Peter Stickney wrote:

In article ,
John Halliwell writes:
In article , The Revolution Will Not
Be Televised writes
They all had facility for 2 pilots, e.g. extra controls could be
fitted to the Halifax and Lanc if neccessary, but basically they had
ceased to be 2-pilot aircraft by 1943.

I'm not sure if they were intended to be operational with two pilots,
I've only ever seen references to an extra set of controls if required,
presumably mostly for training (although all the sources I have suggest
training was done with only one set of controls). Most sources seem to
suggest movement to/from the nose was awkward enough without extra
controls getting in the way.

Even for daylight ops, I'm not sure if a second pilot would have been
carried, maybe the flight engineers would have received additional
training (as some did unofficially from their pilots). I'm not sure when
autopilots became common equipment (1943 perhaps?), they'd take some of
the workload off the pilot.

It's not so much a question of workload as is is, uhm, having a backup
pilot fully capable of flying a probably damaged airplane to a safe
recovery. Yes, quite a number of Lancaster and Halifax FEs got stick
time, but how many were practicing engine-out landings? For that
matter, if you've got a damaged airplane, you want somebody to fly
while the FE keeps things together.

I'll disagree here. You want two pilots so they can take turns flying tight
formation. For night ops it was no big deal to put the a/c on george and have
the first and second pilots swap out (before they replaced the 2nd pilot with
a FE). That's not an option when flying in a combat box. With only a single
pilot the formations are going to be looser, and that's the last thing the
Brit heavies need, as they're already going to be the ground bait. Once air
superiority is won and the invasion has happened it's not as big a deal,
becaue there's less need to fly tight formation for as long, but we're talking
about the period before that occurs. Both Lanc and Halifax have FE seats next
to (and slightly aft) of the pilot, so the space shouldn't be a too much of a
problem. I wasn't aware that these two a/c had provisions for dual controls
built in, although I knew that some had them; when we were trying to figure
out what mods we'd have to make to run these a/c by day, we had allowed a fair
amount of time to design and develop a production dual control system, so it
seems that we were overcautious in estimating how much time that would take.

Guy