Origin of Plane Cockpit

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi guys, this is Fred calling from San Diego.

Hi Fred, how are you doing?

Doing very well.

I’m calling because I used to be a naval flight officer,

Which is a guy in the aircraft responsible for things like navigation, weapons, and things like that.

Occasionally I would be asked, why do they call the place where the crew sits the cockpit?

So, never had a great answer, but my thought was that lots of aviation terms

Are borrowed from naval terms.

And I know that on a sailboat,

That the cockpit is the area of the boat

Where the helm is located.

That’s where you steer it from.

Normally in the aft section of the boat,

And it’s usually depressed into the deck a bit.

So my thought was that in the days of sail,

That when a sailing ship would carry livestock,

That this is the part of the ship

Where hens and roosters might be kept,

And hence the term cockpit.

So I thought, what do you think?

It’s not a bad theory.

There were a couple interesting points there to what you had to say about the sailboats.

I didn’t know that about sailboats.

This is what we know about cockpit.

The first use of this term really applies to cockfighting rings.

This is a place where you’d have two roosters battling it out and people would wager,

And usually a pretty rascally bunch.

And then the term came to be used in stage, in theater.

So the area that we now call the pit used to just be called the cockpit, and it was shortened.

And later it became used for boats and actually ships, I should say.

There’s an Orlop deck.

Do you know this term, O-R-L-O-P?

Haven’t heard that one.

Yeah, an Orlop deck, it’s probably out of fashion now, but this was the lowest deck of a ship.

And what’s interesting about what you said about sailboats is that the Orlop deck could be seen or looked down upon from the upper decks.

And the Orlop deck would hold, say, the junior officers.

That’s where their quarters would be.

Or in times of war, because this typically was a terminology for a warship, this is where the wounded would be treated or even the bodies be stored.

And so, of course, the term cockpit later became used in an aircraft.

And I think what we’re talking about here is an area that can be looked down upon.

If you look at old pictures, say, from the 1700s or the 1800s, Holgarth, for example, has a very well-known engraving or picture of a cockfighting ring.

There’s always some kind of elevated seating or always some kind of gallery up above where you can look down on the action.

So it wasn’t just a flat surface.

And oftentimes it’s round, and parts of ships can be round too.

But I think that we’re just talking about here this area of attention.

And I think you described the helm very much in that way.

It’s a depressed area that’s kind of below some of the other parts of the ship.

And there’s kind of a transfer over the years of this term from place to place.

And it kind of lost some of its meaning over the way.

But from each connecting path, you can still see how it might have transferred.

For example, the helm on a ship becoming the helm on a – or the place of navigation on an airplane makes sense, right?

So Fred had that part right, the idea that it was transferred from a ship.

But I don’t think it had anything to do with the transfer of cattle or animals.

There’s actually not a great – believe it or not, there was not a common way to – except for like really big moves when you’re actually like moving whole families or whole communities to a new place.

Transferring animals by ship was not that common,

Except if you were going to eat them along the way.

All right, well, cool. Thanks a lot, guys.

Hey, Fred, thanks for the question.

Hey, great.

All righty, bye-bye.

Bye now.

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