In the early days of aviation, planes were not yet equipped with gyroscopic turn indicators. When pilots flew through clouds or fog, they would often become disoriented, and because the inner ear does not accurately perceive a banked turn, they sometimes got caught in steep spiral dives called "graveyard spirals."

Pilot and author William Langewiesche describes one such incident:

In December of 1925 a young Army pilot named Carl Crane got caught in the clouds at 8,000 feet directly over Detroit while trying to fly a congressman's son to Washington, D.C., in a biplane. Crane later said, "In a short time I was losing altitude, completely out of control. I could not fly the airplane at all—it had gotten into a spiral dive. Halfway down I looked around at my boy in the back, and he was enjoying the flight to no end. He was shaking his hands and grinning, and I was slowly dying because I knew we were going to crash…."

Crane did not know which wing was down, let alone by how much. If he tried to level the wings, he was just as likely to roll upside down as right side up. If he tried to raise the nose, the effect would be exactly the opposite: the turn would quicken, steepening the descent.…

"Finally it got down to under a thousand feet, and I said, 'Well, here we go. I'm going to look at my boy once more.' And as I turned around to look at him, a sign went by my wing. It said 'Statler Hotel.' I had just missed the top of the Statler Hotel. In all the mist and rain, I could see the buildings and the streets. I flew down the street and got over the Detroit River, and flew about ten feet high all the way to Toledo, shaking all the way."

In life as in flying, it is all-important that we have our bearings.