The secret to my success was that somehow I always managed to live to fly another day.

When I was picked to fly the X-1, it was my duty to fly it, and I did.

[When it started,] I had about 20,000 pilots donate their aircraft and fuel so we could fly 1 million kids by Dec. 17, 2003 (the 100th anniversary of the Wright Brothers first flight), ... I flew the millionth one at the Nevada County Airport.

We somehow managed to live through the trends without succumbing to them. When disco came in, we survived without writing a disco song.

At times in I felt like we were really out of rhythm and out of sync. Somehow we managed to prevail out there and pull it together. People that we weren't expecting to step it up, stepped it up.

You don't concentrate on risks. You concentrate on results. No risk is too great to prevent the necessary job from getting done.