Chuck Yeager Quotes

26 quotes in 369 categories

• The first time I ever saw a jet, I shot it down.
• After about 30 minutes I puked all over my airplane. I said to my self, "Man, you made a big mistake."
• I have flown in just about everything, with all kinds of pilots in all parts of the world - British, French, Pakistani, Iranian, Japanese, Chinese…
• All that I am ... I owe to the Air Force.
• There is no such thing as a natural born pilot. Whatever my aptitudes or talents, becoming a proficient pilot was hard work, really a lifetime's…
• The best pilots fly more than the others; that's why they're the best.
• What good does it do to be afraid? It doesn't help anything. You better try and figure out what's happening and correct it.
• Unfortunately, many people do not consider fun an important item on their daily agenda. For me, that was always a high priority in whatever I…
• At the moment of truth, there are either reasons or results.
• Later, I realized that the mission had to end in a let-down because the real barrier wasn't in the sky but in our knowledge and…
• Never wait for trouble.
• That to me is a bunch of crap trying to shoot guys up into damned space. What they're going to do is they're going to…
• Just before you break through the sound barrier, the cockpit shakes the most.
• If you can walk away from a landing, it's a good landing. If you use the airplane the next day, it's an outstanding landing.
• In 1966, NASA took over in space, and it has been a bureaucratic mess ever since.
• The one word you use in military flying is duty. It's your duty. You have no control over outcome, no control over pick-and-choose. It's duty.
• It wasn't that the X-1 would kill you, it was the systems in the X-1 that would kill you.
• You do what you can for as long as you can, and when you finally can't, you do the next best thing. You back up…
• You don't concentrate on risks. You concentrate on results. No risk is too great to prevent the necessary job from getting done.
• Rules are made for people who aren't willing to make up their own.

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