You concentrate on what you are doing, to do the best job you can, to stay out of a serious situation. That’s the way the X-1 was.

What good does it do to be afraid? It doesn't help anything. You better try and figure out what's happening and correct it.

You do what you can for as long as you can, and when you finally can't, you do the next best thing. You back up but you don't give up.

It's your duty to fly the airplane. If you get killed in it, you don't know anything about it anyway. Duty is paramount. It's that simple if you're a military guy. You don't say 'I'm not going to do that - that's dangerous.' If it's your duty to do it, that's the way it is.

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

Later, I realized that the mission had to end in a let-down because the real barrier wasn't in the sky but in our knowledge and experience of supersonic flight.

The best pilots fly more than the others; that's why they're the best.