Quoted By:
WHY FLY?
I can only imagine for non-flyers, this questioning is even more acute: Why are people risking their lives for a frivolous sport? they ask. After-all, we are not putting our lives on the line to save children, or to defend our country. We aren’t on any obvious do-good mission. But if you are a passionate pilot, you know this is a perspective that only someone who lives on the ground could have. Poet Alehandro Jodorowsky may have sounded a little smug when he said it, but he had a point: “Birds born in a cage think that flying is an illness.”
There are certain poets, pilots and writers who know how to explain flight–who understand risk and the special brand of happiness that comes with being in the air.
“Anything worth doing requires a helmet,” said pilot Stan Koszelak
Richard Bach once said “I’m not happy unless there is a little room between me and the ground. “
“How can you not fly at a time in history when you can fly?” asked journalist William Langewiesche.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry understood flight as an escape from the “tyranny of petty things.”
Geraldine Sloan –one of the first women in the space program– upon getting her first taste of flight immediately recognized the sky as her home and after the flight said she tumbled out of the airplane with stars in her eyes.
There is also is the da Vinci quote we all know well: “For once you have tasted flight, you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return.
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And then there is Stephan Coonts, who declared flying “the most exciting thing you can do with your pants on.”
