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: 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; the next fighters developed domestically for the USAF, the F-22 and F-23, were single-seat only (at least one two-seat F-22B was built, whether as a trainer or preproduction evaluation model, but the USAF never seriously considered a two-seater). The F-35 was never even proposed as a two-seater, primarily because every cubic inch of the design is spoken for especially in the STOVL-capable B variant. The remaining two-seat fighters in the U.S. arsenal are the F-15E strike fighter (the backseater having the unique title of "Weapons Systems Officer" or "Wizzo" and being responsible for the fairly complex radar and targeting systems aboard) and variants of the F/A-18 including the F-variant "Super Hornet" and G-variant "Growler" EW fighter. In all these cases the GIB usually manages the advanced radar, targeting and jamming systems of these craft, as well as assisting in dogfighting by providing a second set of eyes especially behind the aircraft. The EA-6B Prowler, an older EW aircraft replaced just this year with the EA-18G Growler, had a crew of four;