Chuck Yeager

If you want to grow old as a pilot, you've got to know when to push it, and when to back off.

Most pilots learn, when they pin on their wings and go out and get in a fighter, especially, that one thing you don't do, you don't believe anything anybody tells you about an airplane.

This is a first-time event, and we're looking forward to it.

He was in very bad weather and his airplane broke up.

I have flown in just about everything, with all kinds of pilots in all parts of the world - British, French, Pakistani, Iranian, Japanese, Chinese - and there wasn't a dime's worth of difference between any of them except for one unchanging, certain fact the best, most skillful pilot has the most experience.

Unfortunately, many people do not consider fun an important item on their daily agenda. For me, that was always high priority in whatever I was doing.

He had a program called Free Spirit, ... He split 1 million four ways between people who didn't conform to the normal. I did a couple of slow rolls with the X-1 (the plane in which he broke the sound barrier), and I guess he thought that qualified.

The secret to my success was that somehow I always managed to live to fly another day.

There's no such thing as a natural-born pilot.

When it started, I had about 20,000 pilots donate their aircraft and fuel so we could fly 1 million kids by Dec. 17, 2003 (the 100th anniversary of the Wright Brothers first flight), ... I flew the millionth one at the Nevada County Airport.

We have a lot of events coming up, such as Tennessee Week for the Animals in October. We work closely with the Maryville Animal Shelter, which has been just great.

I was always afraid of dying. Always. It was my fear that made me learn everything I could about my airplane and my emergency equipment, and kept me flying respectful of my machine and always alert in the cockpit.

You do what you can for as long as you can, and when you finally can't, you do the next best thing. You back up but you don't give up.

Never wait for trouble.

You don't concentrate on risks. You concentrate on results. No risk is too great to prevent the necessary job from getting done.

Rules are made for people who aren't willing to make up their own.

Later, I realized that the mission had to end in a let-down because the real barrier wasn't in the sky but in our knowledge and experience of supersonic flight.