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...

Ultimately, the Reaction Motors turbo pump became stalled in development, so another 4-chamber Reaction Motors engine, this one fueled by liquid oxygen and diluted ethyl alcohol, was slated for installation,

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.

Rocket propulsion was explored — specifically, a turbo-pump-equipped rocket made by Reaction Motors Inc. Delivering 6,000 pounds of thrust, the acid-aniline-fueled engine was believed to be capable of boosting an airplane to the fringes of...

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.

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...

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

The one word you use in military flying is duty. It’s your duty. You have no control over outcome, no control over pick-and-choose. It’s duty.

I’ll stick with Doc Bear. He knows what he’s doing.

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

It’s really difficult for fanatic churchgoers to understand God can’t help me. I’m the only one who can help me.

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.

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.

When I was picked to fly the X-1, it was my duty to fly it, and I did.

It’s a payoff to John Glenn for his support of (President) Clinton and also the NASA budget. NASA needs the publicity and they couldn’t have picked a better guy to hype the space program.

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.

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

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.

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

It wasn’t that the X-1 would kill you, it was the systems in the X-1 that would kill you.

[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...

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.

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...

That room is really well laid out, … It was sort of emotional to go through the display. You see a lot of things that bring back a lot of memories.

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

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

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

Never wait for trouble.

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