Which way did three of the Vulcan's five crew face?

Short answer

Backwards. Of the five crew, only the two pilots faced forward, on the upper deck; on the lower level the radar navigator, plotter navigator and air electronics officer (AEO) sat with their backs to the direction of travel, facing the tail, and had no ejection seats.

Published: October 22, 2026 · Updated: October 22, 2026 · Edited by Above Ten Thousand · Editorial policy

Which way did three of the Vulcan's five crew face?

Avro Vulcan - Flickr - LumixMick from England (CC BY), vía commons

A cockpit on two levels

The Vulcan's crew numbered five, housed in a pressurised cabin split across two levels. Above, under the transparent canopy, sat the first pilot and co-pilot, side by side. Below and behind them, in a compartment with hardly any windows, worked the other three: the radar navigator, the plotter navigator (responsible for dead-reckoning navigation and plotting) and the air electronics officer, known by the English acronym AEO.

Facing the tail

The three lower-deck crew members sat facing aft, that is, towards the tail of the aircraft, in front of their radar, navigation and countermeasures consoles.

The big difference: how to get out of the aircraft

The orientation of the seats had a consequence more serious than discomfort. The two pilots had Martin-Baker 3K ejection seats (3KS on the B.2), but the three rear crew members did not: in an emergency they had to abandon the aircraft through the crew entry door. The original B.35/46 specification called for a detachable crew compartment, but that requirement was removed in a later amendment, and the question of rear-crew escape followed the Vulcan throughout its career.

A later Avro project, from October 1960, proposed lengthening the forward fuselage to house six crew members, all facing forward and all on ejection seats, but it never got beyond paper.

The first prototype flew on 30 August 1952, and the RAF received its first Vulcan B.1 in September 1956.