Airplane Cockpit

On an airliner, the cockpit is usually referred to as the flight deck. This term derives from its use by the RAF for the separate, upper platform where the pilot and co-pilot sat in large flying boats.
Ergonomics
The first airplane with an enclosed cabin appeared in 1913 on Igor Sikorsky's airplane The Grand. However, during the 1920s there were many passenger aircraft in which the crew were open to the air while the passengers sat in a cabin. Military biplanes and the first single-engined fighters and attack aircraft also had open cockpits into the Second World War. Early airplanes with closed cockpits were the 1924 Fokker tri-motor, the 1926 Ford Tri-Motor, the 1927 Lockheed Vega, the Spirit of St. Louis, the 1931 Taylor Cub, German Junkers used as military transports, and the passenger aircraft manufactured by the Douglas and Boeing companies during the mid-1930s. Open-cockpit airplanes were almost extinct by the mid-1950s, with the exception of training planes and crop-dusters.