“Pilot” can mean a few things: It can be a noun for the person who flies a plane, a verb meaning “to act as a guide to” or “to set and conn the course of,” or to someone in the entertainment industry, the first episode of a TV series. These episodes are often quite different from the rest of the series, as the writers are figuring out the concept. For instance, Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Elaine wasn’t even in the pilot episode of Seinfeld, and that’s just hard to fathom. Aviation and television don’t have much in common, so I was curious to find out if there’s an etymological tie linking these homonyms.
As with some other etymological mysteries, there’s no universally agreed-upon answer as to why “pilot” became such a common term in the television industry. However, there are some popular theories. In the TV world, pilots are produced as a way to gauge audience interest in the concept. It’s fair to think of TV pilots as a “test flight” for the larger idea — you’d need a pilot to perform a real test flight, so maybe this is inspiration for the TV pilot. Similarly, “pilot studies” are common in the field of research — they are used to determine the feasibility of a scientific theory, much like pilot episodes are used to see if a narrative concept has legs.
All that is to say, the TV term “pilot” may not have a whimsical story, and it may have evolved naturally as a metaphor. According to the Etymology Online Dictionary, “pilot” has been used in English as a verb in the sense of guiding direction as far back as the 1510s, and it was only around 1907 that it became a noun meaning “one who flies an airplane.” It originally comes from the Greek pedon, meaning “steering oar.” So in this sense, “pilot” can aptly imply the fact that these first episodes steer the course of a series, and help determine if it gets produced.
In the context of television, the Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest example dates to a 1953 edition of Sponsor magazine (a publication targeted at TV advertisers): “As an indication of new show costs, the pilot for ABC’s new Danny Thomas situation-comedy film came to a higher tab than I Love Lucy.” As Hollywood embraced TV in the mid-20th century, the word “pilot” became firmly entrenched in the TV lexicon.
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