Date: Born c. 1910, in Muscogee, Florida; died August 9, 1980, in Indio, California
Definition: Pioneer in aviation who paved the way for future female American pilots.
Significance: At the time of her death, Cochran held more speed, altitude, and distance records than any other pilot in aviation history. She was the first woman to break the sound barrier and the first living woman to be inducted into the American Aviation Hall of Fame.
Born near Pensacola, Florida, sometime in 1910 (al-though she claimed her birth date was May 11, 1912), Jac-queline “Jackie” Cochran spent her early years in poverty.
Orphaned while still an infant, she was raised by a foster family of sawmill workers. Her formal education did not go beyond the second grade. During her teens, she moved to Alabama to work as a beautician and enrolled in a three-year nursing program. Although she completed her train-ing, Cochran, fearing failure, did not take the written ex-amination and instead became a doctor’s assistant near the sawmills where she had been raised.
Depressed by the poverty of the sawmills, however, Cochran returned to work as a beautician. This work took her from Pensacola to Philadelphia, and finally to New York City, where she worked at the Saks Fifth Avenue de-partment store. On a business trip in 1932, she met Floyd Odlum, a wealthy investor who enjoyed aviation. Follow-ing their conversation, Cochran enrolled in flight school.
She quickly completed the courses, becoming one of only a few women to have a pilot’s license. Thereafter, she re-ceived a commercial pilot’s license, bought her own plane, and began competing in air races.
Cochran opened a beauty shop and started a cosmetic manufacturing business. In 1936, she married Floyd Odlum; the couple settled on a ranch near Indio, Califor-nia. Marriage allowed Cochran to concentrate most of her time on flying. During the next year, she set three speed re-cords and was awarded the Harmon trophy as the outstand-ing woman aviator of the year. In 1938, she won the Bendix Transcontinental Race by setting a new speed re-cord, and the following year set an altitude record of 33,000 feet while winning the New York to Miami air race.
During the early 1940’s, Cochran used her aeronautical skills to help the Allied war effort. In 1941, she became the first woman to ferry a B-17 bomber to Britain, and thereaf-ter recruited other female pilots to continue ferrying
oper-ations for the military. As a result of this success, in 1943 the military appointed her as the head of the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs). Under her direction, over one thousand women completed important missions across the Atlantic. In 1945, the Army awarded Cochran the Distinguished Service Medal for her accomplishments as head of the WASPs. Following World War II, she worked as a reporter for Liberty Magazine. As a journalist she covered the Nuremberg war crimes trials, was the first American woman to enter Japan after the war, and inter-viewed Chinese leaders Chiang Kai-Shek and Mao Ze-dong.
Following the war, Cochran returned to the skies to set new records. In 1948, she set an altitude record of over 55,000 feet, and in 1953, she flew an F-86 Sabre jet faster than the speed of sound (Mach 1), becoming the first woman to break the sound barrier. Her aviation re-cords continued, as she became the first female pilot to land a jet on an aircraft carrier and the first woman to pi-lot a jet across the Atlantic Ocean. In 1964, she logged a record-setting flight at 1,429 miles per hour, over twice the speed of sound (Mach 2) and the fastest for a female pilot.
In 1970, Cochran retired from the U.S. Air Force Re-serve with the rank of colonel, and the next year she be-came the first living woman to be inducted into the Ameri-can Aviation Hall of Fame. She died in 1980, leaving behind more than two hundred flying records. In addition to holding more records for altitude, speed, and distance than any pilot in history, her pioneering efforts made it possible for women to serve their country as pilots, astro-nauts, and military officers.
Aaron D. Purcell Bibliography
Cochran, Jacqueline, and Maryann Bucknum Brinley.
Jackie Cochran: An Autobiography. New York: Ban-tam, 1987. A detailed autobiography compiled by Brinley consisting of interviews, personal recollec-tions, and photographs.
Cochran, Jacqueline, and Floyd Odlum. The Stars at Noon. Reprint. New York: Arno Press, 1980. A fasci-nating autobiography providing important descriptions of Cochran’s early years and the challenges women faced during the development of aviation, especially during World War II.
Cole, Jean Hascall. Women Pilots of World War II. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992. Excellent overview of the WASP program with personal inter-views.
Encyclopedia of Flight Jacqueline Cochran
Lomax, Judy. Women of the Air. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1987. The chapter on Cochran provides an excellent overview of her contributions to flight.
See also: Air derbies; Flying Fortress; Military flight;
Women and flight; Women’s Airforce Service Pilots;
World War II
Cockpit
Definition: The area within an aircraft from which pilots operate the aircraft’s controls.
Significance: Cockpits provide a central point from which airplane performance can be commanded and monitored.
The term “cockpit” originated with the ancient sport of cockfighting. Early pilots had to control unstable air-planes through control levers positioned without regard to one control’s effect on another. Pilots stayed busy, their motions reminiscent of the frenzy in the gaming floor’s cockpit.
Although early airplanes accommodated pilots, they had no cockpits by modern definition. The Wright broth-ers’ Flyer pilot lay prone, having controls in reach but little else. No flight instruments existed until about 1911. In his underpowered, box-kite-like 14-bis, Alberto Santos-Dumont stood erect while becoming Europe’s first air-plane pilot. By their first decade, airair-planes had evolved cockpits as effective yet inefficient workstations.
By World War I, fighter cockpits gave their seated pilots a control stick, a rudder bar and precious few instruments.
Open cockpits were a hallmark of pre-1920 airplanes—
rarely were cockpits enclosed. As enclosures became prom-inent in the 1920’s, some pilots disliked them, wanting the wind on their faces to indicate slips or skids. By the 1930’s, most airplanes featured enclosed cockpits, although effi-cient pilot motion stayed a low priority.
The layout of cockpits only slowly became logical, with their instruments and installations sometimes cum-bersome. Lockheed’s prewar Model 14 Hudson is an ex-ample of cockpit inefficiency; its Royal Air Force (RAF) version was a handful for its single pilot. In his 1972 mem-oir, H. A. Taylor recounted the difficulties of solo flight in the Hudson, beginning with starting the engine. It was a procedure that “was preferably done with three hands, each with more than the usual number of fingers and thumbs,” and involved simultaneously pressing buttons
for both the starter motor and booster coil while holding a spring-loaded, three-position switch that selected the en-gine to be started. Meanwhile, an enen-gine-doping pump and a wobble-pump had to be worked, and as soon as the en-gine fired, the idle cut-off lever had to be released and the throttle manipulated while the booster button was continu-ally pressed. The layout of these vital mechanisms added to the challenge: “The buttons, switches and doper were on a fore-and-aft electrical panel to the pilot’s right; the wobble-pump handle was at the rear of the throttle pedes-tal; and the cut-off levers sprouted, among a dozen or more others, from the top of this pedestal.”
Not all 1930’s manufacturers spurned pilot efficiency.
By the early 1930’s, Germany’s Junkers Aircraft built its Ju-52/3m, called “Tante Ju” (“Auntie Junkers”) by her adoring crews. Its innovations included dual instruments, a series of mechanical devices to reduce distraction-induced pilot errors, and effective weatherproofing. Logic arranged its flight instruments, and the pilot and copilot could both reach the brake lever. By the climax of World War II, cock-pit efficiency had become a manufacturing priority.
Modern Cockpits
Airplane cockpits range from the single-place, where the pilot is the sole occupant and performs all duties, to the multi-place, in which several crew members share duties such as flying, communicating, navigating, and systems monitoring. Cockpit designs demand unique consider-ations.
Accessibility means that the pilot’s station must be eas-ily reached upon entry and easeas-ily departed at flight’s end.
Restraints must counter turbulence, yet allow quick crew egress in emergencies. Once seated, pilots must be able to reach all of the flight and systems controls. The control sticks so favored by early designers provide an unencum-bered view of the instrument panel, and fall to hand natu-rally. Control yokes, or wheels, create an automotive feel that comforts new aviators, but blocks pilot vision of parts of the instrument panel. Both amateur airplane builders and conglomerates, such as Europe’s Airbus Industrie, have found value and pilot acceptance of side-sticks, joy-sticks mounted on the cockpit bulkhead, or side wall, where they can comfortably be reached by the pilot’s hand.
These controls can be reliably gripped, even in tense mo-ments or in turbulence, when jolts and jostling fling a pi-lot’s reaching hand from levers or dials.
From the 1920’s through the 1950’s, training airplanes tended to have tandem cockpits, in which the student and instructor sat on the airplane’s centerline, one behind the other. Advantages included the students’ability to perform
Cockpit Encyclopedia of Flight
maneuvers in either direction with equal challenge, for their field of vision either way remained identical. Addi-tionally, students tended to develop cockpit skills more quickly because their instructors remained essentially hid-den. Disadvantages included the need for duplicate instru-mentation and the instructors’ inability to see nuances in student facial expressions. In the 1950’s, as most trainer cockpits adopted side-by-side seating, designers strove for cockpit efficiency. Sometimes that goal is still unmet. Ten accidents occurring between 1972 and 1982 prompted de-velopment of what is known as cockpit resource manage-ment. Accidents underscored the need for physical changes in cockpits. Studies revealed surprising clues to the dangers induced by poor design.
By the twentieth century’s close, newly produced air-planes had begun to incorporate cockpit ergonomics. Er-gonomics considers the design of the human body, includ-ing its ranges of skeletal and muscular motion. Normal operation is the first consideration, but airplanes encounter strong turbulence, operate in daylight and darkness, and
can climb in minutes from searing heat at the airport to subzero temperatures at altitude. Designers must consider these factors and more, plus incorporate characteristics to maximize crash survivability. Like the rest of the airplane, the cockpit is a compromise, for which designers cannot rely on tradition. Today’s cockpit designers use recent and exhaustive studies to meet their goals. Despite its claustro-phobic faults, the cockpit holds strong allure to millions.
Depicting airplanes, artists usually focus on cockpits, for therein sits an airplane’s humanity, and what many see as its ultimate office.
David R. Wilkerson Bibliography
Caidin, Martin. The Saga of Iron Annie. Garden City, N.Y.:
Doubleday, 1979. An account of one of the world’s most famous airplanes and the travails of restoring an airliner-sized antique to flying condition.
Connor, C. W. Proceedings of the Seventh Aerospace Be-havioral Technology Conference: Operational
Infor-Encyclopedia of Flight Cockpit
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mation Transfer Technology: Are We Designing for the Human Operator? Warrendale, Pa.: Society of Auto-motive Engineers, 1989. A compilation of twenty-three highly technical assessments of aerospace issues, in-cluding cockpit design.
Satchell, P. M. Cockpit Monitoring and Alerting Systems.
Aldershot, Hampshire, England: Ashgate, 1993. A technical work directed to aviation’s production profes-sionals.
Szurovy, Geza. Wings of Yesteryear: The Golden Age of Private Aircraft. Osceola, Wis.: MBI, 1998. A nostal-gic review of 1920’s- to 1940’s-era light planes, lav-ishly illustrated with superb color photos, posters, and contemporary black-and-white photographs.
Taylor, H. A. “Flying the Harassing Hudson.” Air Enthusi-ast Magazine (December, 1972): 292. A pilot’s memoir of Royal Air Force Service during World War II.
See also: Airplanes; Flight control systems; Instrumenta-tion; Manufacturers; Rudders; Alberto Santos-Dumont;
Training and education; Wright Flyer