On Dec. 17, 1903, on the dunes of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville Wright rode his and his brother’s flyer down a track, where it picked up momentum, generated lift, and took off on the 12-second self-powered flight that made history. It was a tremendous moment of progress for America and the human species. It took only a couple of years for flights to be hourslong and well controlled. By May 21, 1927, Charles Lindbergh flew the first solo trans-Atlantic flight from Long Island to Paris. Sputnik 1, the first manmade satellite, was put into orbit on Oct. 4, 1957, inaugurating the space race. The Russians beat the Americans to almost every first, except the big one: On July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took the first steps any human beings had ever taken on a cosmic body other than Earth, 66 years after the Wrights were at Kitty Hawk.
On Oct. 7, 2001, predator drone tailfin 3034 was over Afghanistan being operated from CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, when it fired a missile aimed at Taliban leader Mullah Omar. It missed, but it killed several bodyguards outside. This was the first U.S. drone strike or air-to-ground intentional killing by a remotely piloted vehicle.
Opinions will diverge about whether drone strikes also represent a tremendous moment of progress for America and the human species. There is an argument proffered by serious people that using lighter, more precise, unmanned, quieter weapons platforms has actually enabled America to be radically less violent than it would otherwise be if it had F-16s and the like doing the same work. But the consensus view of drones is very much not to identify them with progress. The Washington Post reports, however, that the Drone Advisory Committee of the Federal Aviation Administration is ready to change that: “In February, the advisory committee — a group that includes representatives from 17 organizations in industry, labor, airports and local government — was tasked with developing language to replace commonly used gender-specific words.” These droners are on the front lines of justice: “The committee proposed several substitutions for commonly used terms. For ‘man-made,’ it suggested ‘manufactured,’ ‘fabricated’ or ‘machine-made.’ It also suggested replacing ‘cockpit’ with ‘flight deck,’ noting that male crew members have sometimes ‘wielded the term to undermine femme co-workers.’” The term “femme,” by the way, is a women’s-studies-class-esque way of referring to socially female-coded characteristics without denoting the sex as female. So, they have written around the gender binary while, inevitably, gesturing vehemently at it. Hence, “in the case of ‘manned aviation,’ the committee suggested ‘traditional aviation.’” More: “In making their case, committee members argued that such a shift could improve morale and safety because it would signal that all viewpoints are welcome” (emphasis mine).
As Oscar Wilde reportedly said about Charles Dickens’s sentimental portrayal of Little Nell’s death in The Old Curiosity Shop, it would take a heart of stone not to laugh. There are any number of observations to make here. Do our friends at the committee know that “manufacture” comes, literally, from the Latin for “made by hand”? The Oxford English Dictionary records a “coarse slang” definition of “cockpit” with entries from a 1658 poem through a 2014 tweet, but I would venture that aeronautical professionals can be asked to avoid coarse genital innuendo at work in general, without entirely banning a word that most of us stopped tittering at by age 10. I could go on, but I don’t want to have to watch the skies for offended or debilitated members of the drone community, whose morale and ability to operate “safely” may apparently be undermined by the wrong combination of words.
