GREAT AVIATION QUOTES
Albert Reed

There are 2 quotes matching Albert Reed in the collection:

We are safely on the other side of the pond. The job is finished.

Lieutenant Commander Albert Reed, USN

Pilot of Curtiss NC-4 flying boat, after the first aerial crossing of the Atlantic, May 1919. Quoted in the 2013 book The Little Book of Aviation.

It will soon be possible to drive an airplane around the world at a height of 60,000 feet and 1,000 miles per hour.

Albert Reed

Then a Lieutenant Commander in the US Navy, in an address to Harvard students after returning to the US and completing the first ever transatlantic flight, September 1919. Quoted in The New York Times, 1 October 1919.

The Times wrote: “It is one thing to be a qualified aviator and quite another to be a qualified prophet. … Nothing now known supports the Lieutenant Commander's forecast. Indeed, all of the available knowledge is against it, for an airplane, moving at the height of 60,000 feet, would be whirling its propellers in a vacuum, or something so near a vacuum as to be practically indistinguishable from it, and it would be contending, too, with an appallingly close approach to the cold of interstellar space. No aviator would be likely to live long or go far in those conditions. To circle the earth in twenty-five hours with an airplane, some day, is not impossible, but when done it will be at a much lower level than 60,000 feet.”

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