Chuck Yeager Quotes

If you can walk away from a landing, it's a good landing. If you use the airplane the next day, it's an outstanding landing.

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.

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.

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

There is no such thing as a natural born pilot. Whatever my aptitudes or talents, becoming a proficient pilot was hard work, really a lifetime's learning experience. For the best pilots, flying is an obsession, the one thing in life they must do continually. The best pilots fly more than the others; that's why they're the best. Experience is everything. The eagerness to learn how and why every piece of equipment works is everything. And luck is everything, too.

The first time I ever saw a jet, I shot it down.

At the moment of truth, there are either reasons or results.

Just before you break through the sound barrier, the cockpit shakes the most.

Everybody that I've ever seen that enjoyed their job was very good at it.

What good does it do to be afraid? It doesn't help anything. You better try and figure out what's happening and correct it.

The secret of my success is that I always managed to live to fly another day.

Leveling off at 42,000 feet, I had thirty percent of my fuel, so I turned on rocket chamber three and immediately reached .96 Mach. I noticed that the faster I got, the smoother the ride. Suddenly the Mach needle began to fluctuate. It went up to .965 Mach - then tipped right off the scale ... We were flying supersonic. And it was a smooth as a baby's bottom; Grandma could be sitting up there sipping lemonade.

The best pilots fly more than the others; that's why they're the best.

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.

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

There is no kind of ultimate goal to do something twice as good as anyone else can. It's just to do the job as best you can. If it turns out good, fine. If it doesn't, that's the way it goes.

Never wait for trouble.

In 1966, NASA took over in space, and it has been a bureaucratic mess ever since.

It's your duty to fly the airplane. If you get killed in it, you don't know anything about it anyway. Duty is paramount. It's that simple if you're a military guy. You don't say 'I'm not going to do that - that's dangerous.' If it's your duty to do it, that's the way it is.

All that I am ... I owe to the Air Force.

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.

After about 30 minutes I puked all over my airplane. I said to my self, "Man, you made a big mistake."

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.

You concentrate on what you are doing, to do the best job you can, to stay out of a serious situation. That’s the way the X-1 was.