Pilate/Pilot

A group asked today how to pronounce "Pilate."  As neither a speaker of Latin nor Aramaic, I cannot answer this question with any certitude, but we do get one clue in the book, when we learn how Pilate was named.

"I want that for the baby's name.  Say it."
"You can't name the baby this."
"Say it."
"It's a man's name."
"Say it."
"Pilate."
"What?"
"Pilate.  You wrote down Pilate."
"Like a riverboat pilot?"
"No.  Not like a riverboat pilot.  Like a Christ-killing Pilate.  You can't get much worse than that for a name.  And a baby girl at that."

This is already a great scene - funny and heartbreaking.  And it gets downright theological a few lines later:

"...You don't want to give this motherless child the name of the man that killed Jesus, do you?"
"I asked Jesus to save my wife."

Morrison spends a lot of time developing the significance of Milkman's entry into the world, but Pilate's entrance is equally fraught and extraordinary.  Setting aside the issue of her navel for a moment, her birth was founded on struggle (someone dies so that she may live, another parallel to Milkman), and her name is an outward flag of rebellion and radical thought, chosen by her father out of despair and a sense of divine injustice.  She comes blazing into the world, an immediate threat to the status quo.

And, we have this homonym, pilot, explicitly mentioned by the father in the naming scene.  I will not gloss that here, except to ask the question:  What do pilots do?