Back in the 1930s, airplane pilots didn’t have sophisticated instruments to tell them which way was up. When flying through clouds, they literally relied on changes in the vibrations in their seat to help them stay on course, flying by the seat of their pants. The phrase later expanded to mean “making it up as you go along.” This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “”Flying By the Seat of Your Pants” Origin”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, I’m Karen, and I’m calling from Denton, Texas.
Hi, Karen. Welcome.
Hi.
What can we help you with?
I have an idea. I was just thinking to myself about, I was thinking about my financial plans, and I was thinking, well, you don’t really have any, and you don’t have any structure, and you’re just flying by the seat of your pants.
And so that’s the phrase that I was curious about, where that came from, because to me, it means that I don’t have any structure or we just take things as they come instead of planning.
No plan.
Yeah, that’s pretty much it.
Flying by the seat of your pants goes back to the 1930s when there were no instruments in aircraft. So a pilot, if the clouds were thick and they couldn’t see the horizon, they’d literally have to wing it.
And they could feel by the vibrations of the plane and what was happening with the different moving parts and just kind of like their natural sense of where up and down were, which is, by the way, in most people, terrible when you can’t see the horizon.
Yeah.
Right.
And they’d have to just fly literally by the seat of their pants by feeling the vibrations of the plane come up through their bum.
So there we go.
You’re using flying terminology and you didn’t know it.
I didn’t know it, yeah.
Thanks, Karen.
Thank you.
Take care now.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Like I said, winging it is a similar thing.
Yeah.
Also from flying.
From aviation.
Yeah.
But isn’t it weird that this term that even pilots don’t really need anymore entered the language with enough fastness and firmness that we still use it in standard English?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It’s one of those things I never thought about.
And then you think about flying by the seat of your pants. And if there’s no airplane involved, that’s a really weird image.
Yeah.
It’s not propellers on your britches.
Right.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Thank you for that explanation.
It’s not rocket-powered pants. Although what a great idea.
Seriously.
We can make a mint.
It’d be a jet-propelled wedgie.
