Title: aircraft design - Why do some fighter jets have two pilots while others have only one? - Aviation Stack Exchange
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Why do some fighter jets have two pilots while others have only one?
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Content: As a result, these systems, intended to increase pilot situational awareness, ended up doing the exact opposite, forcing the pilot to keep his head "in the cockpit" reading gauges and displays, with his situational awareness of what was going on outside the plane somewhere around his ankles. With the problem identified but insufficient technology to take critical "heads-down" tasks like navigation away from the pilot, designers initially addressed it by adding a second crewman, whose job it would be to handle tasks not directly associated with the primary operation of the plane, such as navigation, managing the radar, keeping an extra pair of eyes on the sky around them, handling radio communications, etc. This guy is officially known in most situations as the Radar Intercept Officer or RIO, or informally as the GIB (Guy In Back). It would take a few more technological developments, like the inertial navigation system, heads-up display, HOTAS control layouts, the integrated fire control computer, and advanced C4I capability like AWACS/JSTARS, before the workload inherent in the average fighter sortie could reasonably be handled by one crewman. AWACS can guide and advise pilots much like civilian ATC, the inertial navigation system allows pilots to simply point their plane in the indicated direction as opposed to monitoring nav beacons to figure out exactly where they were, and the HUD and HOTAS got the pilot's head out of the cockpit by placing the information and controls he needs to fly the jet effectively in combat where they're supposed to be; right in front of him and/or at his fingertips. The primary fighter and attack jets of the third and fourth generation to utilize a 2-man crew include the F-4 Phantom, F-111 Aardvark, A-6 Intruder, the F-14 Tomcat, and the B and D variants of the F-15 Eagle, F-16 Falcon and F-18 Hornet. Notice by the development of the F-15 through F-18 that designers and US top brass were already considering single-seaters to be sufficient; the development and integration of the aforementioned systems into U.S. fourth-generation fighters had successfully made the workload presented by the plane more manageable by one person, thus the backseater (who required expensive flight training just like the pilot) could be moved to a second plane as pilot instead of riding along in the first, and the B/D variants of the Eagle, Falcon and Hornet were primarily used as trainers. However, all these designs were laid out in both one and two-seat variants just in case;