I ran accross this:

I found the following at word-detective.com (very interesting, by the way): The first "cockpits" were actual pits in the ground constructed (to the extent that one "constructs" a pit) to house "cockfights" to the death between game cocks (essentially very belligerent chickens). Cockfighting, a barbaric "sport" usually conducted for gambling purposes, probably originated in ancient China and remains distressingly popular around the world. As a name for the scene of such grisly matches, "cockpit" showed up in English in the 16th century. By the 1700's, "cockpit" was being used as a metaphor for any scene of combat, especially areas (such as parts of Belgium and France) known as traditional battlefields. "Cockpit" was then adopted by pilots in World War I, who applied it to the cramped operating quarters of their fighter planes. Our modern sense of cockpit includes the entire crew areas of large airliners, which are usually fairly spacious and not, one hopes, the scene of conflict. So there.

Alasdair Patrick, Lake Forest, California

Note that Navy/Marine Corps trained pilots use the term "flight deck", whereas Air Force trained ones say "cock pit". You'll hear these different terms used in commercial flight announcements- when they say "We'd like to add our welcome aboard from the flight deck", you know you've got a naval aviator.

And if you get yourself an ex-navy pilot, expect hard landings too, some of the time, since these fellas are so used to very very short runways (i.e. landing on ships and not on land) and every little inch of that runway counts.