Flying, Instrumentation, intuitive and contra-intuitive reacting
"As since the 1860ties a generation of users of mobility machines arduously had to learn how to balance, so had the first generation of pilots, who’s “art of balancing” already had been trained, to cope with the comparable but more complex phenomenon of “mastery” of the third dimension. The difficulties in handling the sensually experience of physics and the personal estimation of the behavior of mobility machines had been disproportionately greater in the case of flying compared to driving. Even for those pilots, who had experiences in ballooning, it turned out to be difficult to estimate heights. When they had experiences with cars, they could have developed a certain sense for speed, but this was of little use in 1.000m height, the minimum flying height for military pilots around 1914. Because in the beginning the higher someone flew, the more the sense for the own movement disappeared: the sensation of the own speed in relation to the ground was sharply reduced. Pilots, who got used to a standard height, who increased this standard height had to learn to estimate speed and height anew. On the one hand the own locomotion was estimated to be slower, while on the other the pilots were confronted with a changing, and often confusing-unfamiliar landscape, if the ground wasn’t observed for a certain period of time – so the already sufficiently difficult task of navigation of early pilots flying cross country was made even more complex. Even more serious was the loss of the sense for verticality when flying through clods or by night.”
“[…] It is no pleasure to fly a machine in pitch black night without any instruments. You become hypersensitive for every vibration of the engine, you tend to panic, you think the plane tips over, plunge, slides to the right or the left and you have the feeling that the ground is infinitely deep bellow yourself.” so Cecil Lewis. Wortley confirmed this: “Now I must tell you that when flying in a cloud one loses all one’s sense of balance; the reason being, I imagine, that one is surrounded by upon all sides by the same impenetrable gray mass which obscures both earth and sky. There is no `horizon` by which to judge the angle at which the machine is travelling, either fore-and-aft, or laterally.””
Source: Kurt Möser, Fahren und Fliegen in Frieden und Krieg, Verlag Regionalkultur, Mannheim 2009, p. 201.