GREAT AVIATION QUOTES
Gliding & Sailplanes

Gliders, sailplanes, they are wonderful flying machines. It’s the closest you can come to being a bird.

Neil Armstrong

Interview with Ed Bradley, First Man, CBS TV show 60 Minutes, aired 6 November 2005.



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The air to a glider pilot is a reality, not a shadow on a screen. He is in direct relationship with it, he is trying to understand it in all its moods; to learn its flow, its laws, and its colours, and to try and use this knowledge to his own ends. … He is a lover of the air in the true sense, in that his love is entirely irrational. He does not fly for money or fame, but simply because he feels he must.

Philip Wills

In his introduction to the book The Beauty of Gliding, 1960.

In spite of me it drew forward into the wind, notwithstanding my resistance it tended to rise. Thus I have discovered the secret of the bird and I comprehend the whole mystery of flying.

Jean Marie Le Bris

A French sea captain who experimented with gliders, circa 1850.

I hold that in the flight of the soaring birds (the vultures, the eagles, and other birds which fly without flapping) ascension is produced by the skillful use of the force of the wind, and the steering, in any direction, is the result of skillful manoeuvres; so that by a moderate wind a man can, with an aeroplane, un-provided with any motor whatever, rise up into the air and direct himself at will, even against the wind itself.

Man therefore can, with a rigid surface and a properly designed apparatus, repeat the exercises performed by the soaring birds in ascension and steering, and will need to expend no force whatever, save to perform the manouvres required for steering.

Louis Pierre Mouillard

L’Empire de L’Air, 1881.

This passage was so powerful to Octave Chanute that he quoted it in full in his famous 1894 book Progress in Flying Machines.

We returned home, after this experiment (September, 1874), with the conviction that sailing flight was not the exclusive prerogative of birds, but that the possibility of man flying in this manner was established, since no powerful movement of wings, but only a skilful direction of the wings, was required for the purpose.

Otto Lilienthal

Birdflight As the Basis of Aviation: A Contribution Towards a System of Aviation, 1889.

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All agreed that the sensation of coasting on the air was delightful.

Octave Chanute

Recent Experiments in Gliding Flight, The Aeronautical Annual, 1895.

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Sacrifices must be made.

Otto Lilienthal

One of the main sources of inspiration for the Wright brothers. Widely cited in books and elsewhere as being said after a glider crash that took his life the next day, 10 August 1896. The original German is, “Opfer mussen gebracht werden”, and that is certainly what’s on his gravestone:


But the full history is more complex. He did suffer a glider crash on Sunday 9 August 1896. His mechanic and assistant Paul Beylich ran to him in the wreckage, where Otto reportedly said, “What happened? … I’ll relax a bit, and we’ll continue.” But he was paralyzed from the waist down, and soon transported to a clinic in Berlin, where he died the next day. An 11 August 1896 story in the New York Journal newspaper quotes his last words as:

“Mine is the true inventor’s death. I am satisfied to die in the interest of science.”

But that account appears nowhere else and has no attribution. A letter to the journal Nature a few weeks later, describing Otto’s death by his friends Alard du Bois-Reymond and Carl Runge makes no mention of any last words.

Lilienthal did say the sacrifices phrase several times during his life. So how did it get attributed to the day before he died? It was much later, in a 1930 book The Lilienthals by his daughter Anna and brother Gustav, that the now famous words are first cited in this context. And the phrase wasn’t placed over his grave until 1940.

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When gliding operators have attained greater skill, they can, with comparitve safety, maintain themselves in the air for hours at a time in this way.

Wilbur Wright

Some Aeronautical Experiments, presented to the Western Society of Engineers 18 September 1901.

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Gliders [will be] the freight trains of the air … We can visualize a locomotive plane leaving LaGuardia Field towing a train of six gliders in the very near future. By having the load thus divided it would be practical to unhitch the glider that must come down in Philadelphia as the train flies over that place — similarly unhitching the loaded gliders for Washington, for Richmond, for Charleston, for Jacksonville, as each city is passed — and finally the air locomotive itself lands in Miami. During that process it has not had to make any intermediate landings, so that it has not had to slow down.

Grover Loening

Consulting engineer Grumman Aircraft, in Miracles Ahead! Better Living in the Postwar World, 1944

Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of rope
  A few feet from “The Road".
I whip the Schweitzer 'round so fast
  Exceeds the max'mum load.
I’ve slipped, I’ve stalled, I’ve spiral dived,
  Spun past the sixth full turn.
“You can't do that!” the new ones say,
  They've got a lot to learn.
I find a thermal, turn in it
  To try and gain some height.
But I must beat the towplane down
  Or this is my last flight!
On 2-3 fly a crooked base
  Then crank the plane around.
Or 2-9: pass the hangars
  Then I dive straight for the ground!
But the best is 3-6 final
  when I know I should be higher,
Put out my hand and touch
  The passing telephone wire!

Glider Flight - A High Flight parody

The soaring pilot makes an aerial excursion, not an incursion. His passage leaves a whisper, not a shriek.

Richard Miller

1967. Original citation lost, help please!

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I take the paraglider to the mountain or I roll Daisy out of her hangar and I pick the prettiest part of the sky and I melt into the wing and then into the air, till I’m just soul on a sunbeam.

Richard Bach

Running From Safety: An Adventure of the Spirit, 1994. Daisy was Richard’s Cessna 337.

See more Richard Bach aviation quotes.

What can I tell you about this first step that encounters nothing solid?

Russell Hawkes

In a hugely influential article on the then-nascent sport of hang gliding, Happy Birthday, Otto Lilienthal!, National Geographic magazine, February 1972. California hang gliders were made then of bamboo and cloth, but the essence was already there.

“I began to understand what this sport is all about: To fly without awareness of the means of flight … Is this one more rash of the endemic madness that periodically breaks out in California? Or the birth of a genuine national leisure-time mania, like drag racing and surfing?”

A lot of pilots were inspired by this article, and the first step line is still repeated by pilots who fly with wings, but no wheels.

From the day you’re born, you’re familiar with the force of gravity And then one day you’ll step off, and you’ll be free of it. And how can I describe that? I can’t put it into words. But once you’ve done it, you won’t be able to describe it either.

Bill Moyes

Record-breaking popularizer of Hang Gliding, during his appearance on the Australian TV show This Is Your Life, 1980.

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