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The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, and the Epic Age of Flight QUOTES

The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, and the Epic Age of Flight QUOTES

1 " By 1929 a handful of farsighted flight pioneers had concluded that “aviation could not progress until planes could fly safely day or night in almost any kind of weather.” Foremost among these was Dr. Jimmy Doolittle, recently armed with a PhD in aeronautical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In "

― Winston Groom , The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, and the Epic Age of Flight

2 " Not that the title of top American ace wasn’t flattering. After all, Rickenbacker had shot down seven enemy planes in as many months. It was just that all of the former recipients of the honor had all been killed, and he could not help but ruminate over what he called “the unavoidable doom that had overtaken its previous holders.” Rickenbacker "

― Winston Groom , The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, and the Epic Age of Flight

3 " After a trip to Japan Mitchell famously predicted that the next war would be fought in the Pacific after a Japanese sneak attack on a Sunday morning in Hawaii. Eddie Rickenbacker, who had served as Mitchell’s driver before becoming an ace combat pilot, wryly quipped that “the only people who paid any attention to him were the Japanese.” Most "

― Winston Groom , The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, and the Epic Age of Flight

4 " But as Lindbergh’s friend former president Herbert Hoover instructed, “When you had been in politics long enough, you learned not to say things just because they are true.”21 "

― Winston Groom , The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, and the Epic Age of Flight

5 " a twenty-knot streak looked like; if there weren’t "

― Winston Groom , The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, and the Epic Age of Flight

6 " by the end of the war American warplanes were dropping seventeen hundred tons of bombs a day on Japanese cities. "

― Winston Groom , The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, and the Epic Age of Flight

7 " During one raid alone in 1945, using conventional bombs, it was estimated that eighty-eight thousand Japanese were killed and six square miles of Tokyo were completely destroyed. But "

― Winston Groom , The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, and the Epic Age of Flight

8 " Lindbergh knew perfectly well what modern bombs could do to cities but, seeing Nazi Germany for the first time, the idea of a new and very dangerous war became real to him. "

― Winston Groom , The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, and the Epic Age of Flight

9 " Germany,” Lindbergh said, “had the ambitious drive of America, but that drive was headed for war. "

― Winston Groom , The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, and the Epic Age of Flight

10 " With the advances of science he saw moral perspective being lost. Science and technology practically took on the role of religion, so that man was actually worshipping at the altar of science, a fallacy, if not a heresy, that could lead to the undoing of the American spirit. "

― Winston Groom , The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, and the Epic Age of Flight

11 " Lindbergh expressed these thoughts in a splendid speech while accepting the Wright Brothers Memorial Trophy at the Washington Aero Club in January 1946. Titling his speech “Honoring the Wright Brothers,” he took as his theme “the way in which science was divorcing man from his old sense of independence and moral values.”16 "

― Winston Groom , The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, and the Epic Age of Flight

12 " In late 1915 there appeared on the Western Front a German flier named Manfred von Richthofen, known as the Red Baron, after his royal title and a penchant for painting his squadron’s Fokker triwing fighters red. He was a natural born killer who shot down more than eighty enemy aircraft before himself being fatally brought down by ground fire "

― Winston Groom , The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, and the Epic Age of Flight

13 " After seventeen days of flying school he could now call himself a pilot. After putting in twenty-five hours of flying time, he was commissioned a first lieutenant in the U.S. Army. W "

― Winston Groom , The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, and the Epic Age of Flight

14 " They had graduated from cloth-and-wood flying machines in the dawn of human flight to steel and aluminum behemoths with thousands of horsepower and terrific firepower; "

― Winston Groom , The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, and the Epic Age of Flight