This is inspired by seeing Top Gun: Maverick, where one fighter has a second person in the cockpit as a weapons system officer, while the other doesn’t. Does the other aircraft only have a one-seat cockpit?
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Alright, long post here. Full disclaimer: current Navy pilot, was present at some of the filming during Top Gun (the B-roll footage), and have been qualified in the E/F and G as well.
So the point of having one or two aircrew in a fighter has always been a balance of piloting versus operating systems. During World War II, you had dedicated bombardier/radio operators (like on the TBF Avenger) or radar operators (like on the P-61 Black Widow).
Depending on the complexity of operating an aircraft’s systems, some jets necessitated a second (or even third or fourth) crewmember.
For instance, the F-4 Phantom II had a pilot and a backseater – the Radar Intercept Officer (RIO). The F-14 Tomcat was the same way. The reason? They both had fairly complex radars for their day and before the advent of the glass cockpit, the RIO was the only one that could even operate the radar. The pilot had to fly and be in the right position for the RIO to operate the radar to make a BVR (Beyond Visual Range) intercept happen.
Other aircraft had similar setups. For instance, the A-6 Intruder had a Pilot and Bombardier/Navigator. The B/N would look through a scope that would provide an image of the terrain ahead of it so the pilot would receive commands like “5° nose up” from the B/N while they flew at night or bad weather at a few hundred feet off the ground – potentially in mountainous terrain.
The F-111 and EF-111 did similar things.
The EA-6B Prowler, for instance, had a pilot and up to three ECMOs (Electronics CounterMeasures Officers) to operate the jamming and electronic warfare systems on the aircraft. Its successor, the EA-18G Growler, has a pilot and a EWO (Electronic Warfare Officer).
So it was with the F-15E Strike Eagle and the F/A-18F Super Hornet – the backseater was now the Weapon Systems Officer (WSO). But rather than just handle a radar, the term WSO was used in part because they were expected to handle a lot more, from targeting pods to handling the various combat systems on the aircraft.
But, on the other hand, single piloted aircraft have also become far more common (and even multi-crew aircraft have gotten smaller, like the EA-6B to EA-18G transition). Why?
For one, technology and automation have made things easier. Instead of a human manually adjusting radar gains and identifying raw returns as targets, you now have computers that can build tracks of radar returns and fuse them into targets. Things like glass cockpits (screens instead of analog gauges) meant that a pilot could reconfigure their displays for whatever mission. The original F/A-18 Hornet was designated F/A (Fighter/Attack) in part because with the press of a button, you could switch from Navigation mode to Air to Air (A/A) or Air to Ground (A/G) and its computers would tell its sensors (like its radar or FLIR) to switch to a different mode.
In addition, advances in things like Hands on Throttle and Stick (HOTAS) also enabled a pilot to both fly AND operate systems at the same time.
So why does the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet have both a single seat and two seat option?
It was both a part of the times, some internal politicking, and some design choices.
For one, the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet ended up replacing the F-14, A-6, and S-3 in various missions. All three were Navy aircraft that had a pilot and a NFO (Naval Flight Officer, which is the actual officer designator of non-pilot officer aircrew in everything from fighters to the E-2 to P-8 to E-6, etc.), so there was some worry that you needed two seats to handle all that (since previous aircrew had it) and also to keep the NFO community gainfully employed. And in part because the Navy envisioned being able to use the two seat Super Hornets to do some missions the single seat guys wouldn’t/couldn’t do (for instance, the two seat crews can be FAC(A), or Forward Air Controller (Airborne) qualified).
I was born and raised a single seat guy, so I have my own thoughts on this topic, but as technology and capabilities have matured and advanced, the single seat E’s have overtaken the F’s in production totals and those operational by far. Most carrier air wings now have only a single F squadron with three single seat E squadrons.
Even the Tomcat squadrons that converted to the Super Hornet didn’t all stay two seat (like VFA-14, 31, 143, etc.).
There were other considerations too like the initial Super Hornet software and what came out later were night and day different, vastly reducing aircrew workload and making it more possible for a single pilot to do the mission of two.
Now, don’t get me wrong, there are times when two aircrew working really well together can be better than the sum of their parts. On the other hand, I’ve seen times where 1 + 1 is < 1. So, yeah.
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Now for some Frequently Asked Questions:
* Why did the movie Top Gun: Maverick use a two seat and single seat fighter in a pair? It’s a movie, and there were movie dynamics involved. The final mission itself is all Hollywood envisioned. There are a million other options for the situation involved. I was glad they showed an E-2 Hawkeye in there, but they also ignored things like the EA-18G Growler which is designed specifically for electronic attack against enemy air defenses.
* What was the reason they didn’t use the F-35 in the mission? When they filmed Top Gun: Maverick, the F-35C wasn’t operational with the Navy or Marines yet. In fact, the B-roll footage in the intro was shot on the USS Abraham Lincoln in August of 2018, during Operational Test 1 (OT-1), which was the first at-sea integration test of the F-35C with the air wing (CVW-7 was on board, minus one squadron). In addition, even today in 2022, there are only three operational F-35C squadrons (2 Navy, 1 Marine) while there are over 30 F/A-18E/F squadrons. So Hollywood plot excuse aside, odds are really really good you’d see F/A-18s involved one way or another in a Navy operation (again, with the fact that the tactics used in the movie are all Hollywood). And also because F-35 is single seat, and Tom Cruise wanted to be in actual jets, so he got shoved in the backseat of some of our Fs for the flying scenes.
* Do two seat aircraft have sticks in the back? So in the Air Force, the F-15E actually does have a stick in the back for their CSOs (Combat Systems Officer is the rated officer job, the airframe you are in makes you a WSO or ECMO or whatever), but CSOs aren’t rated pilots and aren’t allowed to land the aircraft or handle it in other critical phases of flight. In the Navy, the F/A-18F and EA-18G can both be reconfigured into trainer configurations with a stick and throttle in the back. But, operationally, they are going to be in a missionized configuration in the back, and do not have controls.
* But I thought backseaters were pilots? In some militaries, yes. But not in the US. In the Navy and Marines, they are NFOs – Naval Flight Officers. They are also the backseaters in the E-2 (think radar controllers) and the P-8 (think navigator and tactical commander). In the Air Force, they are CSOs – Combat Systems Officers. The flight school programs they go through are different. For instance, here is the Navy/Marine [pilot training pipeline](https://www.cnatra.navy.mil/training-sna.asp) while [here is the NFO one](https://www.cnatra.navy.mil/training-nfo.asp).
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