas Aircraft. "A free ride and free food are two of the three things no pilot ever turns down."   - attributed to Dick Rutan "You little fool! Don't you know it is even dangerous to look at an airplane?"   - Spencer Tracy, advice to Myrna Loy, 1938 movie Test Pilot. "For a plane to fly well, it must be beautiful."  
- Marcel Dassault "Did he not clear the runway, that Pan American?"   - F/E William Schreuder, KLM (shortly before Tenerife collision Mar, 27, 1977) "You can be in London at 10 o'clock and in New York at 10 o'clock. I have never found another way of being in two places at once."  
- Sir David Frost, British journalist and Concorde regular "I didn't start out to chart the skies: it's just no one had done it before."  
- E. B. Jeppesen, founder of namesake company of aviation charts "Aviation is for grown men, alert, strong and above all capable of endurance."   - Charles Turner, holder of many early aviation records "Oh no, it wasn't the aeroplanes. It was Beauty killed the Beast."  
- James Creelman, Final words of 1933 movie King Kong