2/28/2009
"Gun control is the ability to hit what you are aiming at." Ted Nugent

9/11/2008
"Don't let your dreams be dreams"

7/28/2007
"Let schoolmasters puzzle their brains
With grammar, and nonsense, and learning.
Good liquor, I stoutly maintain,
Gives genius a better discerning."
-Oliver Goldsmith

7/27/2007
"Dan, sometimes, you just gotta drink warm beer."
-M Speisman

7/9/2007
It is generally inadvisable to eject directly over the area you just bombed.

- USAF Manual

6/22/2007
"I have done it.  Damn the Admiralty....Not a life lost and we have been through Hell."

Shackleton's telegram to his wife 1916

6/22/2007
"Never mistake motion for action."

Ernest Hemingway

6/11/2007
But if the book is good, is about something that you know, and is truly written and reading it over you see that this is so you can let the boys yip and the noise will have that pleasant sound coyotes make on a very cold night when they are out in the snow and you are in your own cabin that you have built or paid for with your work.

Ernest Hemingway, P185 By-Line.

5/30/2007
"You live with a ship a few years and cuss her enough and all of a sudden one day you wake up and discover you're in love."

Ernie Gann

5/30/2007
"During this period Steen and Fox were killed trying a single-engine instrument approach at Moline. Then Campbell and Leatherman hit a ridge near Elko, Nevada.

In both incidents the official verdict was "Pilot error," but since their passengers, who were innocent of the controls, also failed to survive, it seemed that fate was the hunter.

As it had been and would be."

Ernie Gann

3/31/2007
"As employees, pilots are a difficult lot. By convention and necessity they are the masters of their vessels, answerable to no one for as long as the engines are running. Airline presidents have the power to control entire fleets, to decide where and when every plane shall fly. But once those decisions are made, no one tells the pilot how, or even whether, to fly."

-Petzinger JR

3/12/2007
From its origins, flying was touted as a libidinal experience for men, or at the very least something that intensified their masculinity, in the manner of sports and soldiering, A 1920s-era ad for a flying school appeared under the headline, "The Aviator-The Superman of Now," to which it added, "Flying is the greatest sport of red-blooded, virile manhood." The official history of the pilots' union notes that men had always been drawn to piloting in part for "the looks tha got from attractive young women."

Hard Landing
-Thomas Petzinger Jr.

10/28/2006
"As aviators we maintain the highest standards,
not because they are required,
but because our mistakes are documented in newspapers."

-Dan

10/25/2006
"Never accept a 'No' from someone who can't say yes."
-Paul Selover

4/29/2006
--Pan Am--

"The soft spoken but strong willed Trippe taught his adventurous pilots and skilled employees that following orders and protocol was essential, but also that there were rewards for responding imaginatively to risk..."
"Pan Am"
-Conrad

4/12/2006
"Cash is a crutch.  Buying away your problems is not the same as solving them."

-Robert Rodriguez
Creator, El Mariachi

4/12/2006
"Sex is like math. Add the bed, subtract the clothes, divide the legs, and hope you don't multiply." Jenni Wall

11/10/2005
"You can't hire captains, only mates make captains."
-Bartender at Pepe's
Key West, FL

9/10/2005
The emergencies you train for almost never happen. It's the one you can't train for that kills you.

- Ernest K. Gann, advice from the 'old pelican'

7/15/2005
"If you work for a living, why do you kill yourself working?"
-The Good the Bad and the Ugly

6/23/2005
...while you're busy listening, someone is making the music...

-dan

6/23/2005
....The road out would be treacherous, and I didn't know where it would lead but I followed it anyway. It was a strange world ahead that would unfold, a thuderhead of a world with jagged lightning edges.  Many got it wrong and never did get it right.  I went straight into it.  It was wide open.  One thing for sure, not only was it not run by God, but it wasn't run by the devil either."

-Bob Dylan, Chronicles I

4/23/2005
"Life is a daring advenure or nothing at all."
-Helen Keller

4/17/2005
"What about 'Virgin'? We're complete virgins at business."

"And there aren't many virgins left around here," laughed one of the other girls.  "It would be nice to have one here in name if nothing else."

"Great," I decided on the spot.  "It's Virgin."

-Sir Richard Branson, 1970

12/20/2004
A man is all the people he has been.
-William Manchester

12/4/2004
"There is no difference between expensive and cheap liquor -
you either pay a lot up front, or pay the difference in the morning.
-Dan

10/24/2004
"Never drink alone. Never drink cologne."
---Olaf Nordstrom

The Chart Room, Key West, FL 
November 11th 2003

10/5/2004
"Rule Number One:
Never drink while working...

Rule Number Two:
Never work while you're drinking...

Rule Number Three:
If rule number two is broken, never drink alone..."

-Jack McCoy, 'Law and Order'

8/11/2004
"It takes a lifetime to become an overnight success..."  DD

8/4/2004
"Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. This will teach you to keep your mouth shut." E.H.

7/30/2004
"...his original destination's just another story that he loves to tell..." JIMMY BUFFETT, 'Cowboy in the Jungle'

4/27/2004
Where you've been is good and gone all you keep is the gettin' there...
-"To Live Is To Fly" (c)TVZ

1/7/2004
If you can walk away from it, it was a good landing. If the aeroplane is reusable, then it was a fantastic landing.........anonymous

10/31/2003
Bid the years good-bye you cannot still them
you cannot turn the circles of the sun
you cannot count the miles until you feel them
and you cannot hold a lover that is gone
It's snowin' on Raton
come morning I'll be through them hills and gone...
---Townes Van Zandt

9/12/2003
But, whether singing about outlaws of the Old West, murder and prison, unrequited love or simple pleasures, Cash sang in an unadorned, frank baritone about the plight of the common citizen. His was the voice of truth.

"My roots are in the working man," Cash told the Music City News in 1987. "I can remember very well how it is to pick cotton 10 hours a day, or to plow, or how to cut wood. I remember it so well because I don't intend to ever try to do it again."

-Mary Jo DiLonardo

9/8/2003
Never give up on what you really want to do. The person with the big dreams is more powerful than the one with all the facts...Tom Claytor/Unknown

9/3/2003
Man shall never reach the moon for such a quantity of gunpowder would
be needed as to gravely injure the crew.

-Childrens Encyclopaedia, 1926

9/3/2003
In this Autobiography I shall keep in mind the fact that I am speaking from the grave.  I am literally speaking from the grave, because I shall be dead when the book issues from the press.
I speak from the grave rather than with my living tongue, for a good reason: I can speak thence freely.  When a man is writing a book dealing with the privacies of his life--a book which is to be read while he is still alive--he shrinks from speaking his whole frank mind; all his attempts to do it fail, he recognizes that he is trying to do a things which is wholly impossible to a human being.  The frankest and freest and privatest product of the human mind and heart is a love letter; the writer gets his limitless freedom of statement and expression from his sense that no stranger is going to see what he is writing.  Sometimes there is a breach-of-promise case by and by; and when he sees his letter in print it makes him cruelly uncomfortable and he perceives that he never would have unbosomed himself to that large and honest degree if he had known that he was writing for the public.  He cannot find anything in the letter that was not true, honest and respecworthy; but no matter, he would have been very much more reserved if he had known he was writing for print.<br>It has seemed to me that I could be as frank and free and unembarrassed as a love letter if I knew that what I was writing would be exposed to no eye until I was dead, and unaware, and indifferent.

MARK TWAIN
1924

1/17/2003
"I feel sorry for people who don't drink. When they wake up in the morning, that's as good as they're going to feel all day. "

- Frank Sinatra

1/14/2003
The more sins you confess, the more books you will sell.

American Proverb

1/12/2003
Before take-off, a professional pilot is keen, anxious, but lest someone read his true feelings he is elaborately casual. The reason for this is that he is about to enter a new though familiar world. The process of entrance begins a short time before he leaves the ground and is completed the instant he is in the air. From that moment on, not only his body but his spirit and personality exist in a separate world known only to himself and his comrades.

As the years go by, he returns to this invisible world rather than to earth for peace and solace. There also he finds a profound enchantment, although he can seldom describe it. He can discuss it with others of his kind, and because they too know and feel its power they understand. But his attempts to communicate his feelings to his wife or other earthly confidants invariable end in failure.

Flying is hypnotic and all pilots are willing victims to the spell. Their world is like a magic island in which the factors of life and death assume their proper values. Thinking becomes clear because there are no earthly foibles or embellishments to confuse it. Professional pilots are, of necessity, uncomplicated, simple men. Their thinking must remain straightforward, or they die -- violently.

The men in this book are fictitious characters but their counterparts can be found in cockpits all over the world. Now they are flying a war. Tomorrow they will be flying a peace, for, regardless of the world's condition, flying is their life.

- Ernest K. Gann, forward to 'Island in the Sky,' 1944.

1/8/2003
I have a feeling that there is just about one more good flight left in my system and I hope this trip is it. Anyway when I have finished this job, I mean to give up long-distance "stunt" flying.

- Amelia Earhart, departing from Los Angeles, California, for Florida on 21 May 1937. Start of her last flight

1/7/2003
Possibly everyone will travel by air in another fifty years. I'm not sure I like the idea of millions of planes flying around overhead. I love the sky's unbroken solitude. I don't like to think of it cluttered up by aircraft, as roads are cluttered up by cars. I feel like the western pioneer when he saw barbed-wire fence lines encroaching on his open plains. The success of his venture brought the end of the life he loved.

- Charles Lindbergh  1953

1/4/2003
"Don't ask for permission, beg for forgiveness.  Keep you're wings level and never look back..."

-Jimmy Buffett conversation with Chris and Dan. Boston 2000

1/1/2003
Either write things worthy reading, or do things worth the writing.

-Benjamin Franklin

1/1/2003
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do.

-Mark Twain

12/13/2000
Hold fast to dreams, for when dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.
Hold to fast to dreams, for when dreams go, life is a barren field, frozen with snow.

-Langston Hughes

12/12/2000
It's time to move on, time to get goin', what lies ahead I have no way of knowin'. Under my feet, baby, the grass is growin'. It's time to move on, time to get goin'...

-Tom Petty

12/11/2000
Each night when I go to sleep, I die. And the next morning, when I wake up, I am reborn.

-Mahatma Gandhi

12/10/2000
Tomorrow is easy, but today is uncharted.

-John Ashbury

12/9/2000
Use what talents you have: the woods would have little music if the birds sang their own song except those who sang best.

-Reverend Oliver G. Wilson

12/8/2000
All our dreams can come true,if we have the courage to pursue them.

-Walt Disney

12/7/2000
Far away in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see the beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead.

-Louisa May Alcott

12/6/2000
A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.

- Henry Adams

12/5/2000
It takes as much courage to have tried and failed as it does to have tried and succeeded.

-Anne Morrow Lindberth

12/4/2000
Sometimes, what we look for is right before us, but we still look for what's not there in far places in hopes that we might find it in a better form. Ignorance is not all bliss.   
-Author unknown

12/3/2000
There's a little bit of seriousness in every joke.

-Roger William Ward Jr.

11/30/2000
Reach high, for stars lie hidden in your soul. Dream deep, for every dream precedes the goal.
-Anonymous

11/17/2000
Behind every successful woman...is a substantial amount of coffee.

-Stephanie Piro

11/15/2000
I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to
have been only a boy playing on the
sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother
pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst
the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
-Newton

11/7/2000
When a man assumes a public trust, he should consider himself as public
property.
       
-Life of Jefferson (Rayner), p. 356.

11/6/2000
Man shall never reach the moon for such a quantity of gunpowder would
be needed as to gravely injure the crew.

-Childrens Encyclopaedia, 1926

11/5/2000
"Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

-Edgar Allan Poe

11/3/2000
Deal with the faults of others as gently as with your own.

-Chinese proverb

11/2/2000
It's kind of fun to do the impossible.

-Walt Disney

11/1/2000
Donīt fear dying,
fear not having lived!
                                                        -Anonymous

10/31/2000
Lots of times you have to pretend to join a parade in which you're not really interested in order to get where you're going.

-Christopher Darlington Morley (1890-1957

10/30/2000
There is only one success: to be able to spend your life in your own way, and not to give others absurd maddening claims upon it.
-Christopher Darlington Morley (1890-1957)

10/26/2000
Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.
-Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

10/25/2000
We think in generalities, but we live in details.

-Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947)

10/24/2000
I haven't failed, I've found 10,000 ways that don't work. 

-Thomas Edison (1847-1931)

10/23/2000
Behind every good man is a great woman.

-unknown

10/21/2000
Life is not a sprint, it is a marathon.

-James Samuel Capellupo Jr.

10/19/2000
Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.

-Mark Twain [Samuel Langhornne Clemens] (1835-1910)

10/19/2000
When you live in a house of glass, be careful not to throw stones.

-unknown

10/17/2000
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
-George Santayana (1863-1952)

10/17/2000
All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take root in our personal experience.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)

10/13/2000
Minds are like parachutes. They only function when they are open.
-Sir James Dewar, Scientist (1877-1925)

10/12/2000
Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern but impossible to enslave.
-Baron Henry Peter Brougham

10/11/2000
I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
-William Butler Yeats