[Tristan Lall]

You'd typically see it used in the term "piloting feature" (which is at worst straightforwardly metaphorical). I suspect that the writer assumed the reader would understand it in that context, because the writer thinks hard about piloting features all day long. I don't see anything especially wrong with that.

It probably hasn't hit the OED because they're purposely slow to incorporate neologisms, and probably not as efficient with engineering terms as the are with literary ones. Presumably the Merriam-Webster website draws from their mass-market dictionary, so the presence or absence of a word shouldn't be especially significant.