Books and study material related to dead reckoning navigation techniques.

Piloting - also known as dead reckoning - is a navigation technique consisting in using visible reference points to travel from one point to another. However, since the inception of the first heavier-than-air aircraft the word gained a new meaning, and piloting is more commonly understood as flying an airplane or helicopter.

The case is that the history of aviation shows clearly how advances in science, technology and exploration shape the way in which we think: when the Wright brothers flew for the first time, the news spread as 'the conquest of space,' and for the people living then, it was true, for space one centimetre above the soil was as unreachable as the stars.

The atmosphere was seen as part of outer space, while as aircraft technology progresses, the whole gas layer that covers our planet became reachable and thus part of our neighbourhood. Now we make a difference, and flying in an aircraft seems more or less a routine thing, while getting into orbit or interplanetary space remains something quite uncommon.

So, today nobody flies in a discount airline and 'conquers the space,' but a hundred years ago that would have been the case.

And this is not the only word or concept that has changed surreptitiously: an 'aerodrome' was the something else than an airstrip. The word was a neologism invented by Langley, one of the competitors of the Wright brothers, who christened his aircraft with that name. Over time, airfields became aerodromes.

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