Chuck Yeager Quotes

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.

The best pilots fly more than the others; that's why they're the best.

Hey Ridley, that Machometer is acting screwy. It just went off the scale on me.

The first time I ever saw a jet, I shot it down.

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

Everybody that I've ever seen that enjoyed their job was very good at it.

When I was picked to fly the X-1, it was my duty to fly it, and I did.

I have no regrets about my life. People ask, "If you had to do it all over again, would you do it differently?" No. That's speculation.

As we went through mach one, the nose started dropping, so we just cranked that horizontal stabilizer down to keep the nose up. We got it above mach one, and once we got it above the speed of sound, then you have supersonic flow over the whole airplane, so you have no more shock waves on it that are causing buffeting ... You really don't think about the outcome of any kind of a flight, whether it's combat, or any other kinds of flights, because you really have no control over it ...

Just before you break through the sound barrier, the cockpit shakes the most.

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 wipe out half a dozen people one of these days, and that will be the end of it.

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.

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.

There is no kind of ultimate goal to do something twice as good as anyone else can. It's just to do the job as best you can. If it turns out good, fine. If it doesn't, that's the way it goes.

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.

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.

Never wait for trouble.

You concentrate on what you are doing, to do the best job you can, to stay out of serious situations. And that's the way the X-1 was.

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.

The secret of my success is that I always managed to live to fly another day.

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 was doing.

In 1966, NASA took over in space, and it has been a bureaucratic mess ever since.

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.

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

It's really difficult for fanatic churchgoers to understand God can't help me. I'm the only one who can help me.

It wasn't that the X-1 would kill you, it was the systems in the X-1 that would kill you.