Emergency! We need altitude. Open the side door and start throwing cargo out.
Ok, we made it!
My Dad’s story about riding in an overloaded cargo plane that was going to hit a mountain in Korea. They threw out the cargo and just barely made altitude to get over the mountain.
From a friend of mine:
All plane crashes have the same cause. A lack of ground clearance.
A local chicken wing place is called “The Wing Stop”. They’ve got a poster with an anonymous quote (I guess?) from World War II:
“Two turnin’ and two burnin’ - and flak so thick you could walk on it.”
Yeah, I could imagine there’d be circumstances where you’d look a little wistfully out the window and wonder for just a moment whether it just might be better to get out and walk… but only for a moment, I suppose.
I disagree.
Yes, things can go wrong. But it’s not like in the movies where if you sneeze you explode. A great deal of training is in emergency situations and how to avoid them. I feel safer in an aircraft than I do in a car.
Last time I checked, only one crash in five resulted in a fatality, and crashes are very rare.
How about ‘six turning and four burning’? From the Convair B-36, which operated from 1949 to 1959.
Some one once described a piston air craft to me this way:
Thousands of bits of metal arranged in a particular way, so that when you set off a series of explosions inside them, the pieces bounce off each other in just such a fashion that the entire assembly moves through the air. Now if that ain’t witchcraft, I don’t know what is.
Don’t know if it was original to him, and I kind of doubt it.
Tris
A marginally aviation-related quote.
Aboard the carrier Yorktown in the closing months of the war, besieged by kamikaze attacks, a gunner who had seen action around Guadalcanal earlier in the war described the kamikazes: “The Solomons in all their glory had not a raid like one of these!”
(Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.)
Try to keep your number of landings equal to your number of takeoffs.
NTSB - 4/12/2009 - 4/12/2010:
Accidents, NOT incidents:
Non-fatal: 1186
Fatal: 342
All aircraft types, all operations
Thanks for the correction.
The only time you have too much fuel is when you are on fire.
Here’s one that’s not directly about aviation, unless you know who said it:
“Humans are the best value in computers. Where else can you get a non-linear computer weighing only about 160 pounds, having a billion binary decision elements, that can be mass-produced by unskilled labor?”
Scott Crossfield
Before flying in a DeHavilland Beaver (radial engine), the advice was to “fill it up with oil and check the gas.”
All aircraft eventualy land.
Booker’s first flight was in a Piper PA 11.Over 30 years ago. Fond memories. Thanks Brian.
Can’t remember where I saw it, but I remember something similar about a helicopter: it’s the only kind of flying machine that tries to fling its various bits and pieces over a large area without having to crash first.
Helicopters are inherently unstable.
I don’t know who said it, but it’s true.
Later “Three turning, three burning, two joking, and two smoking”.
“As a pilot, there are only two bad things that can happen to you, and someday one of them will. You can walk out to the airplane knowing it’s your last flight. Or you can walk out to the airplane NOT knowing it’s your last flight.”
Another that just came to me:
“If you lose an engine on takeoff while flying a multi-engine aircraft, you may have just enough power left to get to the scene of the crash”.
And a bad joke:
The FAA requires every pilot to take a periodic checkflight. So one day the flight examiner showed up at the North Pole, and he and Santa went out to the sleigh. After reviewing Santa’s paperwork, inspecting the aircraft, and reviewing the flight plan, Santa and the examiner got into the sleigh and prepared to get underway. The examiner rested a shotgun against the seat.
Santa asked, “What’s that for?”
The examiner said, “I’m not supposed to tell you ahead of time, but you’re gonna lose an engine on takeoff”
On 9/11 the flight controllers did not know what to fo. When the order was issued to land all planes, someone asked in a stunned voice “Are we gicing the planes the option to land?”
The reply was “You get those fucking planes out of that fucking sky.”
For those of you who can’t get enough aviation quotes I recommend the following website: