Idiom
Fly by the seat of your pants
To fly by the seat of your pants is to do something using instinct and quick decisions, without a plan, training or proper tools.
How people use it
People use it when they improvise, often with some risk (we didn't have a map, so we flew by the seat of our pants). It can sound admiring, showing quick thinking, or worried, suggesting poor planning. Before a noun it becomes seat-of-the-pants (a seat-of-the-pants decision). In British English, pants usually means underwear, but the phrase is understood there too, with trousers in mind.
Also said: by the seat of your pants, seat-of-the-pants.
Examples
- Our tour guide got sick, so we flew by the seat of our pants for the rest of the trip.
- Maya had never cooked for twenty people, but she flew by the seat of her pants and dinner was a hit.
- The new manager is flying by the seat of his pants until the training starts.
Where it comes from
The phrase comes from early aviation in the 1920s and 1930s. Before reliable instruments, pilots often judged a plane's movement by what they felt through their bodies, including the seat beneath them, especially in fog or cloud. Flying this way was called flying by the seat of your pants, and the phrase later spread to any task done by instinct.
Check yourself
1. What does it mean to fly by the seat of your pants?
Answer: To act by instinct without a plan. The phrase means improvising, the way early pilots flew by feel instead of by instruments.
2. Which sentence uses the idiom correctly?
Answer: With no recipe, Omar flew by the seat of his pants and invented a new curry.. Inventing a curry without a recipe is improvising. Following a manual is the opposite, and the flight sentence is literal.
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