Illustration by David Vogin
Stall. A stall can occur at any speed, and at any attitude. Oh, don’t worry: That’ll be on the test. Stalling sounds like something the engine should do. When an airplane stalls on landing, an ambitious local reporter rushes out to the airport, interviews a few pilots, then writes that the crash happened when the engine stalled. After you start taking up passengers, during the preflight briefing you usually have to explain that if the engine should quit, the airplane turns into a glider; it doesn’t just plunge out of the sky. Or go into a spin. So, then, why is a stall called a stall?
Blame Wilbur Wright.
In a letter to his mentor, Octave Chanute, Wright wrote, “After about 200 feet, [Orville] allowed the machine to turn up a little too much and it stalled.” It was a spontaneous choice of words. Maybe he could have used “tailed” or “plunged,” which means today we’d be cautioned against “plunge/spin accidents.” But stall stuck. Many other Wright terms didn’t; if they had, instead of a pilot you’d be an aeroplanist or an operator, in a flying machine or a flyer, changing pitch with the horizontal rudder.
Their contemporary Samuel Langley fared no better. He called his tandem-winged flying machine, which plunged tail-first into the icy Potomac River only days before the Wrights succeeded, an aerodrome. (Actually, and humbly, he named it the Great Aerodrome.) World War I pilots adopted the word to describe their airfields.
But the Wrights did add a term or two to aviation linguistics. To protect their 1903 Flyer from Kitty Hawk’s brutal winds, they built a shed at the foot of Kill Devil Hill, which they jokingly referred to as “hand car,” a play on hangar, French for “shed.” Chanute had advised them to bone up on the language, presuming they would tour France soon to sell their flying machine there.
After the news of their first powered, controlled flight hit Europe, France grew jealous that the United States had succeeded first. But, after taking the lead in aviation innovations a couple of years after the Wrights, they began naming names. Alberto Santos-Dumont covered the longitudinal structure of his aircraft with canvas and thus invented the fuselage, for its resemblance to a fusil, the spool that thread is wound around on French sewing machines. The tail assembly they labeled the empennage, after the feathers of an arrow; and when Henri Farman brought his admittedly fuselage-less biplane to America, he also brought along the term aileron, which he used to describe the movable control surfaces he’d added to the lower wing’s trailing edge. Soon those surfaces replaced the Wrights’ flexible system of wingwarping. Aileron, for the record, means “tiny wing.”
Modern pilots owe the English a linguistic debt, but mostly for prosaic terms such as lift, drag, and thrust—concepts that Sir George Cayley described in his early nineteenth-century work On Aerial Navigation. OK, instead of drag he used the confusing drift, and in Cayley’s mind, aerial navigation meant the same as flying. But, hey, he was a scientist. The same guys today say stuff like “deoxyribonucleic acid” when they really mean “DNA.” (Personally, “cell instructions” works for me.)
Brits discarded the Wrights’ horizontal rudder for elevating plane, which gradually was shortened to elevator. So, not all structural terms are French—and not all French terms are structural. Roland Garros, who was probably the most famous prewar stunt pilot, shot down four enemy airplanes early in World War I before getting himself shot down. (He actually shot off his own propeller, but that’s another story.) It was the most aircraft anyone had taken out. While Garros cooled his heels in a German prisoner of war camp, every pilot who subsequently topped his score became known as an ace, the top card in the deck. And after radios became standard equipment, a French pilot in trouble would broadcast m’aidez, or “help me.” Anglo ears and a little static changed it to mayday. Say that three times. Seriously—do it if you get into trouble up there.
Still, England did rule the waves. The way they built their ships in the 1800s, junior officers and the wounded bunked in a pit called the cogge, which morphed into cockpit. Despite rampant rumors, the term doesn’t come from the space where roosters fight to the death.
That brings us to the word you’ve all been waiting for. In his 1866 paper On Aerial Locomotion, Francis Wenham coined aeroplane—although he used it to refer to straight, nonflexing wings like those found on beetles, instead of flapping wings like birds. After the Wrights succeeded, the Brits began using it to refer to their flying machines, and so Americans began using it too—only in our distaste for their spelling (Colour? Flavour? Aluminium? Come on!), we eventually altered it to airplane.
As an aside, a real pilot never says plane. “A plane’s something you use to shave wood,” an instructor once spat at me. This guy wore a toupee and had a single, curly black hair growing from the bridge of his nose, and he looked scary enough that I never said plane again—unless I needed to shave wood.
The Wrights co-opted the nautical word rudder, which is so old that it’s actually Old German for oar, one of which the Vikings used to steer their vessels when they went to conquer England. Go back even further to ancient Greece, whose word for oar is pedon. That’s how the French steersman became known as the pilote. Yeah, sorry, Orville and Wilbur, but aeroplanist just didn’t make the cut.
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