Wolfgang Langewiesche Quotes

Germany, Author
1907 – 2002.

Wolfgang Langewiesche aviator, author and journalist, is one of the most quoted authors in aviation writing. His book, Stick and Rudder (1944), is still in print, and is considered a primary reference on the art of flying fixed-wing aircraft.

Also known as Aviator

A fierce and monkish art; a castigation of the flesh. You must cut out your imagination and not fly an airplane but regulate a half-dozen instruments . . . .At first, the conflicts between animal sense and engineering brain are irresistibly strong.

Wolfgang Langewiesche
Get rid at the outset of the idea that the airplane is only an air-going sort of automobile. It isn't. It may sound like one and smell like one, and it may have been interior decorated to look like one; but the difference is - it goes on wings.

Wolfgang Langewiesche

Sometimes I watch myself fly. For in the history of human flight it is not yet so very late; and a man may still wonder once in a while and ask: how is it that I, poor earth-habitituated animal, can fly?

Wolfgang Langewiesche
- Sometimes
- Wonder
- Humans
Any young boy can nowadays explain human flight - mechanistically: " ... and to climb you shove the throttle all the way forward and pull back just a little on the stick. ... " One might as well explain music by saying that the further over to the right you hit the piano the higher it will sound. The makings of a flight are not in the levers, wheels, and pedals but in the nervous system of the pilot: physical sensations, bits of textbook, deep-rooted instincts, burnt-child memories of trouble aloft, hangar talk.

Wolfgang Langewiesche
- Children
- Memories
- Humans
Flying is done largely with the imagination.

Wolfgang Langewiesche
- Imagination
- Flying