![]() In addition to his astonishingly comprehensive “Vehicles” book, he wrote several other highly technical books, and numerous articles, on the budding world of aviation. The founder of the Society of Automotive Engineers, he may well have been the first aeronautical engineer in the modern sense of the word. We didn’t need the word cockpit earlier as there was no pit! But by 1915, cockpit is in common use in numerous books.īut was Lougheed, and his book, influential enough to brand the operator’s compartment for all time? Who was Lougheed, anyway? Of course, at that time, well prior to the trio of planes cited by Lougheed, most pilots were seated on open wings, or in chairs lashed to struts forward of the wing. 1907’s “Navigating the Air” by the Aero Club of America, makes no mention of cockpits. ![]() But is it the origin of cockpit in aviation? It intrigues me that this very sentence, near the dawn of aviation history, directly connects our cockpit back to those of boats. (George Grantham Bain collection at the Library of Congress) machines.” The first Blériot XI in early 1909, just months before his successful flight over the English Channel. Lately, however, some of the more advanced craft are appearing with very comfortable arrangements for seating the operator, as is particularly evidenced in the boat-like cockpits provided in the Bleriot, Antoinette, and R.E.P. In discussing aeroplane seating for pilots and passengers, Lougheed tells us, “So far, most of such seats have been of the most elementary construction, as is suggested in the illustrations throughout these pages. It’s in the book “Vehicles of the Air” by Victor Lougheed. That’s five years before World War I, and only six years after Kitty Hawk. The earliest printed reference to cockpit in aviation that I could find came from 1909. Or does it come from an earlier point in time? Is it found in the writings of the World War I aces? Is it when flight decks became complex enough to merit being considered control centers? One approach is to look at early aviation writing to try to figure out when the word cockpit first appears in print in relationship to aviation. So how can we sort all of this out? Which of the three theories is correct? A cockswain (also known as coxswain) was at first the boy servant in charge of the small boat that was kept aboard to row the ship’s captain to and from the ship (as seen in the painting The Missionary Boat by Henry Scott Tuke.) (Photo from Wikimedia Commons)Īs early aviation borrowed a host of other terms from the sea, many commentators have suggested that this is the source of cockpit as we know it. Over time, this title led to the steering compartment of smaller boats, where the cockswain sat, being called a cockpit. The title comes to us from “cock,” an Old English term for a small boat, and “swain,” which means servant. Initially, the word cockswain is used to describe the person in charge of a small vessel. I’d like you to meet a different flavor of pilot from the kind we hang around with: The coxswain. The word cockpit had a second and completely independent evolution on the waves, one that has nothing whatsoever to do with cock fighting. Related to this, in the 18th Century, wounded sailors were taken below decks during combat, where the ship’s surgeon and his mates would tend to them - a bloody business that led to the surgeon’s station being called the cockpit.Īnd it’s also on the high seas that our third contender comes from… The Nautical Connections Hypothesis The cockpit of the SPAD XIII at the Dawn Patrol in 2018 at the National Museum of the U.S. The Word Detective website has suggested that the word cockpit was then “adopted by pilots in World War I, who applied it to the cramped operating quarters of their fighter planes.” It is, after all, a small pit where plenty of fighting takes place. In addition to being used as a synonym for control center, apparently in the 1700s, soldiers started using “cockpit” as a metaphor for the site of grisly combat, especially when the fighting was in an enclosed area. Meanwhile, on a different tangent from this same set of facts we have… The Blood and Guts Hypothesis Apparently, Londoners continued to call the new cluster of buildings “the cockpit” after the old theater, which in turn, got its name from being built on the site of an actual, Honest-to-Pete cock fighting site.Īll of this led to Robert Barnhart, in his book the Barnhart Concise Dictionary of Etymology, to suggest that cockpit evolved into a synonym for control center and that this was later applied to the control centers of airplanes. Here’s the tale: In 1635 a theater in London called The Cockpit was torn down to make room for buildings to serve King Charles I’s cabinet.
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