Preflight

adj, noun, verb

adj, noun, verb ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    An inspection of an aircraft before the start of a flight.
  2. 2
    The portion of the movement after launching from the springboard but before pushing off the vault.

    "Between the preflight and postflight is the block, a rapid motion in which the gymnast’s hands hit the vault and she pushes herself off, converting the horizontal momentum from her sprint down the runway into vertical momentum."

Verb
  1. 1
    To perform an inspection of an aircraft before the start of a flight.
Adjective
  1. 1
    Taking place before the start of a flight. not-comparable
  2. 2
    Serving to confirm that requests can be accepted, before sending an actual request. not-comparable

    "a CORS preflight request"

Example

More examples

"Between the preflight and postflight is the block, a rapid motion in which the gymnast’s hands hit the vault and she pushes herself off, converting the horizontal momentum from her sprint down the runway into vertical momentum."

Etymology

From pre- + flight.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.