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There are 8 quotes matching Wolfgang Langewiesche in the collection:
A good pilot can guess what kind of pilot you are from the moment when you walk out with him to take the ship up. He gets a line on you from the manner in which you climb into the ship and look over the instruments and controls; and he has you pretty well sized up by the time he has watched your manner of taxing the ship.
Wolfgang Langewiesche
I’ll Take the High Road, 1939.
Airmanship is remarkable in that respect. There is something about it that shows almost immediately in the way a man behaves with airplanes; even in the way he merely talks about them at dinner. It shows in magazine articles; you often feel you can guess the exact number of hours the author has had, if any.
Wolfgang Langewiesche
I’ll Take the High Road, 1939.
If we could only see the spray!
Attributed to Anthony Fokker
Founder of Fokker Aviatik GmbH, lamenting the invisibility of air over the wing.
Quoted as Fokker “once mused” by Wolfgang Langewiesche in The Three Secrets of Human Flight, Harpers magazine April 1941, and by C. G. Grey “talking to me one day, and feeling frightfully depressed, he said, ‘If aeroplane designers could see the spray in the air as you can see the spray from water they would all be ashamed of themselves’”, Quaint Ideas for Aeroplanes, Newnes Practical Mechanics magazine, May 1951.
A fierce and monkish art; a castigation of the flesh. You must cut out your imagination and not fly an airplane but regulate a half-dozen instruments … At first, the conflicts between animal sense and engineering brain are irresistibly strong.
Wolfgang Langewiesche
Describing flying on instruments, A Flier’s World, 1943.
Get rid at the outset of the idea that the airplane is only an air-going sort of automobile. It isn’t. It may sound like one and smell like one, and it may have been interior decorated to look like one; but the difference is — it goes on wings.
Wolfgang Langewiesche
First words of his classic text Stick and Rudder: An Explanation of the Art of Flying, 1944.
Flying is done largely with the imagination.
Wolfgang Langewiesche
Stick and Rudder: An Explanation of the Art of Flying, 1944.
Sometimes I watch myself fly. For in the history of human flight it is not yet so very late; and a man may still wonder once in a while and ask: how is it that I, poor earth-habitituated animal, can fly?
Any young boy can nowadays explain human flight — mechanistically: “ … and to climb you shove the throttle all the way forward and pull back just a little on the stick … “ One might as well explain music by saying that the further over to the right you hit the piano the higher it will sound. The makings of a flight are not in the levers, wheels, and pedals but in the nervous system of the pilot: physical sensations, bits of textbook, deep-rooted instincts, burnt-child memories of trouble aloft, hangar talk.
Wolfgang Langewiesche
A Flyer’s World, 1950.
However fanciful they get, the new air vehicles will never seem as crazy as that first contraption at Kitty Hawk.
Wolfgang Langewiesche
Last sentence of Look at the New Flying Machines, Air Facts magazine, May 1964. Reproduced in Reader’s Digest, June 1964.
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