Pilot Quotes

Increasingly, there’s much better material on television, but there’s not always the time and money to make it, so you’ve got to make sure you make it in the right place. It also depends on time commitment; a lot of directors will make a pilot, but a series is just a whole other level of involvement.

I’m at a little loss in terms of my Leave It To Beaver expertise, since I never watched an episode of the show – so the cast in the pilot could have been Martians or they could have been the regular cast for all I know.

I never dreamed to be a fighter pilot, because those guys are jerks.

Being a display pilot is probably the thing I’ve been most proud of in my life. Don’t really fly anymore now though. I have three small children and as most of my friends were killed in different accidents, I realised that it was probably just a matter of time before I went that way.

My grandfather was a general in the Nationalist Chinese Air Force during World War II, and I grew up hearing the pilot stories and seeing pictures of him in uniform.

I was a pilot and flying hang gliders, paragliders, aerobatics airplanes, and then I discovered skydiving. Free fall. Free. With nothing around you, just a parachute on your back. And you go down. But you don’t feel like you’re going down. Total freedom.

When I was a young girl, I used to dream about what I would be when I grew up. I thought that I wanted to be a nurse, then a teacher, even a pilot at one point.

I was in the pilot of ER: I played a 15-year-old pregnant girl they were treating. And then, in the final season, they were casting for interns.

As a pilot, I can tell you drones may be a lot of things; airplanes they are not.

Coming in and out of Hollywood for pilot season, I may have to thicken my accent or hear that, physically, I’m not Latino. I not only am, but there’s another 50,000 people who look exactly like me.

You always have that danger when you do a pilot of getting this gigantic chunk of change, and all of a sudden you’re like, ‘It’s going to run forever, and I’m buying a house in the Hollywood Hills.’

As a physician and as a pilot, I think it lets me be a pretty good translator having one foot in the medical world and one foot in the flying world. Sometimes when the medical guys come in and speak medical stuff to the pilots, the pilots really don’t know what they’re saying.

Like the Spitfire it was immensely strong: a pilot had no need to fear the danger of pulling the wings off, no matter how desperate the situation became.

I’ll admit I wanted to be a pilot, originally.

Being a consultant is like flying first-class. The food is terrific, the drinks are cold. But all you can do is walk up to the pilot and say, ‘bank left.’ If you’re in management, you have the controls.

I’m trying to conquer swimming. I’m getting there. I’ve gotta conquer it. I had a fear of drowning and tunnels and flying. I started flying and got my pilot’s license, so I conquered that. Now, I’m onto swimming and tunnels.

As a child, my sister and I had very fruitful imaginations, and I would think that I wanted to be one profession or I’d want to have this experience in life. I realized it’s not because I actually wanted to be a Coast Guard helicopter rescue pilot or something like that – I just enjoyed the idea of playing it.

I’m doing this pilot called ‘Demon.’ Kevin Smith is directing it. It’s a comedy drama. I play a guy who rises up from Hell.

I really loved Twin Peaks. When I saw the two-hour pilot, they screened it in the big theatre. I said, I don’t know what is going to happen. I’m in this and I don’t understand it. This is never going to sell. Who’s going to watch this thing?

‘The X-Files’ from the beginning was a very visual show, and with Bob Mandel directing the pilot and Dan Sackheim being involved in the production of the pilot and directing the first episode, they brought a visual style to it that was elaborated on by so many good directors.

I learned to be a hot-air balloon pilot to take tourists over the Masai Mara Reserve in order to earn some money and finance the work I was doing with my wife, Anne. We were studying the life of a family of lions for more than two years. Taking pictures was a way to capture information we could not put in words.

If I’m not on stage, I’m a pilot. I like flying planes; I have a little plane back in Nashville.

Very few pilots even know how to read Morse code anymore. But if a pilot could read Morse code, he could tell which beacon he was approaching by the code that was flashing from it.

I read it in college as an assignment. I didn’t think about it at the time. But when I heard there was a ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ pilot, I freaked out.

If crimes are committed, they are committed by people; they are not committed by some free-floating entity. These companies and other entities don’t operate on automatic pilot. There are individuals that make decisions – and some make the right decisions, and some make the wrong decisions.

My pilot’s license. I’m proud of that.

Astronauts working for the government will always need to be either pilots or mission specialists. Those who want to be pilots should have military experience – ideally, a test pilot background.

And so, I was not a military test pilot, but as soon as NASA expressed an interest in flying scientists and people who were not military test pilots, that was an epiphany that just came like a stroke of lightning.

My first job out of school was the ‘Adventure Time’ pilot. I was lucky enough to have my first lead on a job at a company called Frederator. They were accepting pitches for a shorts program.

My whole life, I wanted to be a fighter pilot; it’s what I wanted to do. I set up all of my classes for it, but I got lazy my senior year in high school and didn’t get my paperwork in.

When I went to Test Pilot School, that’s when we came to Johnson Space Center. And I ended up seeing John Young and listening to him talk and getting a positive influence from him.

I don’t know much about writing a show or being a show-runner on a show, but I can only imagine that when you first cast a show and you first do a pilot, there are so many components that you’re throwing into the mix and you’re not sure how they’re going to develop.

I did a sitcom with Desi Arnaz Jr. in a pilot called ‘Whacked Out.’ We were bombing, and Lucille Ball grabbed the mic and started berating the audience.

I’ve not been a prolific poet, and it always seemed to me to be a bad idea to feel that you had to produce in order to get… credits. Production of a collection of poems every three years or every five years, or whatever, looks good, on paper. But it might not be good; it might be writing on a kind of automatic pilot.

For ‘Orphan Black,’ all I got was the pilot script, and that was enough for me. I was daydreaming about this part. I kept thinking about how certain scenes were going to play out and how these interactions were going to take place.

I couldn’t tell you a good, bad or ugly pilot just from reading it, but I can tell you a character I want to play.

When you make a pilot, you’ve never seen the show before; you don’t know what it is.

I am most grateful for having bad eyesight, which prevented me from becoming a commercial pilot and instead, led me to having the best job in the world – representing the people of California’s 47th Congressional District.

When you have an older group of players, they play on automatic pilot a lot of the time, but with youngsters, you have more intuition.

In terms of the pilot, you have to introduce a lot of characters in a very short period of time, and you have to paint with slightly broad brush strokes because you just need to give an audience an idea of who these people might be.

I could have just invited a bunch of my pilot buddies to go, and we would have had a great time and come back and had a bunch of cocktails. Instead, we wanted to bring in everyday people and energize everyone else around the idea of opening up spaceflight to more and more of us.

There’s no such thing as a natural-born pilot.

I remember when I did the pilot, and I though no network is going to want to do this. How could that happen? A half Chinese guy walking the old west that doesn’t fire one gun and never gets on a horse?

My father was a pilot in WWII and I have nothing but the utmost respect for anyone who answers the call to serve our country.

I got my private pilot’s license in autumn 1986.

I’d love to play a commercial pilot on screen.

I decided I’d never do a series again, but I was offered a pilot for a series through Eddy Murphy Productions, and that was the gig that got me Parker Lewis.

I’ve learned through experience that you can’t ever predict what’s going to happen with any show. When I signed on to ‘Ugly Betty,’ I just prayed that I wouldn’t get fired after the pilot, and four years later, I was still doing it.

I had to think ahead. How much would I really enjoy committing five or seven years to working on this? When you’re an unemployed actor offered a TV pilot, no matter who you are you’re tempted by the good hunk of change to be made. It keeps you out of the unemployment line.

When you’re doing a pilot, you don’t know where it will end up, and then you’re being put up with the best of the best.

My take on ‘Lucifer’ was pretty much laid down by Tom Kapinos when he wrote the original pilot script for it. I remember reading it for the first time, and I was about four or five pages in, thinking this is so funny, and I know how I would want to do this if I was going to do it.

As a child, I always wanted to be a race car pilot.

When I read the ‘Ugly Betty’ pilot, I thought, ‘Oh, this part’s funny.’ I said to my husband, ‘I’m going to get it!’ But based on what? All my exquisite comedic work in a Nike commercial?

I still remember when I was 18 and my life was completely different. I was in my apartment, and I got the call that I got Stiles for this pilot. I was just jumping around with my roommates, freaking out. It’s crazy to think about.

We’ve seen other Internet people go to TV, and it’s bad because they take two months off to make a pilot, and their viewers have forgotten about them when they come back.

Anybody can pilot a ship when the sea is calm.

I left the Navy as a lieutenant after spending almost 10 years as a helicopter pilot.

She glances at the photo, and the pilot light of memory flickers in her eyes.

Even if I could talk face to face with the pilot who dropped the bombs I would tell him, ‘We cannot change history, but we should try to do good things for the present and for the future to promote peace.’

The pilot looked at his cues of attitude and speed and orientation and so on and responded as he would from the same cues in an airplane, but there was no way it flew the same. The simulators had showed us that.

My dad is a pilot so I think I was born with the travel bug.

Two months after I got out of test pilot school, I saw an advert that said NASA was recruiting more astronauts. The best job you could have as a test pilot was being an astronaut, so I volunteered.

The first season of a show is kind of like an extended pilot. You’re only really on the map if it goes a second season.

One thing every Army pilot knows is that there is no such thing as a routine mission.

I started playing the guitar when we started filming the pilot to ‘Lost in Space,’ which was way back in December of 1964, and there’s a little bit in the pilot that was used in the first season where Will Robinson is sitting around some bad foam rubber rock playing and singing ‘Greensleeves.’

We went down for pilot season, I got Full House, and we wound up never leaving.

Well, it’s difficult to fall in love with a character when you just read the pilot. You don’t really know who the character is.

‘Boldface’ is a pilot term, a magic word to describe the procedures that could, in a crisis, save your life. We say that ‘boldface is written in blood’ because often it’s created in response to an accident investigation. It highlights the series of steps that should have been taken to avoid a fatal crash, but weren’t.

What I do know is how difficult it is in this industry to get a show on the air. There’s so many different stages: getting a script bought by the network, then getting a pilot made and having that pilot go to series, and then, when that series gets on the air, having people watch it.

Now that I know what goes into making a pilot, keeping it on the air, and keeping your fans, I’m at a point now where I do a pilot and just hope for the best. If it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t work out.

You learn to know a pilot in a storm.

There were moments where Supergirl gets a thrashing in the pilot, where if a man in the ‘Flash’ or ‘Arrow’ pilot got beat up, people didn’t visibly wince. And I watched in testing, people in the audience really became uncomfortable by the fisticuffs and the action. But then, they were elated and cheering at the end.

For the last four or five years, I had been in the position where I didn’t have to take a pilot. I took this one because the script and the people were terrific. It never frightened me. As we were doing the pilot, I could tell that it was working.

As actors, if you get a pilot on HBO or on USA, your odds are good that it’s going to get picked up.

I did a pilot for Nickelodeon that didn’t end up going to series.

I would like to pilot a government-led scheme, alongside Help to Buy, to offer a loan to young people on a reasonable income to be able to pay the deposit on a new home and then swap their high rents for a mortgage and actually have a place of their own.

When you accept a role in a pilot, you automatically sign up for five years. You think it’s scary to walk down the aisle? Try signing a five-year contract for a show you may not want to be part of down the road.

Mohammed al-Qahtani was not alleged to be a leader of the Sept. 11 plot. He was not trained as a pilot. If he was involved, he was one of the ‘muscle’ hijackers.

My first inclination was toward flying and being a pilot.

The only thing that I’m not willing to do is really stupid, horribly written sitcoms. It can be tempting during pilot season time, but I realized this a while ago when I almost signed my life away to a stupid pilot.

This is what I wanted all along, and after I finished my studies and begun the job of testing jet aircraft, well, there wasn’t a happier pilot in the air force.

It is cool to make a pilot because you get to do all the fun stuff, and then you get to leave when all the tough stuff starts.

As probably is known, I did not want my husband to join politics. He was not keen to join politics. He was very happy as a pilot.

I directed a half hour comedy pilot, ‘Upgrade,’ and had one of the best times ever! I had such a great time directing; I would love to get to direct another project.

I have a rule: I want the pilot flying me up in the air at 30,000 feet to make more than a guy working at Taco Bell.

If I had the uniform on, you didn’t doubt for a moment I was a pilot. No one ever blinked an eye if I tried to cash a cheque wearing that uniform.

Nine g’s is good, if the pilot can stand it. We couldn’t stand it. Not in the airplanes of World War II.

I believe really deeply in the pilot process because you learn things about tone and casting. Even some of our best shows have had substantial re-shoots and reworking before they’ve gone on the air.

I can’t tell you how good it is to go from ‘Homeland’ to be lucky enough to find ‘The Blacklist’ at the right time. It literally came at the very end of pilot season when I thought there was nothing left.

The pilot system in television is utterly broken. It’s a huge waste of money.

Honest pioneer work in the field of science has always been, and will continue to be, life’s pilot. On all sides, life is surrounded by hostility. This puts us under an obligation.

I got to do Disney Sunday movies. I got to do a TV pilot there. And it really helped me to realise that I needed to not just be a writer, but a producer, to see my work up on the screen the way I wanted it to look and play.

Pilot season’s such a strange time. You get such a concentrated amount of scripts. A lot of them become white noise after a while. When something really pops, it becomes apparent very quickly. I’m quite instinctive about that. I know, normally by about 10 pages in, whether I want to do something or not.

My mother was a stay-at-home mum and my father was an RAF pilot.

Lucifer likes to have fun, but we need to make sure that he’s also rooted in a proper journey. For the first few episodes after a pilot, you’re just trying to establish your world and the starting points for your characters. But I feel like, as the stakes went up, the ‘Lucifer’ veneer got less and less.

You know, it’s scary when you sign onto a pilot of a series because, as much as you want the series to go, you also want it to be a character that you’d be interested in playing for a long time.

I feel like if we can use the combination of basically data-driven hunches and bet on really first-class talent to deliver the shows, that I think we could do as well as the networks do, who basically have a 75 to 80 percent failure rate for new shows anyway – even after all that development and pilot work.

‘Proof’ is a really cool pilot that I was lucky enough to read by Rob Braggin for TNT that’s about a surgeon who’s an agnostic, tough, grounded, scientific mind and she’s hired by a Steve Jobs-type who’s just been diagnosed with cancer to focus on near death experiences and what happens when you die.

‘Bhuj’ has a strong ensemble and I play a Sikh fighter pilot in it.

A pilot is like the most extensive dress rehearsal you can ever imagine, because the writers are learning about the actors, the actors are learning about the characters.

Being in a male-dominated career field as a combat pilot, I got used to kind of blocking out the lies in the attacks that people would levy against me and trying to tell me who I am and define who I am when I know what I’m fighting for.

Here’s to the pilot that weathered the storm.

I’m rubbish at maths but I would like to have been a pilot.

I think the core of Jaime Lannister is actually that final line in the pilot when he says, ‘The things I do for love.’ He might do horrible things – and they are truly, some of them, horrific. There’s no excuses. But he does it out of what he sees as a necessity, out of love.

From an actor’s point of view, you never really like to hope that anything will go beyond the pilot. I’d always say to my agent every time I filmed a pilot, ‘Great! Well, I’ll see you at pilot season.’

You hope for that with anything, but with a TV show, the writer and the actor being the right mix are more important than the actual writing of the pilot because you hope it’s something that can have a long life.

I still love a great pilot as much as I did the day I started at NBC.

Even failures can turn into something positive if you just keep going. I wrote a television pilot called ‘Head of the Family.’ CBS didn’t want it. It was considered a failure. But we reworked it. A year later, it became ‘The Dick Van Dyke Show.’

When I read the pilot ‘for Married with Children’, it just reminded me of my Uncle Joe… just a self-deprecating kind of guy. He’d come home from work, and the wife would maybe say ‘I ran over the dog this morning in the driveway’. And he would say ‘Fine, what’s for dinner?

Some infrastructure projects clearly require massive, coordinated investment – interstate highways or a new trans-Hudson tunnel, for instance. Others don’t have to. We should be unafraid of pilot projects and learning.

I dress like a 7-year-old space pilot. I have clothes that I still wear regularly from high school.

I grew up and I kind of took the road of becoming a pilot, which was another dream I had of flying, and once I did attend the air force academy, that dream of flying became more like a project, and I wanted to be a fighter pilot, which I did. I became a fighter pilot.

I realized how important it was to know something about aviation, and it was something I was interested in, so I followed my brother’s footsteps and obtained my pilot’s license.

What they did was to make a pilot and it may well go to series at the next festival but I don’t have any news on that. It’s already been on Paramount actually, but as it’s on Paramount it’ll probably be on several more times… hopefully.

To be a bodyguard is to be a kamikaze pilot. Dedicated.

The most important decision you can make as a showrunner when you’re doing a pilot is who’s in it and who’s directing it.

I loved playing Jackie on ‘Happy Endings.’ It was really exciting to be in the pilot and then be able to come back. Her character was so much fun!

It was understood that when I left to do the pilot that I wasn’t coming back.

When I first did a U.S. pilot season, there were very few British actors schlepping around town trying to get into television. That was 1999.

The obviously inexperienced pilot is the game the scientific air-fighter goes after, and the majority of victories are won that way. But, on the other hand, it is the novice usually who gets the famous ace by doing at some moment the unexpected thing.

I forgive everyone who caused my suffering, even the pilot, commander, people controlling me.

I’ve written a couple of scripts. Actually, a pilot. I’m not sure I’m allowed to say, but it’s a comedy about three young men in New York City, one of whom may or may not be a romantic like me.

The experienced fighting pilot does not take unnecessary risks. His business is to shoot down enemy planes, not to get shot down.

I had never worked in television before ‘Freaks and Geeks,’ and ‘New Girl’ is the first time since that I’ve worked on a series that is actually a series and not just a pilot.

When I was first told about ‘Game of Thrones,’ I didn’t know the books, anything. So I read the pilot, and when I got the first script, it was clear the story was about these people and families and a constant battle for power.

I was fortunate enough to book a pilot, and we just got picked up for a midseason replacement for ABC. It’s called ‘Romantically Challenged,’ and I’m going to be playing Alyssa Milano’s little sister. The other actor in it is Kyle Bornheimer from ‘Worst Week’ – he’s hilarious.

I never intended to become a professional pilot. But, as I became more curious about aircraft, and, well, not being John Travolta, I realized that the only way I was ever going to fly a jet is if I got a job.

Pilot season in L.A. is just this blood bath. They make so many pilots, and such a small percentage are picked up. And then if you are picked up, there are so many variables. You have to get a good time slot, and you have to get promoted. And then you have to thrive in that time slot.

You know, being a test pilot isn’t always the healthiest business in the world.

It’s great if a pilot starts off great and if it doesn’t start off so great it’s not that big a deal: everybody’s baby is born ugly. But you want to know, if given the opportunity: Where are we going? What’s the story we’re trying to tell?

I’d never properly done pilot season in America. I did it for just a couple of weeks, a couple of years ago. Usually, you get pilot scripts and the initial script quality isn’t there.

Dylan, myself and my father were in a two hour movie called The Sand Kings, which started off the Outer Limits series. It was sort of the two hour pilot movie.

Somehow, I knew you had to have perfect eyesight to be a test pilot, and so that was it for my astronaut career.

I wanted to be a doctor at one point and I also wanted to be a pilot. I think if you grow up in a dodgy area, reality often beats down those ambitions as you get older. But with me that never really happened.

I’m going to write a whole pilot and see if anyone’s interested, and if not then I’ll just live out the tortured life instead of showing it on TV.

One of my best friends was the first U.K. female fighter pilot.

I think aerobatic pilots make the best pilots because you know, you’re just so confident in an aeroplane. If you’re gonna get into trouble, I’d rather be with someone that’s a skilled aerobatic pilot.

I use Pilot’s document ink, but their drawing ink is OK, too. It’s just that I don’t like the impression that clings to the pen tip.

I came to New York and started doing stand-up and improv, and started auditioning for commercials and voiceovers and stuff. My first job was on a pilot of that prank show called ‘Boiling Points’ on MTV.

I’m doing another pilot about a black Democratic pundit who’s married to a white Republican pundit. And the purpose of me wanting to do that show – and ABC sort of supported me in the way they did – is because I feel like, you know, the political system is like an old married couple.

If you go back and look at the pilot of ‘Seinfeld,’ no one would have thought that show would be what it became, and television isn’t given that kind of chance anymore.

I don’t know about living on an automatic pilot, but I’ve had times where I’ve decided to just test myself and my mettle, and for no good reason other than it’s what life is. Even before I was acting, I had, like, one day in high school I decided to just show them my pajamas, just for no good reason.

Like, to do a pilot, you don’t know what’s going to happen with it.

I’ve been as a pilot involved in the Gulf War. And then, in the No-Fly Zone.

Before I became a fighter pilot, everyone said that women didn’t have the physical strength. Well, I had just completed the Hawaii Ironman Triathlon.

I would have loved to have been in the room with the ABC executives when they watched David Lynch’s ‘Mulholland Drive’ TV pilot. You know that had to be a long silence after that thing stopped.

There were a lot of things I thought of doing as I was growing up, from becoming a singer to a priest to a pilot.

I took my first flying lesson in 1967, when I was 16. By October 1968, I had 70 hours in the air and got my pilot’s license.

I want to find a nice decent job as a helicopter pilot.

The script that I fell in love with and adored was ‘Jane the Virgin’… but every line in the pilot was essentially, ‘Why did you keep my daughter a secret all of these years?’ I didn’t know any direction my character was going – was it going to be a dramatic character, a comedic character? – I didn’t know.

Brimstone was great. That was another occasion when they called me in to do the pilot and it turned into a regular job, which made me quite happy. It was another really good experience and we were all so surprised when they pulled the plug on it.

I used to be a calligrapher for weddings and events – that was my side job while I was auditioning. I think handwritten notes are a lost art form. When I booked my first pilot, my dad wrote me a letter that I still have. The idea of someone taking the time to put pen to paper is really special.

JJ Abrams is definitely a guy that when he calls, you want to answer. He’s incredibly focused. When he was shooting the pilot on ‘Lost,’ we’d do a take and he’d go back to his tent and be working on the first episodes of ‘Lost’ as well as the cliffhanger for the eighth season of ‘Alias.’ He’s an incredible multitasker.

The glory of being a carrier pilot has certainly worn off.

At the end of the day, it’s really, really difficult to make a brand-new show, to write a pilot where you have to introduce characters and everyone has to kind of be dynamic and have something different for themselves.

I live in the sky as a pilot, so it has great meaning to me.

More people saw the pilot of ‘Glee’ than saw me in my entire 10-year career on Broadway.

We did exactly what everybody in the country did, watching it. You entered this state of sort of denials. You think, well, it must have been a tragic accident by an amateur pilot. And then you see the next plane coming.

I don’t have my pilot’s licence anymore, but I’m still very political.

‘Dexter,’ while the pilot shares moments with the novel that created the character of Dexter, they completely abandoned the book from that moment on.

One thing I quickly discovered as a female pilot – ditch the heels!

One of the best decisions we made on the ‘Arrow’ pilot was to have the Deathstroke mask. Within 30 seconds, you knew you were watching a DC comics show.

When I moved to L.A. in 1989, the very first thing I did was this horrific pilot called To Protect And Surf.

It’s much easier to fail when you’re in the pilot, early stage, when it’s less expensive and you’re exploring than when you’re way out the door and you’ve spent all this money. Industry is smart: structured to have skunkworks and pilot phases.

I used to train with my husband, Anthony Maina, but he is now too busy as a helicopter pilot, so we only run together when I do light jogging. I don’t want to kill him before his next flight!

I’m a commercial pilot before I was an actor.

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!

When I read the pilot of ‘The Sopranos,’ I wasn’t terribly blown away by it.

When a network passes, you really mourn the show. The official state of grief in Hollywood is saying you’re taking around a dead pilot.

And so we were asleep there in San Diego. And our pilot called us. And his brother was on one of the other planes. And when he was leaving the airport, he saw in his rear view mirror that there was an explosion.

For me, I look at a pilot and go, ‘I see the landscape. I see the characters. I see the direction and the potential of the story.’ And I also go, ‘That didn’t work. I could change that. Maybe that works. I don’t know. We’ll see.’ For me, I look at it, as an actor, as what can I improve upon?

I don’t think any of us could have possibly anticipated how successful Mad Men has been. When we were working on the pilot, we loved it. We thought it was special. We hoped and prayed it’d be a success. But, we didn’t count on it.

We did one pilot for FOX which was about this couple that moves to a town, and we play everyone in the entire town. So it was like a Peter Sellers film.

On ‘Masters of Sex,’ especially in the pilot, everybody was showing up word-perfect, and you’re expected to show up word-perfect.

My father-in-law was a pilot. During World War II, he was shot down in a B-17 over Belgium. With the help of the French Resistance, he made his way through Occupied France and back to his base in England.

I’d like to have been a pilot.

I experienced a lot of discrimination in the military. One commander told me that if my time of the month got in the way of my job, he would fire me. An instructor in pilot training continually failed me for subjective things, like judgment and situational awareness–I couldn’t get him to tell me what I was doing wrong.

You read a million scripts during pilot season, and most of them are not very good, so the good ones really shine.

The pilot is the wedding, and the series is the relationship.

I believe that 99 percent of successful TV shows change an immense amount from the pilot to the tenth or twelfth episode.

I spent one semester in Air Force ROTC, as I wanted to be a pilot.

A lot of people think Formula One isn’t a sport because everyone drives a car when they go to work in the morning. But we’re pulling up to six G on a corner or during breaking, which is almost like being a fighter pilot. So we have to do a lot of work on our neck muscles.

I’m doing a pilot for Comedy Central with the band Steel Panther. They’re faux heavy metal. They started as kind of a tribute band out here, or a cover band, and they’re funny guys, and they just sort of morphed into their own thing.

What the hell is pilot season? It’s an artificial boundary that makes no sense, and it makes you do things under duress.

Jimmy Van Heusen was a top security test pilot in World War II as well as being a great songwriter. He was absolutely incredible. Van Heusen inspired me to write music.

Whether you are an astronomer or a life scientist, geophysicist, or a pilot, you’ve got to be there because you believe you are good in your field, and you can contribute, not because you are going to get a lot of fame or whatever when you get back.

My grandmother was a flight attendant; my mother had a pilot’s license, and my grandfather was a pilot. That’s how my grandmother and grandfather met.

I get so tickled when that pilot happens to be an African American because I rarely see that. The same is true when I go to find restaurants. I mean, most places I go, I kind of have some idea who the chef is, which is why I want to go.

Each test pilot I know considers him, or herself, now that there are women, to be the very best. It’s very demeaning to step down the ladder once in a while.

It’s better to write a pilot rather than write a spec show. In some cases, you have to do both, but more often, writing a pilot and having an original voice is more important.

Not long after I got my test pilot qualification, I realised there was no manned space flight programme in the U.K., and there was unlikely to be one.

Networks can typically invest tens of millions of dollars in the development of a pilot. And if they put the show on the air and it fails, that’s all lost money. There’s no monetization of a broken series.

Having kids has proven to be this amazing – for me, this amazing source of ideas of anecdotes, of examples, I can test my own kids without human subject permission, so they pilot – I pilot my ideas on them. And so it is a tremendous advantage to have kids if you’re going to be a developmental psychologist.

There was so long from when we did the pilot and then when the show was eventually picked up by Comedy Central – and, in fact, we had to shoot the pilot twice.

I’m a medevac pilot. I have spent time suppressing wildfires and things like that. And as a combat pilot, I tend to find the biggest bucket of water I can find and put it on the biggest fire I can find, right?

I did a terrible television pilot that was so badly written and dumb that it became a turning point for me and I decided that I would never accept a job just because I needed the money.

In 1994, to motivate me to complete my pilot’s license, my good friend, Gregg Maryniak, gave me Charles Lindbergh’s autobiography of his solo flight across the Atlantic.

I did a CNN pilot but they decided I wasn’t Anthony Bourdain.

I remember on the pilot of ‘Will and Grace’ some executives from NBC saying to me, ‘There are too many gay jokes.’ I said, ‘If not on this show, then what show?’

But when I was selected, after my very first tour of squadron duty, to become one of the youngest candidates for the test pilot school, I began to realize, maybe you are a little bit better.

I’ve already begun to put pilot programs in place that give CUNY grads opportunities to get good tech jobs. We should expand on that so that New Yorkers are getting those jobs, because those jobs are probably one of the biggest 21st Century pathways into the middle class.

As a military pilot and a test pilot, handling unusual situations and aircraft malfunctions was part of the business.

When I first began doing TV pilots, my expectations were high. I didn’t understand that world. So when ‘Weeds’ took off, I was so happy. Especially as I was just a guest star in the pilot. But once it got picked up, they made me a regular cast member.

I enjoy the writing process and producing; I enjoy seeing an idea come to fruition. I’m driven by very complex characters. You look at the pilot of ‘Breaking Bad,’ where there’s so much depth to the character, you can’t help but be invested when you watch.

I get inspired when I look at Tom Lennon, who did ‘Reno 911!’ for six seasons while writing huge movies and directing and also doing other pilots; he did that FX pilot, the ‘Star Trek’ thing.

‘The Originals’ is going to be an epic showdown of supernatural forces, and that was very evident in the pilot. I just wanted to be a part of that.

I thought it would be good for the engineers and workmen who were building my spacecraft to see the pilot who would have to fly it hanging around. It might make them just a little more careful than they already were and a little more eager to get the work done on time if they saw how much I cared.

Seeing that a Pilot steers the ship in which we sail, who will never allow us to perish even in the midst of shipwrecks, there is no reason why our minds should be overwhelmed with fear and overcome with weariness.

You get to actually see the music video on the TV in the pilot and we have the soundtrack playing at this big party. I thought that was sort of a cool moment, to actually have the A-Ha video is pretty cool.

In aviation they have auto pilot and color radar and a lot of other instrumentation that is a backup for pilots. It’s really brought the incidents of plane crashes way down. Same thing ought to happen in the medical industry, I think.

I created ‘Dinner: Impossible’ with a guy named Bryan O’Reilly and I shot the pilot as a 30 minute show and we sold it.

Usually when you do a pilot, there’s a moment where all of the executives get together and say thumbs up or down.

Oftentimes, you read these pilot scripts that come through for American work, and they don’t sing to you. I’ve got to be honest, not many of them ignite the flame or give you that burning feeling of, ‘Oh, God, I really want to be a part of this.’

I wrote a script – a script about a guy working on the automobile assembly line; I never could get money for that. I did a pilot about minimum wage workers for HBO that didn’t get picked up; they thought it was depressing, even though it was a comedy.

It is easy to fall into despair thinking about all that is wrong with the world. The joys seems so small in comparison. Internet videos of cats riding Roombas just can’t compete with a father talking about how his dead 13-year-old son had wanted to be a pilot.

I was only 11 when we filmed the pilot. The idea of a rapper being a star on a sitcom just wasn’t heard of.

My father was a fighter pilot, so I moved around the world when I was young. Then I ended up in Kansas.

I worked with people I admire; Josh Lucas, who I’d worked with many many years ago on a pilot called The Class of 61 and Kurt Russell, and so there were a variety of different people that I enjoyed working with.

When a test pilot comes off a flight, there is typically another pilot who is going to take it up, and he believes in the debriefing. You don’t keep something to yourself.

Yes… well, I used to have a pilot’s license.

I didn’t get a pilot slot my first time trying. We Texans don’t give up easy, and everything we’ve accomplished is just the beginning.

Richard Kerry not only was a pilot in World War II, but was a civil servant. He did not come from money.

I always wanted to be a pilot, though somewhere down the line switched to computers.

I did a pilot for a show about community support officers, and all the community support officers were pleased that we didn’t portray them as idiots.

Every pilot I’ve ever written, I’ve fallen deeply and madly in love with. It’s the only way I work.

I work really, really hard and it’s challenging going through all of those time zones and having to be awake when you’re supposed to be asleep. I literally fly more than a pilot.

I can still remember them wheeling the black and white TV sets into our classroom at school so we could watch the men landing on the Moon, and that obviously had a huge impact. I later found out those people flying Apollo were ex-military test pilots, so I decided to join the Air Force and become a test pilot.

People always say I write a lot of pop culture references. Can somebody please count the pop culture references in ‘Firefly?’ Because I don’t know how to put this to you, but there was one. I referenced The Beatles in the pilot.

I don’t know how much credit I can take for ‘Walker, Texas Ranger,’ because I only worked on it for three weeks. I re-wrote the pilot, and then my name was on it forever.

I would like to fly in space. Absolutely. That would be cool. I used to just do personally risky things, but now I’ve got kids and responsibilities, so I can’t be my own test pilot. That wouldn’t be a good idea. But I definitely want to fly as soon as it’s a sensible thing to do.

I was always accepted at par value. I wore the uniform of a Pan Am pilot; therefore, I must be a Pan Am pilot.

I’m shooting a pilot based on my show. It’s a one-camera show. I play myself.

I am still a keen mountain walker and an enthusiastic glider pilot.

If you want to grow old as a pilot, you’ve got to know when to push it, and when to back off.

Between the ages of 12 and 15, I wanted to be a pilot because I thought it would be glamorous and dangerous.

I got canceled in the middle of making the pilot.

I have some eye problems from when I was a pilot.

I have one brother, John, an airline pilot, who is seven years younger. He’s adopted, though we’re still blood related – he’s my cousin. My parents couldn’t have any more children after me, so when Dad’s brother died, they adopted John, then just a baby.

I think a lot of actors, we underprepare emotionally for how intense pilot season can be. And we underprepare the people around us, our support system. So when it starts taking up more time than you expect it to, we feel guilty.

When you’re making a pilot, what you’re mostly thinking is, ‘Please let this be a real job, please.’

My main incentive now is to be so successful that I can get a private jet and sit with the pilot. I got upgraded to first class the other week, but even there I was still scared. I could be massaged for the whole flight and still think I’m going to die.

The reason I’ve never gone for pilot season even as a younger actor, and wouldn’t entertain that sort of thing now, is the idea of signing a piece of paper that binds me for six or seven years.

When I fly in a helicopter, I insist there be two sets of controls, one for me in case something happens to the pilot. I’m no expert, but I know enough to at least get the thing on the ground. Nothing scares me like the thought of not being in control.

During World War II, the pilot losses were staggering. In some bombing raids, as many as 80% of the planes that left did not return.

So, whenever Scooter was the Pilot, he never had a chance to fly the orbiter. So, the joke is: I’m going to have a chance to fly it first and hand it over to him.

I got this letter asking me if I wanted to or if I would consider going to experimental test pilot school and becoming the first Negro astronaut and I thought it was crazy.

When you’re doing a pilot, you’re doing it in this bubble that almost works against the creative impulse. You don’t have time to get to know the actors first, and you have three writers, as opposed to a room full of writers.

The audition process for ‘Are You There, Chelsea?’ was overwhelming and exciting. It was my first pilot season and one of the first pilots I auditioned for.

All I know is I’ve had an overall deal with Warner Brothers Television since the ‘Smallville’ pilot; that was my first pilot for Warner Brothers Television. I have to do pilots for them, but I get a chance to spend time and find the people that work best with me.

Pilot season can be maddening. You’re basically putting yourself and your talent out there to be scrutinized several times a day for months by network executives who have probably never acted in anything since their junior high school production of ‘The Wiz.’

I had done another show called ‘United States of Cars,’ which was a pilot that didn’t get picked up. And they said, ‘You know, we’re doing ‘Top Gear,’ and would you like to meet the guys?’ It was the wild – most wild audition I ever had because I never went to a studio or a producer’s office.

By interviewing at least one veteran, you can preserve memories that otherwise might be lost. My uncle was a downed fighter pilot and P.O.W. in World War II, and I am looking forward to recording his story for inclusion in the project.

I was a part of the planning and attack package intelligence team for the strike against Syria in 1983 – in which we lost a pilot and had another one captured until Jesse Jackson got him out – and numerous other operations against Syria both before the Iraq war and during the insurgency.

When ‘Hung’ got canceled, I was available for pilot season, and ‘Arrow’ was the first thing I auditioned for. It wasn’t the first script that came to me, but it was my first audition.

Dad endorsed my learning to fly so he would have a live-in pilot, one he could get in touch with at any time.

I flew fighters for the Navy in San Diego for three years, went and did my post-graduate education, and then I was a test pilot in Patuxent River, Maryland, for a few years. I was back in the fleet in the Navy when I was selected to come back here to NASA to become an astronaut.

I did a pilot for Fox years ago called ‘Faceless,’ with Sean Bean. I always thought it was such a cool show because it was really raw. I thought we were pushing it. This was back at a time before there was the ‘cable standard.’

You may hate the pilot but you don’t want the plane to crash.

I’ve always been someone who can just move. Some people in L.A. are addicted. They have to be here; they come for pilot season and stay here.

Making a pilot is never a seamless process. If it is, it usually tanks.

It’s ‘Star Trek!’ It’s as close to an American mythology as we get. To be a part of that storytelling after being a fan since I was a teenage boy who saw the pilot episode of ‘Next Generation’ air, it’s all very surreal.

It was especially hard for me, as a professional pilot. In all of my years of flying – including combat in Korea – this was the first time that my aircraft and I had not come back together. In my entire career as a pilot, ‘Liberty Bell’ was the first thing I had ever lost.

From day one, I have been told I am no different from the male astronauts. As a pilot, I flew in the sky. Now that I am an astronaut, I will fly in space.

Once my pilot and I push and jump into the sled, I hold on for dear life in the back while she skillfully and hopefully quickly navigates the two of us down a mile of icy, often bumpy, sharp right and left turns. I then pull the brakes at the end.

I’ve not been distracted by a long-running TV show or visits to America for pilot season.

The pilot came back and said he had just heard that Kennedy was shot.

When I got the offer to do ‘Weird Ernie’ in the pilot, I was living in New York, and somebody had made a mistake, and they made an offer that was supposed to be $2,500 for the job, but they offered $25,000. I couldn’t turn that down. I’d never heard of anything like that!

The interesting thing for ‘Playing House’ to me is we both are at crossroads in the pilot. We both have our lives kind of upside-down, and then because we’re taking care of each other, we’re able to move forward and live our best lives.

Well, I’m about to do another western, a pilot for HBO this fall.

Acting was never part of the plan – at one point I wanted to be an RAF pilot, but I wasnt made of the right stuff.

Every public school in the country should have a nutrition-education curriculum. We’re creating a pilot program at my son’s school. We are looking to create a replicable model that can help bring good nutrition to all children.

When I directed the pilot for ‘Smallville,’ I knew that making Clark Kent relatable would be the key to audiences believing in him as a hero. ‘Arrow’ is a different show – darker and harder-edged – but it’s the same core idea.

The famous pilot season literally sends shivers down my spine.

Normally, you cast a pilot, and you have to make compromises about being political about who you cast.

I had done one failed pilot. I remember, when it failed, I was like, ‘Oh my God, how does someone survive this? That’s it – that’s the end of my career; it’s over.’

I would have become a pilot if it wasn’t for my poor eyesight and the fact that I am hopeless in science.

My brother is my inspiration. From being a star student in school, to the perfect boy next door – he was adored by everyone and I always looked up to him. We all shared a dream that he would become a pilot someday.

I’ve known numerous actors who got a pilot that they thought was going to run forever, and they went out and blew all of the money. Now they’ve got a mortgage they can’t pay for.

My father was a fighter pilot, so I moved around the world when I was young. Then I ended up in Kansas. I’d just sort of gravitated toward the arts, and I had always loved music and really loved theater even though I didn’t want to act.

I’m one of the only actresses in Los Angeles who has never waited tables – yet – and I’m so terrible at holding trays. When we shot the ‘Vampire Diaries’ pilot, I totally spilled water all down Nina Dobrev, and she had to get her hair and make-up redone.

I am not only overwhelmed with excitement to be back in the seat but also to show my support to help raise awareness to end domestic violence and sexual assault by displaying the ‘No More’ symbol as I pilot the No. 24 car.

As an actor, and as you get to a certain level… and it’s pilot season and you read the trades, you could have a nervous breakdown. ‘So-and-so’s signed for a pilot. Why aren’t I?’

From Clara Barton’s tireless work founding the American Red Cross to the first female Medal of Honor winner, Dr. Mary Walker, to our first female combat fighter pilot Lt. Kara Hultgreen, no list of American heroes is complete without the names of some of these extraordinary women.

The ‘Lost’ pilot was wide enough and included enough things so that when Season Five came, and we spent half of the year in 1973, nobody cried foul. It felt like it was already a part of the DNA.

My father, a Vietnam War pilot, used to tell me that the only really bad decisions are the ones you stick to even when you get facts that support a change in the mission.

I think my being a combat pilot, being a woman who has had to break down barriers and succeed in a male-dominated environment, and, I think, just being in the military for 26 years have all helped me.

If I just said, ‘I’m a helicopter pilot and a federal prosecutor’ they might think I’ve served my country, I’m experienced. If I say, ‘And I’m a mom,’ they think I get it. ‘She’s a working mom. That’s tough.’

The task of the mediator is to help the parties to open difficult issues and nudge them forward in the peace process. The mediator’s role combines those of a ship’s pilot, consulting medical doctor, midwife and teacher.

What I saw when I was a child was my father who was a pilot, and because of circumstances was thrown into the political system, and all I saw when was small after my grandmother died was my father in constant – constant combat with the system in India, and then I saw him die, actually.

My first pilot gig, in fact my first job in television, was ‘Freaks and Geeks,’ and the experience of directing that pilot was probably the single most formative of my directing life.

I get really sad when people say, ‘I’m no good. I haven’t been cast in a pilot.’ It doesn’t mean you’re not good; it just means someone hasn’t seen you yet. It doesn’t mean that in real life you’re not the greatest actor.

I have this TV pilot I was writing for and a couple of films. It’s just a different way to express myself.

Look, there might not be a whole lot of people that really can relate to being a fighter pilot. Let’s just be honest. But there’s a ton of people that can relate to being a mom, because I am doing it right along with them.

I’m going to go do a Netflix series. It’s straight-to-series, 10 episodes, probably go for three seasons. I’m going to direct the pilot and hopefully the last episode of the first season. The show is ‘Seven Seconds.’

I did the pilot, and when they came through and said they were going to put it on the air, I had already some dates in the book with my band and so on. So Barry did the first one, he may have done a few more than the first one in the series, and I took it up from then.

Sometimes I hear the crowd cheering, and most of the time your body’s on auto pilot, so sometimes even after I do a floor routine, I’m like, ‘Did I really just do that?’

I grew up thinking that I would become a fighter pilot and was fascinated by aircrafts as I had grown up around that. But my father encouraged me to not become an Air Force person, given the varied interests I had, be it books, movies, sports or fighter flying.

I hadn’t worked for a year when I had my Prison Break audition and it was the easiest audition I’ve ever had. I got the script on Friday, went to the audition on Monday and got the part on Tuesday. I was shooting the pilot a week later. I didn’t have time to be nervous – it happened so quickly.

I have been a fan of Dexter since the pilot. Once I got the audition I just squealed, and you would have thought I just won 45 million dollars.