What is an aeroplane cockpit?
The aeroplane cockpit, called the flight deck on larger aircraft, is the compartment at the front where the flight crew sit and fly the thing.
Who counts as flight crew is a legal question rather than a loose one. The Air Navigation Order 2016 defines flight crew as those members of the crew of the aircraft who respectively undertake to act as pilot, flight navigator, flight engineer and flight radiotelephony operator. On a modern airliner most of those roles have collapsed into two pilots and a great deal of automation, but the wording is a reminder of how many jobs used to live in that room.
What is in an aeroplane cockpit?
Everything the crew has to reach without looking for it. The flight controls, the engine and systems instruments, the radios, the navigation displays, and on most passenger aircraft two seats side by side so one pilot can fly while the other monitors. A light training aircraft might have a single simple panel. A large airliner has a wall of screens, laid out around what has to be seen at a glance rather than around what looks tidy.
The speeds on those instruments are in knots, not miles per hour, which is what a knot is. Almost nobody who isn't a pilot ever sees a flight deck up close, and that's a fair part of why it holds the pull it does, which is also the pull behind plane spotting. If you are buying for someone who flies, see gifts for pilots. The rest of the reading is on the sky.
