Aviation Dream Quotes

People ask me, 'What is the use of climbing Mount Everest?' and my answer must at once be, 'It is of no use.'There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. Oh, we may learn a little about the behaviour of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation. But otherwise nothing will come of it. We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, not a gem, nor any coal or iron... If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won't see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to live. That is what life means and what life is for.

High Flight Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings; Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there, I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung My eager craft through footless halls of air.... Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace. Where never lark, or even eagle flew — And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod The high untrespassed sanctity of space, - Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

It was Thomas Edison who brought us electricity, not the Sierra Club. It was the Wright brothers who got us off the ground, not the Federal Aviation Administration. It was Henry Ford who ended the isolation of millions of Americans by making the automobile affordable, not Ralph Nader. Those who have helped the poor the most have not been those who have gone around loudly expressing 'compassion' for the poor, but those who found ways to make industry more productive and distribution more efficient, so that the poor of today can afford things that the affluent of yesterday could only dream about.

Dreams are meant to become reality. Don’t ever think you can’t do something just because it’s difficult.

An incomplete list: No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played out under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power of the electric third rail. No more cities. No more films, except rarely, except with a generator drowning out half the dialogue, and only then for the first little while until the fuel for the generators ran out, because automobile gas goes stale after two or three years. Aviation gas lasts longer, but it was difficult to come by. No more screens shining in the half-light as people raise their phones above the crowd to take pictures of concert states. No more concert stages lit by candy-colored halogens, no more electronica, punk, electric guitars. No more pharmaceuticals. No more certainty of surviving a scratch on one's hand, a cut on a finger while chopping vegetables for dinner, a dog bite. No more flight. No more towns glimpsed from the sky through airplane windows, points of glimmering light; no more looking down from thirty thousand feet and imagining the lives lit up by those lights at that moment. No more airplanes, no more requests to put your tray table in its upright and locked position – but no, this wasn't true, there were still airplanes here and there. They stood dormant on runways and in hangars. They collected snow on their wings. In the cold months, they were ideal for food storage. In summer the ones near orchards were filled with trays of fruit that dehydrated in the heat. Teenagers snuck into them to have sex. Rust blossomed and streaked. No more countries, all borders unmanned. No more fire departments, no more police. No more road maintenance or garbage pickup. No more spacecraft rising up from Cape Canaveral, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, from Vandenburg, Plesetsk, Tanegashima, burning paths through the atmosphere into space. No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars.

dreams may have been the paintings on my walls, but doubts and fears were the bars on my windows.

I have always considered imaginative truth to be more profound, more loaded with significance, than every day reality... Everything we dream about, and by that I mean everything we desire, is true (the myth of Icarus came before aviation, and if Ader or Bleriot started flying it is because all men have dreamed of flight). There is nothing truer than myth... Reality does not have to be: it is simply what is.

Certainly Gloria Steinem doesn’t seem very full of crusading zeal anymore. I caught sight of her willowy figure and aviator glasses at the party. In a group of other women who surrounded her I heard her say, “We must become the men we wanted to marry.” I loved that.

My stomach was so full of butterflies and other insects with busy, brushing wings—entirely appropriate under the circumstances, I couldn’t help but think!—that I could hardly fall asleep. And when at last I did, I know I slept lightly. As if I remembered, even in my slumber, that I had a dream beneath my pillow that I did not wish to crush.

Ireland, like Ukraine, is a largely rural country which suffers from its proximity to a more powerful industrialised neighbour. Ireland’s contribution to the history of tractors is the genius engineer Harry Ferguson, who was born in 1884, near Belfast. Ferguson was a clever and mischievous man, who also had a passion for aviation. It is said that he was the first man in Great Britain to build and fly his own aircraft in 1909. But he soon came to believe that improving efficiency of food production would be his unique service to mankind. Harry Ferguson’s first two-furrow plough was attached to the chassis of the Ford Model T car converted into a tractor, aptly named Eros. This plough was mounted on the rear of the tractor, and through ingenious use of balance springs it could be raised or lowered by the driver using a lever beside his seat. Ford, meanwhile, was developing its own tractors. The Ferguson design was more advanced, and made use of hydraulic linkage, but Ferguson knew that despite his engineering genius, he could not achieve his dream on his own. He needed a larger company to produce his design. So he made an informal agreement with Henry Ford, sealed only by a handshake. This Ford-Ferguson partnership gave to the world a new type of Fordson tractor far superior to any that had been known before, and the precursor of all modern-type tractors. However, this agreement by a handshake collapsed in 1947 when Henry Ford II took over the empire of his father, and started to produce a new Ford 8N tractor, using the Ferguson system. Ferguson’s open and cheerful nature was no match for the ruthless mentality of the American businessman. The matter was decided in court in 1951. Ferguson claimed $240 million, but was awarded only $9.25 million. Undaunted in spirit, Ferguson had a new idea. He approached the Standard Motor Company at Coventry with a plan, to adapt the Vanguard car for use as tractor. But this design had to be modified, because petrol was still rationed in the post-war period. The biggest challenge for Ferguson was the move from petrol-driven to diesel-driven engines and his success gave rise to the famous TE-20, of which more than half a million were built in the UK. Ferguson will be remembered for bringing together two great engineering stories of our time, the tractor and the family car, agriculture and transport, both of which have contributed so richly to the well-being of mankind.

Go away,” she said voicelessly. Aureliano, smiled, picked her up by the waist with both hands like a pot of begonias, and dropped her on her back on the bed. With a brutal tug he pulled off her bathrobe before she had time to resist and he loomed over an abyss of newly washed nudity whose skin color, lines of fuzz, and hidden moles had all been imagined in the shadows of the other rooms. Amaranta Úrsula defended herself sincerely with the astuteness of a wise woman, weaseling her slippery, flexible, and fragrant weasel’s body as she tried to knee him in the kidneys and scorpion his face with her nails, but without either of them giving a gasp that might not have been taken for that”“breathing of a person watching the meager April sunset through the open window. It was a fierce fight, a battle to the death, but it seemed to be without violence because it consisted of distorted attacks and ghostly evasions, slow, cautious, solemn, so that during it all there was time for the petunias to bloom and for Gaston to forget about his aviator’s dream in the next room, as if they were two enemy lovers seeking reconciliation at the bottom of an aquarium. In the heat of that savage and ceremonious struggle, Amaranta Úrsula understood that her meticulous silence was so irrational that it could awaken the suspicions of her nearby husband much more than the sound of warfare that they were trying to avoid. Then she began to laugh with her lips tight together, without giving up the fight, but defending herself with false bites and deweaseling her body little by little until they both were conscious of being adversaries and accomplices at the same time and the affray degenerated into a conventional gambol and the attacks became”“caresses. Suddenly, almost playfully, like one more bit of mischief, Amaranta Úrsula dropped her defense, and when she tried to recover, frightened by what she herself had made possible, it was too late. A great commotion immobilized her in her center of gravity, planted her in her place, and her defensive will was demolished by the irresistible anxiety to discover what the orange whistles and the invisible globes on the other side of death were like. She barely had time to reach out her hand and grope for the towel to put a gag between her teeth so that she would not let out the cat howls that were already tearing at her insides.

AN INCOMPLETE LIST: No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played out under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power of the electric third rail. No more cities. No more films, except rarely, except with a generator drowning out half the dialogue, and only then for the first little while until the fuel for the generators ran out, because automobile gas goes stale after two or three years. Aviation gas lasts longer, but it was difficult to come by. No more screens shining in the half-light as people raise their phones above the crowd to take photographs of concert stages. No more concert stages lit by candy-colored halogens, no more electronica, punk, electric guitars. No more pharmaceuticals. No more certainty of surviving a scratch on one’s hand, a cut on a finger while chopping vegetables for dinner, a dog bite. No more flight. No more towns glimpsed from the sky through airplane windows, points of glimmering light; no more looking down from thirty thousand feet and imagining the lives lit up by those lights at that moment. No more airplanes, no more requests to put your tray table in its upright and locked position—but no, this wasn’t true, there were still airplanes here and there. They stood dormant on runways and in hangars. They collected snow on their wings. In the cold months, they were ideal for food storage. In summer the ones near orchards were filled with trays of fruit that dehydrated in the heat. Teenagers snuck into them to have sex. Rust blossomed and streaked. No more countries, all borders unmanned. No more fire departments, no more police. No more road maintenance or garbage pickup. No more spacecraft rising up from Cape Canaveral, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, from Vandenburg, Plesetsk, Tanegashima, burning paths through the atmosphere into space. No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars.

Kalinske then described what made the videogame industry unique, what made it superbly unpredictable, and what tomorrow might or might not bring. But along this wild roller-coaster ride, there was one thing that would not change. “Suspension of disbelief. It’s always been the fundamental component of diversion, whether that diversion is books, movies, or the theater. Advances in gaming mean we will come to supply that component more effectively than any other medium. The interactive entertainment business is going to allow the Walter Mitty in all of us to finally realize our dreams. We are going to become great football players, race car drivers, or aviators. We are going to move into and occupy new worlds that were formerly only available to us in dreams.

might be just a set of equations and eye-blearing numbers disembodied from all physical significance. She might not hear another word about the work until a piece appeared in Air Scoop or Aviation or Air Trails. Or never. For many men, a computer was a piece of living hardware, an appliance that inhaled one set of figures and exhaled another. Once a girl finished a particular job, the calculations were whisked away into the shadowy kingdom of the engineers. “Woe unto thee if they shall make thee a computer,” joked a column in Air Scoop. “For the Project Engineer will take credit for whatsoever thou doth that is clever and full of glory. But if he slippeth up, and maketh a wrong calculation, or pulleth a boner of any kind whatsoever, he shall lay the mistake at thy door when he is called to account and he shall say, ‘What can you

A few years ago, I led an expedition to return to Mount Everest, the mountain I had climbed aged 23, a mountain where I had risked everything and survived - just. I had always held a secret dream to return and attempt to fly over the mountain in a small one-man paramotor - like a paraglider, only with a backpack engine strapped to your body. At the time, the highest altitude that one had been flown was around 17,000 feet (5,180 metres). But being an enthusiast (and an optimist!), I reckoned we shouldn’t just aim to break the record by a few feet, I thought we should go as high as it was possible to go, and in my mind that meant flying over the height of Mount Everest. This in turn meant we needed to build a machine capable of flying to over 29,000 feet (8,840 metres). Most of the people we spoke to about this thought a) we were crazy, and b) it was technically impossible. What those naysayers hadn’t factored in was the power of yes, and specifically the ability to build a team capable of such a mission. This meant harnessing the brilliance of my good friend Gilo Cardozo, a paramotor engineer, a born enthusiast, and a man who loves to break the rules - and to say yes. Gilo was - and is - an absolute genius aviation engineer who spends all his time in his factory, designing and testing crazy bits of machinery. When people told us that our oxygen would freeze up in minus 70°, or that at extreme altitudes we would need such a heavy engine to power the machine that it would be impossible to take off, or that even if we managed to do it, we would break our legs landing at such speed, Gilo’s response was: ‘Oh, it’ll be great. Leave it with me.’ No matter what the obstacle, no matter what the ‘problem’, Gilo always said, ‘We can do this.’ And after months in his workshop, he did eventually build the machine that took us above the height of Everest. He beat the naysayers, he built the impossible and by the Grace of God we pulled it off - oh, and in the process we raised over $2.5 million for children’s charities around the world. You see, dreams can come true if you stick to them and think big. So say yes - you never know where it will lead. And there are few limits to how high you just might soar.

While most of the men felt patriotic and even nationalistic attachment to Germany, their motives centered mostly on being able to finally obtain the funding needed to create the rockets all of them dreamed of, as von Braun once explained: “There has been a lot of talk that the Raketenflugplatz finally ‘sold out to the Nazis.’ In 1932, however, when the die was cast, the Nazis were not yet in power, and to all of us Hitler was just another mountebank on the political stage. Our feelings toward the Army resembled those of the early aviation pioneers [...] The issue in these discussions was merely how the golden cow could be milked most successfully.” (Neufeld, 1995, 26).

You can’t go home again,” wrote Thomas Wolfe, and he might as well have been writing about the newly minted Imperial Japanese Navy aviator, resplendently clad in blue and brass, returning home to visit his family. Of course his parents and siblings were overjoyed to see him, and he them. He had done them a great honor, lifting the status of his entire clan in the eyes of neighbors, colleagues, and friends. He was bigger, stronger, tougher, older, wiser. But his homecoming was inevitably poignant, and more than a little strange. He might have dreamed of home every night he was away, clasping it in his imagination as a sanctuary from the brutality of his tormentors and the unremitting toil of his training. Once there, however, he was inevitably taken aback by the comfort, the ease, the disorder, the aimlessness. The reality of home had steadily diverged from the image he had carried in his mind. It contrasted too sharply with the harsh, purposeful life to which he had grown accustomed. He loved his family as much as he ever had, and they loved him as much as they ever had, but he was aghast at how much space had grown between them. They could never fully understand what he had done and endured, or what he had become. That was a secret known only to his classmates, his fellow survivors, who had shared in the long crucible of his training—the fatigue, the humiliations, the beatings, the deprivations, the chronic dread of expulsion, the ecstasy of flight, and the inconceivable joy he had felt upon receiving those blessed wings. He might never admit it, but his fellow airmen were closer to him now than his own kin. He belonged with them. He could not go home again because now the navy was his home.

I do know what suffering is. It is terrible, not because it torments the body but because you no longer dream of ridding yourself of pain: you are prepared to rid yourself of your body. To die. You simply are not in a condition to think about matters such as the meaning of life and you see ridding yourself of suffering as the only meaning of death.

So there we were, in the middle of the night, on our hands and knees with scrub brushes, steel wool, sponges, scouring powder and buckets of water making the old shop look spic and span. We secured from the task at 0400. I should have hit the rack but instead went topside and out to the canoe, the sacred spot where Lieutenant Goldberg and I had sat together contemplating the why's of life. I was saying farewell in my own way. I wanted to experience the Oriskany for the last time on the high seas. It was still dark – the dark that comes just before dawn. The waning moon, merely a fluorescent nail clipping, hung near the horizon. The night air was crisp; the sky a deep, cold black with pinpoints of stars shimmering through the earth’s canopy. Above me was the endless universe; below me, the deep mystical sea. Large undulating swells gently rocked the ship like a babe in its mother’s arms. Mother Ocean. Father Sky. I meditated upon this new life that I am now obliged to live. I thought about youth. I thought about old age. Apparently bad memories fade away with time and only the moments of goodness and joy remain. Those who are nearing the end of their lives revel in the bliss of yesterday but we the young have this day and tomorrow to contend with. Today, we see the world naked, exposed before our eyes. We see hatred, misery and pain. We find it difficult to live for today. Only the desires for tomorrow’s better world can alleviate the suffering that is today. Only tomorrow can offer us hope that glimmering moments will again materialize. So we continue to exist for a dream, a wish that tomorrow we can say: “This is a day worth living.” Excerpted from God, Bombs & Viet Nam: Based on the Diary of...

Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth, And danced the skies on laughter silvered wings; Sunward I’ve climbed . . . and done a hundred things You have not dreamed of.” Beauvoir looked over and saw the chief, his eyes closed and his head tilted back, but his lips moving, repeating a phrase. “Up, up the long delirious burning blue, I’ve topped the wind-swept heights . . . Where never lark, or even eagle flew.” “Where’s that from?” asked Beauvoir. “A poem called ‘High Flight’ by a young Canadian aviator in the Second World War.” “Really? He must’ve loved flying. Bees love flying. Can cover long distances for food, if they have to, but they stay close to the hive if they can.” “He died,” said Gamache. “Pardon?” “Says here the poet was killed. Shot down. The poem was quoted by President Reagan after the Challenger disaster.” But he’d lost Beauvoir to the bees again.

Why did this music move her? Was it really a signal of some kind? They had all been so musical-both her grandfathers, Alexander and Jacob—and Genrikh … Genrikh … And from her heart a deep lament rose up and choked her, and it was as though it wasn't she crying, but Genrikh in her. Little Genrikh, intolerable little child who threw himself on the floor and thrashed his arms and legs, who wanted to fly a glider or an plane, whom they barred from his beloved profession of aviation—yes, of course, because his father, was an enemy of the people and ruined everything. He was robbed of his dreams, his hopes, his shining, beckoning future. Oh, poor Genrikh! Nora cried together with him, this boy, her future and former father, who had not been given the chance to live the life he dreamed about. He sobbed and gasped for then grew tired and moaned quietly, then howled again, and started throwing a tantrum. Nora just wiped away the tears. How awful! Would his grief never end? Would it never burn out, never die? Would it torment him, and Nora, and the newborn who had only just arrived and was not guilty of anything at all? Is it possible that the evil we commit never dissipates, but hangs above the head of every new child that emerges out of this river of time?

The moment before he started to suspect that there were punishments for those who dared to dream so big, to fly so high.