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Added explanation for chop and drop
U_flow
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I have made this answer a community wiki, so we can avoid pointshopping and flood of conflicting answer. Only edit this if you are sure of what you think you know.

Kick the tires and light the fires

This phrase refers to the pre flight inspection, kicking the tires, a pilot performs on his/her aircraft before hopping in and starting the engines, the fires part comes from old planes having very short exhaust manifolds, so flames could often be seen at the tips of the headers on startup with fuel priming and rich fuel setting.


Cookers



Bird

Planes fly, birds fly; planes have wings, birds have wings, need we dig in more...


Copy Shot


Dirty up


Hot rock


Chop and drop

Simple combination of chopping power and dropping altitude. "To chop" is slang for "to cut", with "cutting" refering to "cutting power", therefore reducing power to zero. Dropping altitude is self explanatory, meaning to quickly reduce altitude. I imagine this phrase was formed like this because it rhymes.


Running on fumes

I would not call this one slang as it is basically a literal translation. In general it means to keep going when you have no energy left. It broadly comes from engines that ran on vaporous fuels; piston engines and the such. Most fuel tanks that hold liquid fuel have some sort of a float which reads the level, the phrase comes from the idea of running the tank "dry" or empty to the point where the float bottoms out (or reads empty) but the engine still runs. Its based on the loose idea that the free area in a fuel tank is filled with vaporous fuel and you could run the engine on the vapors at the end of your fuel tank since the final step of most fuel systems is to vaporize or atomize fuel anyway.

Ironically many modern planes may very well have a fuel inerting system that would quite literally prevent you from running on fumes. A lot of fuel pumps are also cooled by the fuel that flows through them so starving a pump of liquid fuel can cause it to burn out.


Conga line

Conga line is a dance people engage in when they have consumed enough alcohol to impair their judgement. The "dancers" form a line, holding the next one on the waist, and they proceed more or less rhytmically more or less forward in what can best be discribed as a squigly manner.

With aircraft, a conga line is a formation of aircraft, proceeding at a common general heading one after another, but not in a military like precicion when it comes to distancing and track.


Dry/wet feet


Bag= flight suit

Use of Bag to describe the flight suit comes from its saggy fit. The fabric, at least in older ones, was certainly not stretchy, so the form of the suit had to be such, that it felt comfortable when sitting and operating knobs, buttons and such in cockpit. This, unfortunately, made the suits look saggy and baggy when the pilot was posing heroicly by the aircraft...


Jpe61
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