As I travelled around Australia, strangers in pubs, on airplanes, in beach parking lots would bring up Gina Rinehart, not knowing I was writing about her. Everybody had something to say, some of it thoughtful, some of it poorly informed, some of it vividly obscene.
My ‘thing’ is that I just lie in my immense bed and look out the window at the skyline over Virginia and the sky and the airplanes coming into Reagan. I really love doing that.
I got my first pilot license, an airplane private pilot license, in 1997 for the purpose of going to pick up my kids, who were living with their mother in Arizona, and I was in L.A. It was easier than to put them on a commercial flight. It was purely practical.
I had just done a movie called ‘How to Beat the High Cost of Living,’ and it didn’t get a good review. And the same people sent me the script for ‘Airplane!’ for the Robert Hays part. I read it, and there were a lot of plays on words, and I said, ‘I don’t like this kind of comedy.’
Before I go and even get in an airplane to go on a flight, I say a prayer, and I always think about my family.
I’ve had a chance to fly a lot of different airplanes, but it was nothing like the shuttle ride.
Crossword puzzles, Sudoku… I’m good at all those things. It’s not daily, but I’ll do stuff on the airplane. I love playing chess. It’s my favorite game.
I do work-related stuff on airplanes. Then, when I’m in the hotel room or just vegging out, I read for pleasure.
When that second airplane hit the building, we all changed. We need to get back to some serious thinking.
Any object, whether animate or inanimate, will have a size. Airplanes, boats, or musical string instruments vary in size just like animals and plants, and in all cases, their size and their material construction are totally different matters even though they affect one another.
My wife had taken off on a plane. Two airplanes had crashed into the World Trade Center. I, of course, like any other person, felt potentially devastated, panicky a little bit.
It’s one thing to wear jerseys at games, which fans have been doing in great numbers for 30 years, dressing as if they might be summoned from the stands on a moment’s notice to pinch-run. But those same jerseys are now omnipresent on airplanes, in restaurants, in doctor’s waiting rooms.
Yesterday NPR fired me for telling the truth. The truth is that I worry when I am getting on an airplane and see people dressed in garb that identifies them first and foremost as Muslims. This is not a bigoted statement. It is a statement of my feelings, my fears after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 by radical Muslims.
Anyone who follows me on Twitter knows I – I show pictures of my airplanes.
Unmanned airplanes – and more broadly, autonomy in space, in the air, undersea – is a big future area for Boeing and an area where we are continuing to build out collaborations. So we are always looking for partners in that arena.
Airplane travel is nature’s way of making you look like your passport photo.
When you get into an airplane by yourself and take off, you find yourself in this lovely, three-dimensional world where you can go in any direction. There is no feeling any more exciting than that.
When I’d travel by myself on airplanes and stay at hotels, I spent most of my days just watching movies.
Every time you go to an airport and get on a plane, you are basically taking advantage of the work that was done at Langley. Between World War I and World War II, they did just tremendous amount of fundamental research into basically making airplanes safer, making them more stable.
I shot down two airplanes in Korea, so I wasn’t a slouch.
With a bucket of Lego, you can tell any story. You can build an airplane or a dragon or a pirate ship – it’s whatever you can imagine.
Grounding airplanes to cover your butt would never have let Orville or Wilbur change the world. We would still be spending weeks to cross the Atlantic to do business in London.
Most of the writers in TV are from L.A. or New York, and those are places where people are cynical and snarky. And they fly from L.A. to New York in an airplane over this vast, expansive land where people aren’t snarky; they’re a lot more like the ‘Parks and Rec’ characters.
I was stationed at the flight test center at Wright-Patterson, and I was flying a wide range of airplanes and giving them a lot of different tests. It was a job that I thoroughly enjoyed.
When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.
I thought that automobiles were going to have mufflers and go fast and airplanes were going to fly fast.
My dad served in two wars has been flying airplanes for 60 years now. He was certainly quite an inspiration.
I can write anywhere. I write in airports. I write on airplanes. I’ve written in the back seats of taxis. I write in hotel rooms. I love hotel rooms. I just write wherever I am whenever I need to write.
I got a promo of ‘Nichts Muss’ in what would have been 2002 or 2003 and fell totally in love with it after listening to it on an airplane that took me to Australia via Taipei and Kuala Lumpur.
In 1996 – when, for the fifth year in a row, we had the best record among major airlines for on-time performance and for baggage handling and the fewest complaints for the number of customers carried – we dedicated an airplane to all of our 25,000 people. We put all their names on the outside of the overhead bins.
I spent about seven years during the Vietnam War flight-testing airplanes for the Air Force. And then I went in and I had a lot of fun building airplanes that people could build in their garages. And some 3,000 of those are flying. Of course, one of them is around-the-world Voyager.
I had a great life at Boeing. I’d been there for 37 years and contributed to all the Boeing airplanes as a designer: the 707, 727, 37, 47, 57, 67 and ‘triple 7’ and the 87.
I want to bring passengers on my airplanes to present to them my product.
You will remember me as a little child in another time, during another war, and involving another airplane.
Flying a good airplane doesn’t require near as much attention as a motor car.
Airplanes are a good place to concentrate because you get no emails, no phone calls.
