Pilots will be showing off this weekend at Toronto's annual air show. To designate someone in charge of a boat, the English had been quite happy with the Anglo-Saxon word “steersman” till the mid-1400s. Why they decided they needed to replace it with a nifty new French word, “pilot”, we don't know. The French word came via Latin from the Greek pedota, from pedon (an oar or rudder). Since there were no aircraft, “pilot” was originally confined to people steering boats, but in the 19th century we see pilots in hot-air balloons, and just two years after the Wright brothers made their first flight in 1905, the word was being used of fliers.
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