Chuck Yeager Quotes (18 Quotes)

Never wait for trouble.

We have a lot of events coming up, such as Tennessee Week for the Animals in October. We work closely with the Maryville Animal Shelter, which has been just great.

This is a first-time event, and we're looking forward to it.

There's no such thing as a natural-born pilot.

Unfortunately, many people do not consider fun an important item on their daily agenda. For me, that was always high priority in whatever I was doing.

Rocket propulsion was explored -- specifically, a turbo-pump-equipped rocket made by Reaction Motors Inc. Delivering 6,000 pounds of thrust, the acid-aniline-fueled engine was believed to be capable of boosting an airplane to the fringes of the known performance envelope,

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.

If you want to grow old as a pilot, you've got to know when to push it, and when to back off.

I was always afraid of dying. Always. It was my fear that made me learn everything I could about my airplane and my emergency equipment, and kept me flying respectful of my machine and always alert in the cockpit.

Rules are made for people who aren't willing to make up their own.

You don't concentrate on risks. You concentrate on results. No risk is too great to prevent the necessary job from getting done.

When it started, I had about 20,000 pilots donate their aircraft and fuel so we could fly 1 million kids by Dec. 17, 2003 (the 100th anniversary of the Wright Brothers first flight), ... I flew the millionth one at the Nevada County Airport.

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 experience of supersonic flight.

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 but you don't give up.

He had a program called Free Spirit, ... He split 1 million four ways between people who didn't conform to the normal. I did a couple of slow rolls with the X-1 (the plane in which he broke the sound barrier), and I guess he thought that qualified.

I have flown in just about everything, with all kinds of pilots in all parts of the world - British, French, Pakistani, Iranian, Japanese, Chinese - and there wasn't a dime's worth of difference between any of them except for one unchanging, certain fact the best, most skillful pilot has the most experience.

He was in very bad weather and his airplane broke up.

Ultimately, the Reaction Motors turbo pump became stalled in development, so another 4-chamber Reaction Motors engine, this one fueled by liquid oxygen and diluted ethyl alcohol, was slated for installation,