After about 30 minutes I puked all over my airplane. I said to my self, "Man, you made a big mistake."

It wasn't that the X-1 would kill you, it was the systems in the X-1 that would kill you.

The first time I ever saw a jet, I shot it down.

Rules are made for people who aren't willing to make up their own.

As we went through mach one, the nose started dropping, so we just cranked that horizontal stabilizer down to keep the nose up. We got it above mach one, and once we got it above the speed of sound, then you have supersonic flow over the whole airplane, so you have no more shock waves on it that are causing buffeting...You really don't think about the outcome of any kind of a flight, whether it's combat, or any other kinds of flights, because you really have no control over it.

The secret of my success is that I always managed to live to fly another day.

After about 30 minutes I puked all over my airplane. I said to my self, "Man, you made a big mistake."