Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor F-22B

The F-22B was the planned two-seat version of the Raptor: an aircraft with the same combat capabilities as the single-seat F-22A, intended mainly for pilot training. When the Air Force announced in April 1991 that the YF-22 had won the Advanced Tactical Fighter competition and that the Pratt & Whitney F119 was the selected engine, the engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) contract that followed ordered nine flyable development aircraft: seven single-seat F-22As and two twin-seat F-22Bs. Together with the two non-flying structural test articles, the order came to eleven pre-series aircraft, two of them two-seaters. The production design was refined from the demonstrator into Configuration 645, and Lockheed moved much of its EMD work from Burbank to Marietta, Georgia; the two-seater was part of that configuration from the outset, and its manufacture was prepared at Marietta alongside the single-seaters.

The F-22B was cancelled in 1996 to save development costs, and the two test aircraft on order were converted to single-seat F-22As. The decision came just as management reviews of the programme were pointing to cost growth: in June 1996 the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition chartered a Joint Estimate Team (JET) to review F-22 cost and schedule, and in January 1997 the team estimated that programme costs would increase by about 1.5 billion dollars and that more time would be needed to complete EMD. In February 1997 the Department of Defense approved a restructuring that added twelve months to development, deleted the preproduction aircraft and slowed low-rate initial production. The French edition of the encyclopaedia sums it up: the programme was running about five years late with a unit price that had more than doubled, and as a result the two-seat version was abandoned and the number of aircraft on order was gradually cut, from the 648 planned in 1991 to 339 in 1997, when the first pre-series aircraft flew. JET members told the GAO that although they had considered performance reductions as a way of cutting costs, none were adopted as a result of their study: the savings came from the schedule, from the preproduction aircraft and from variants such as the two-seater, not from the aircraft's capabilities.

With no two-seater, every F-22 pilot has always made his first flight in the type alone, and training has relied on simulators and on a share of the production fleet set aside for instruction: of the aircraft built for operational squadrons, 74 were F-22A Block 10/20 training aircraft and 112 were Block 30/35 combat aircraft, for a total of 186 (or 187 when the Production Representative Test Vehicles and certain EMD jets are counted). The F-22B was not the only variant dropped: the naval F-22N was abandoned in 1993 and the FB-22 bomber never went beyond a proposal. What remains of the two-seater are its three-view drawings and the two airframes that, as single-seaters, joined the run of nine development aircraft whose first example, 91-4001, was named Raptor on 9 April 1997 and flew on 7 September that year.