Aviation Pioneers Quotes

The legendary French aviation pioneer and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote: “I have no right to say or do anything that diminishes a man in his own eyes. What matters is not what I think of him, but what he thinks of himself. Hurting a man in his dignity is a crime.

Even if we are right and the other person is definitely wrong, we only destroy ego by causing someone to lose face. The legendary French aviation pioneer and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote: “I have no right to say or do anything that diminishes a man in his own eyes. What matters is not what I think of him, but what he thinks of himself. Hurting a man in his dignity is a crime.

If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true really is true, then there would be little hope for advance.

By 1929 a handful of farsighted flight pioneers had concluded that “aviation could not progress until planes could fly safely day or night in almost any kind of weather.” Foremost among these was Dr. Jimmy Doolittle, recently armed with a PhD in aeronautical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In

One cannot argue whether Hughes was gifted, visionary, and brilliant. He just was. Literally a mechanical genius, he was also one of the best and bravest pilots in the pioneer days of aviation. And as a businessman and filmmaker he had the ability to predict wide, sweeping changes that came to transform not just the industries he was involved in, but America itself.

The youngsters today—Oh, the aviators have plenty of nerve. The physicists, these twenty-five-year-old Ph. D.'s that violate the inviolable atom, they're pioneers. But most of the wishy-washy young people today—Going seventy miles an hour but not going anywhere—not enough imagination to want to go anywhere! Getting their music by turning a dial. Getting their phrases from the comic strips instead of from Shakespeare and the Bible and Veblen and Old Bill Sumner. Pap-fed flabs! Like this smug pup Malcolm Tasbrough, hanging around Sissy! Aah! "Wouldn't it be hell if that stuffed shirt, Edgeways, and that political Mae West, Gimmitch, were right, and we need all these military monkeyshines and maybe a fool war (to conquer some sticky-hot country we don't want on a bet!) to put some starch and git into these marionettes we call our children? Aah!

In the February 9, 1935, issue of the Saturday Evening Post, an article appeared written by Frank Vanderlip. In it he said: Despite my views about the value to society of greater publicity for the affairs of corporations, there was an occasion, near the close of 1910, when I was as secretive—indeed, as furtive—as any conspirator.... I do not feel it is any exaggeration to speak of our secret expedition to Jekyll Island as the occasion of the actual conception of what eventually became the Federal Reserve System.... We were told to leave our last names behind us. We were told, further, that we should avoid dining together on the night of our departure. We were instructed to come one at a time and as unobtrusively as possible to the railroad terminal on the New Jersey littoral of the Hudson, where Senator Aldrich's private car would be in readiness, attached to the rear end of a train for the South.... Once aboard the private car we began to observe the taboo that had been fixed on last names. We addressed one another as "Ben," "Paul," "Nelson," "Abe"—it is Abraham Piatt Andrew. Davison and I adopted even deeper disguises, abandoning our first names. On the theory that we were always right, he became Wilbur and I became Orville, after those two aviation pioneers, the Wright brothers.... The servants and train crew may have known the identities of one or two of us, but they did not know all, and it was the names of all printed together that would have made our mysterious journey significant in Washington, in Wall Street, even in London. Discovery, we knew, simply must not happen, or else all our time and effort would be wasted. If it were to be exposed publicly that our particular group had got together and written a banking bill, that bill would have no chance whatever of passage by Congress.

America didn’t want war. Both major political parties still supported neutrality. The aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh argued in popular radio speeches that it would be foolish and hypocritical to fight Germany. He said America had no standing to accuse the Nazis of aggression and barbarism because America had sometimes been aggressive and barbaric itself . Later he argued that American Jews were a “danger to this country” on account of their “ownership and influence in our motion pictures , our press, our radio and our government .” Lindbergh became the public face and champion of an antiwar group called the America First Committee. “America First,” a campaign slogan of Woodrow Wilson, had been adopted by the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. Within a year the America First Committee was holding rallies at Madison Square Garden.

The aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh argued in popular radio speeches that it would be foolish and hypocritical to fight Germany. He said America had no standing to accuse the Nazis of aggression and barbarism because America had sometimes been aggressive and barbaric itself. Later he argued that American Jews were a “danger to this country” on account of their “ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.

let us not overlook that pioneer of aviation Oliver of Malmesbury, who in 1065 made a glider on which he launched himself from a church tower. He was discouraged by the breaking of both legs.

After a time I saw what I believed, at the time, to be a radio relay station located out on a desolate sand spit near Villa Bens. It was only later that I found out that it was Castelo de Tarfaya, a small fortification on the North African coast. Tarfaya was occupied by the British in 1882, when they established a trading post, called Casa del Mar. It is now considered the Southern part of Morocco. In the early ‘20s, the French pioneering aviation company, Aéropostale, built a landing strip in this desert, for its mail delivery service. By 1925 their route was extended to Dakar, where the mail was transferred onto steam ships bound for Brazil. A monument now stands in Tarfaya, to honor the air carrier and its pilots as well as the French aviator and author Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger, comte de Saint-Exupéry better known as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. As a newly acclaimed author in the literary world. “Night Flight,” or “Vol de nuit,” was the first of Saint-Exupéry’s literary works and won him the prix Femina, a French literary prize created in 1904. The novel was based on his experiences as an early mail pilot and the director of the “Aeroposta Argentina airline,” in South America. Antoine is also known for his narrative “The Little Prince” and his aviation writings, including the lyrical 1939 “Wind, Sand and Stars” which is Saint-Exupéry’s 1939, memoir of his experiences as a postal pilot. It tells how on the week following Christmas in 1935, he and his mechanic amazingly survived a crash in the Sahara desert. The two men suffered dehydration in the extreme desert heat before a local Bedouin, riding his camel, discovered them “just in the nick of time,” to save their lives. His biographies divulge numerous affairs, most notably with the Frenchwoman Hélène de Vogüé, known as “Nelly” and referred to as “Madame de B.

If you have courage, strengthen it…if you have none, develop it. We’ll need it all through this conflict and afterward.

My father, Edwin Eugene Aldrin, was an engineer and an aviation pioneer—and a friend of Charles Lindbergh and Orville Wright.

Glenn Hammond Curtiss was a bicycle enthusiast before he started building motorcycles. Although he only attended grammar school to the 8th grade, his interests motivated him to move on to greater things. In 1904, as a self-taught engineer, he began to manufacture engines for airships. During this time, Curtiss became known for having won a number of international air races and for making the first long-distance flight in the United States. On September 30, 1907, Curtiss was invited to join a non-profit pioneering research program named the “Aerial Experimental Association,” founded under the leadership of Dr. Alexander Graham Bell, to develop flying machines. The organization was established having a fixed time period, which ended in March of 1909. During this time, the members produced several different aircraft in a cooperative, rather than a competitive, spirit.

But what the Oscar November incident reveals is that even a pioneering industry like aviation is not completely immune from the blame tendency. And perhaps it exposes, more than anything, just how far we need to travel to eradicate the blame instinct once and for all.

The Curtiss Flying Boat On January 12, 1912, Curtiss developed a utility flying boat that he sold to the U.S., Russian and Italian navies. The following year he designated these as the Model F series aircraft, some having transatlantic capabilities. The first Model F saw service with the United States Navy, having the designations C-2 through C-5. These aircraft were later reclassified to AB-2 through AB-5. In October of 1913, Curtiss met John Cyril Porte, a British pioneer in aviation who shared his interest in flying boats and helped design the improved Model F-5-L flying boat. These aircraft became known as “Seagulls” in the postwar civilian market. Taken from page 479, “The Exciting Story of Cuba” by award winning author Captain Hank Bracker

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).

Reciprocating (piston) engines rotating aircraft propellers dominated commercial aviation until the late 1950s, but in 1943 both the UK and Germany were preparing to deploy their first jet fighter planes (the Gloster Meteor and the Messerschmitt 262, respectively, with the Germans being first in combat) powered by turbojet, continuous-combustion gas turbines. While the Mustang, America’s most successful propeller fighter, could reach about 630 km/h and the British Supermarine Spitfire less than 600 km/h, the maximum speeds of the two pioneering jet fighters, 970 km/h and 900 km/h, approached the speed of sound.

Tooey” Spaatz was an aviation pioneer who had shot down three German planes in World War I and helped set a world record for staying aloft in 1929 through innovative midair refueling

In 1910 Curtiss started the Curtiss Aeroplane Company of Hammondsport, New York, which later in the year he named the Curtiss Motor Company. That same year he took on the Burgess Company of Marblehead, Massachusetts, as a subsidiary. On January 12, 1912, Curtiss developed a utility flying boat that he sold to the U.S., Russian and Italian navies. The following year he designated these as the Model F series aircraft, some having transatlantic capabilities. The first Model F saw service with the United States Navy, having the designations C-2 through C-5. These aircraft were later reclassified to AB-2 through AB-5. In October of 1913, Curtiss met John Cyril Porte, a British pioneer in aviation who shared his interest in flying boats and helped design the improved Model F-5-L flying boat. These aircraft became known as “Seagulls” in the postwar civilian market.

Farnsworth is one pioneer of a new multidisciplinary science, fit for an era in which weather radar has become so sensitive it can detect a single bumblebee over thirty miles away. It’s called aeroecology, and it uses sophisticated remote-sensing technologies like radar, acoustics and tracking devices to study ecological patterns and relationships in the skies. ‘The whole notion of the aerosphere and airspace as habitat is not something that has come into the collective psyche until recently,’ Farnsworth says. And this new science is helping us understand how climate change, skyscrapers, wind turbines, light pollution and aviation affect the creatures that live and move above us.

Strap yourself into the jump-seat, make sure your harnesses are pulled really tightly, and let Scott ‘Sunshine’ Gibson give you the flight of your life. Join him as he meets up with some old and new comrades, Ryan ‘shut-eye’ Davis, Lawrence ‘sticky’ LaBelle, Jack ‘crackerjack’ McCleary, Carson ‘sleepy’ Sandmann, John Edward ‘long john’ Silver, and Sebastian ‘Atlas’ Williams, aboard a Beech 18, Boeing B-29 Superfortress, Boeing 314 Clipper, and a Scottish Aviation Twin Pioneer and share in his adventures from Newfoundland to Mexico to Malaysia in the late 1960’s. Hang on to your hats boys. It’s time to fly. Extract from 'Short Finals