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I always liked airplanes, and I decided I was going to go to school to study them.

When I started flying, I realized how enjoyable it was, and flying became my main focus while engineering went on the back burner.

I used to skip out of high school and go flying. It was just one of those things, I thought it was kind of a cool thing to do. I never thought about doing that as a profession, but I started checking things out and I found out there was a flight school down in Daytona Beach, called Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

Flying, for some reason, has never been my favorite thing, but after taking some aviation classes and reading about it and learning about it... They've been doing this for over a hundred years, they've been to the moon and back; they kind of have a good system going here.

I was hooked on aviation, made model airplanes, and never thought I would be able to fly myself. It cost too much. But then World War II came along and changed all that.

Flying was great. You have to think fast. You have to develop intuition about the physics of air moving quickly over a surface.

I loved flying as much as I thought I would and continue to fly aircraft.

I read, studied, and learned everything I could find about aviation. It was my greatest desire to become a pilot. I could already picture myself in the cockpit of an airliner or in a military fighter plane. I felt deep in my heart this was my thing!

I started flying because I had a fear of it early on. I figured if I learned to fly, I would understand better what was happening and started taking lessons in the late 1950's, once I had made some money on tour.

I wanted to travel from the beginning. As a kid, I used to dream about airplanes, before I ever flew in one.