Is the seat of your pants really the best navigator?

Early aircrafts didn’t have many navigation aids to communicate with the ground crew.

Prior to the second world war, flying was mostly accomplished by pilot judgment. Aviators relied on their innate sense of balance to detect shifts in movements of the plane, which were transferred to their bodies by the contact with the seat.

Corrigan, the aviator who received national acclaim for his transatlantic flight, famously went aloft without various instruments, radio or other pilot luxuries. He ignored the rejection of his flight plan and deliberately flew east rather than west.

One newspaper famously described him as the wrong way aviator who, you guessed it, flew by the seat of his pants.

Now, this expression wasn’t idiomatic at the time. Historians say he literally flew by the seat of his pants, since that was the style in the thirties. Flying involved a heightened sense of awareness, bought on by adrenaline, where all the relative flight data seemed to pass through the pilot’s buttocks in preparation for later evacuating them.

Wow, that’s one hell of a carry on. Maverick’s got nothing on that guy.

Fast forward to a hundred years later, and that phrase has flown its way into our vernacular. When you fly by the seat of your pants, it means you decide a course of action as you go along. Instead of relying on predetermined plans or mechanical aids, you work from intuition and perception. You make decisions as each choice comes up.

Which, in many cases, can be an efficient and calming and useful way to solve problems. The question is, when does this approach stop being useful and start being dangerous? Should people be thinking about choices or obstacles that might come up and interrupt their path, or forge ahead based on their own judgment?

Guess it depends on what you’re doing.

If you’re flying a passenger aircraft that weighs three hundred tons, navigation aids are probably helpful.

If you’re performing brain surgery, using an endoscope is your best friend for examining the tissue up close.

If you’re running a million dollar business, sales forecasts might not be a bad idea to do at your annual planning retreat.

None of these tasks preclude the invaluable skills of intuition and perception. But to solely depend on those things would be foolhardy. Working by the seat of your pants, constantly making things up as you go, it’s just not sustainable or scalable, for individuals or organizations.

On the other hand, if you’re trying to decide what to have for lunch, making a pros and cons list is absurd. If you’re not sure whether to go on a third date with that cute guy who gives you butterflies every time you talk, facilitating a whiteboard session with your roommates to map out your next five text messages isn’t healthy or useful.

Ultimately, nobody can know for sure if people place too much confidence in human judgment. There’s a time for planning and a time for action. Providing a repeatable and innovative experience in which your creativity can thrive is important.

But then again, so is your ability to follow your intuition and say, ah screw it, we’re doing this.

Davinci made the first studies of flight back in the fourteen hundreds, and to say that he flew by the seat of his pants would be an understatement.

Then again, his glider supposedly crashed into a mountain.

Oh well, small price to pay for being ahead of your time.

Do you need to work from past planning or present perception?