- Lew Moran: It may not be the best possible advertisement. but Frank Towns is probably one of the few really great pilots left in this push-button world of yours.
- Heinrich Dorfmann: Oh, really?
- Lew Moran: [angrily] Yes, 'Oh, really!' He was flying by the seat of his pants in planes that were nothing more than bits and pieces before you even went to school!
- Heinrich Dorfmann: That's precisely what is wrong - he has remembered everything and learned nothing!
- Frank Towns: If you hadn't made a career out of being a drunk you might not have been a second-rate navigator in a firth-rate outfit. And if you'd not stayed in your bunk to kill that last bottle, maybe you might have checked that engineer's report on the radio and we might not be here now. All right!
- Lew Moran: I don't know what your practical navigation's like, but mine's not bad. I wouldn't march ten paces from here. In the daytime it's hitting a hundred and twenty in the shade, and out there, there is no shade.
- Lew Moran: You told Towns he was behaving as if stupidity was a virtue. If he's making it into a virtue, YOU'RE MAKING IT INTO A BLOODY SCIENCE!
- Lew Moran: If you marched a hundred and six miles by the stars and your calculations were just one per cent out, you could pass the Eiffel Tower in daylight and never even see it.
- Heinrich Dorfmann: I told you there would be no difficulty in building this aeroplane. I also told you it would require an outstanding pilot to fly it. The only thing outstanding about you, Mr. Towns, is your stupidity.
- Frank Towns: I've lost five men, Lew. Gabriel in there, he's on the way, that'll be six. Are you asking me to try to kill the rest of them trying to get a deathtrap off the ground. I don't know... I don't know, Lew. It won't work... it just can't work.
- Lew Moran: All right, then, it can't. Maybe it can't and we'll all be killed. But if there's just one chance in a thousand that he's got something, boy, I'd rather take it than just sit around here waiting to die.
- Heinrich Dorfmann: Gentlemen, I have been examining this aeroplane.
- Frank Towns: Yeah?
- Heinrich Dorfmann: Yes. We've everything we need here to build a new one and fly it out. Now, if you'd like to have a look at my calculations, I don't know whether you can read my handwriting.
- Frank Towns: Are you trying to be funny?
- Heinrich Dorfmann: What did you say?
- Frank Towns: I said, are you trying to be funny?
- Heinrich Dorfmann: That is precisely the reaction I would have expected from a man of your obvious limitations.
- 'Ratbags' Crow: Sometimes I wonder how you chaps never won the war.
- Heinrich Dorfmann: War?
- 'Ratbags' Crow: [making sputtering sounds like an airplane and gesturung to suggest a plane flying in a mocking fashion]
- Heinrich Dorfmann: [trying not to respond in kind] I wasn't involved.
- 'Ratbags' Crow: [makes a sound like a machine gun, falls down on the sand, and rolls over] That's it then! That's why they never won!
- 'Ratbags' Crow: [in a mocking tone] They didn't have old Heinrich!
- Frank Towns: Time was you could take real pride, in just getting there- Flying used to be fun, Lew, it really was.
- 'Ratbags' Crow: Don't forget to put it down in your diary, how very, very nice it was at the party here until the booze ran out!
- Lew Moran: [of an alternate destination] Three stinkin' mud huts and a poisoned well. That's not a place, it's a disease.
- Standish: [nervously] The sandstorm'll make it more difficult, won't it?
- 'Ratbags' Crow: [in a mocking, ironic tone] What? Find us? Nah, it'll simplify things no end, old chap! They'll just bloody give up! Oh, you're not frightened, are ya? You don't want to be despondent, old man, you know! Wait till the water runs out. Then you'll really start laughing!
- Standish: Hey, they wouldn't just give up looking, would they?
- Sergeant Watson: Never. Don't you worry, me old duck. They'll find us all right. Trouble is - we'll all be dead.
- Heinrich Dorfmann: I must say, without a radio, you would have expected them to turn for their alternate airport by now. Wouldn't you?
- Trucker Cobb: I don't know, you grew up boy? Are you from the oil fields?
- Heinrich Dorfmann: My brother's there Dorfmann. I went to visit him on a holiday.
- Trucker Cobb: You went to visit your brother a general?
- Heinrich Dorfmann: Yes he's chief under the geophysicist for the Iraqi oil company. That pilot, I would have thought he was a little elderly to be flying without a copilot. Wouldn't you?
- Trucker Cobb: That sand's a bastard you know that, a real bastard.
- Frank Towns: Your theory's fine, but you get this mister... that engine's rated at two thousand horsepower and if I was ever fool enough to let it get started up it'd shake your patched-up pile of junk into a thousand pieces, and cut us up into mincemeat with the propeller.
- Lew Moran: Maybe Frank Towns, who's flown every crate they've ever built and could fly in and out of a tennis court if he had to, maybe that great hell-for-leather trailblazer's nothing more than a back number now. And maybe men like Dorfmann can build machines that can do Frank Towns's job for him, and do it better
- Frank Towns: [One great and rather prescient line comes from Frank Towns] "The little men with the slide rules and computers are going to inherit the earth".
- Dr. Renaud: [the plane has just crashed and two men are dead. Dr. Renaud offers Frank a Bible] Would you like to say something?
- Frank Towns: Like what? Sorry?
- Heinrich Dorfmann: A model plane has to fly itself. There's no pilot to correct the trim. Therefore if anything, a model plane has to be designed for greater stability that what you are pleased to call the real thing.
- Lew Moran: We can die here or we can die in that thing. What's the matter? Haven't you any curiosity left? Wouldn't you like to know how it feels to fly a toy aeroplane?