Questions from the Cockpit: Not to be taxing, but…

Fredrick, a private pilot in Wyoming, writes: What are the origins of the words “taxiing” and “taxiways” in aviation?

That’s a great question. The words — especially the root word taxi as a description for the movement of an airplane on the ground — date from the very dawn of fixed wing powered flight.

According to Barnhart’s Dictionary of Etymology, it first appears in print in 1911, not even a decade after the Wright Flyer’s first flight. Of course, not having landing gear wheels (the launch sled had wheels, but the aircraft didn’t), the Wright Flyer itself couldn’t taxi.

But that said, no one really knows why the word was adopted or how the word came to aviation.

Of course, that doesn’t stop all kinds of people from having all kinds of theories about the word’s origin. Here are the top three theories on why we taxi. I’ll cover taxiways next.

Theory #1

In the enthusiasm for all things aeronautical following the invention of powered flight, it was widely predicted in the popular press that we’d become a flying society, with the most optimistic proponents writing that taxis would soon be replaced by aeroplanes, which in turn — apparently — led some aviators to use “taxi” as a slang word for aeroplane.

From there, the movement of a taxi becomes taxiing, according to this line of thought.

Theory #2

The early French aviation pioneers Blériot, Farman, and Voisin were all using the term taxi as early as 1909 as a noun to refer to wingless or clipped-wing trainer aircraft commonly used by early aviation schools to teach students basic handling without the risk of a takeoff.

From there, a verb to describe the movements of taxi airplanes naturally becomes taxiing, and is ultimately applied to winged and wingless airplanes alike.

Theory #3

Other folks maintain that the slow movement of airplanes on the ground was reminiscent of the slow, trolling movements of taxicabs scouting fares.

And if you are wondering about the origin of taxicabs, apparently the early horse-drawn cabs were sometimes called taxameters, taximètres, or taximeters — all from the same Latin root taxa, which simply means “to charge.”

Off topic, but I can’t resist, apparently a taxi dancer was a paid partner at dance halls in the 1920s and 1930s.

But not to dance around the subject any further, regardless of the origin of the word taxi for the ground movement of airplanes, once airplanes were taxiing all over the place, the word taxiway is linguistically logical.

Or at least it is once you know where the word “way” comes from.

Because a way is a very specific kind of road. While we tend to throw around the various words that designate roads as if they are synonyms, nothing could be further from the truth. The various linguistic labels for roads are anything but random and convey specific intelligence about the nature of the road.

According to SouthernLiving.com roads are the broadest category, sort of a generic catchall. Roads link two points, by the way. So much for the dead-end road.

Anyway, moving on: Streets are public roads, often lined by buildings on both sides. Avenues have buildings or trees, and interestingly, run perpendicular to streets. They are also typically wider.

Next, our taxonomy of roads includes boulevards, wide with center medians, and the other side of the coin lane, a narrow street. Drives are winding roads shaped by landscape and terrain. A court is a street that ends in a cul-de-sac.

And a way? A way is a small side street that connects to a larger road, which perfectly describes an airport taxiway.

That’s not to be confused with roadway, which is the right-of-way on which any road, street, avenue, boulevard, lane, drive, court, or way is built on.

Anyway, given the proper definition of a way, it makes sense that once taxiing takes its place as an aeronautical term, that taxiway is the logical extension of where taxiing takes place.

Could the word taxiway have predated the word taxi, so that the motion was actually named after the place where the motion occurs? Probably not, simply because early aerodromes tended to be circular grass fields, with no defined runways nor taxiways.

We don’t see runways as we know them until World War I, and formal taxiways associated with runways don’t show up in any great numbers until the late 1920s with the advent of more complex paved airport layouts associated with commercial air travel, long after airplanes started taxiing.

But like a bookend, the airplane as a taxi (from Theory #1) is making a comeback in today’s language, thanks to the advanced air mobility movement using the new buzzword of “air taxi” for their machines, mixing the publicly understood definitions of airplane and taxicab.

That’s taking taxiing to new heights.