Definition of "cockpit"

Jump in the cockpit and start up the engines / Remove all the wheel blocks, there's no time to waste

1984 September 3, Steve Harris (lyrics and music), “Aces High”, in Powerslave, performed by Iron Maiden

I obſerv'd a Place where there had been a Fire made, and a Circle dug in the Earth, like a Cockpit, where it is ſuppoſed the Savage Wretches had ſat down to their inhumane Feaſtings upon the Bodies of their Fellow-Creatures.

1719 May 6 (Gregorian calendar), [Daniel Defoe], The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, […], 3rd edition, London: […] W[illiam] Taylor […], published 1719, pages 194–195

Cockfighting has been banned during the virus outbreak. Before the pandemic, it was allowed only in licensed cockpits on Sundays and legal holidays, as well as during local fiestas lasting a maximum of three days […]

2020 October 28, “Police officer raiding illegal cockfight gets killed by rooster”, in BBC News

But pardon, and gentles all,The flat unraised spirits that have daredOn this unworthy scaffold to bring forthSo great an object: can this cockpit holdThe vasty fields of France? or may we cramWithin this wooden O the very casquesThat did affright the air at Agincourt?

1599, William Shakespeare, “The Life of Henry the Fift”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, [Act I, prologue]

India became the cockpit in which it was shown that trade was war carried on under another name.

2016, Peter Ackroyd, Revolution, Pan Macmillan, published 2017, page 170

If then the stone, as doctors tell the story, / Be a disease that prove hereditory, / I trust her daughter will have so much wit, / Early to get a cock for her cock-pit; / And rather then be barren; play the whore, / As her great mother hath done heretofore.

1658, John Eliot, Poems, London: Henry Brome

[…] ſo that her thighs duly diſclod'd, and elevated, laid open all the outward proſpect of the treaſury of love: the roſe-lipt ouverture preſenting the cock-pit ſo fair, that it was not in nature even for a natural to miſs it: […]

1749, [John Cleland], “[Letter the Second]”, in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure [Fanny Hill], volume II, London: […] G. Fenton [i.e., Fenton and Ralph Griffiths] […], page 191

The grand object of a Maroon chief in war was to take a ſtation in ſome glen, or, as it is called in the Weſt Indies, Cockpit, encloſed by rocks and mountains nearly perpendicular, and to which the only practicable entrance is by a very narrow defile.

1803, R. C. Dallas, Esq., The History of the Maroons: […] , volume 1, London: T. N. Longman and O. Rees, page 39