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McDonnell created a program management structure under Barkey and Lewis and carried to the Navy a wide variety of rough proposals and suggested uses for such designs. Sometimes the best they could do was to keep the proposal process going until they reformulated the task into a problem that they could solve and which was acceptable to the Navy. But the Navy definition of a mission was confused, giving McDonnell engineers time to explore new areas in the state of the art under the broad mandate of a sole-source letter contract The confiion, and the negotiations, revolved around the mission for the aircraft. The Navy could not state definitively what kind of flight apparatus it needed that it did not already have. Furthermore, the Navy already possessed the fleet of Forrestal carriers and announced plans for a new class of superclass. that synopsis freed McDonnell from designing an aircraft small and specific. Engineering the F-4 Phantom was enough to fit on the older Essex class of carriers. So Lewis and Barkey explored to make the Phantom Jet a multimission aircraft, capable of flying attack and reconnaissance missons as well as interceptor missons. They submitted a supplementary proposal, in January 1954, to build the plane with interchangeable nose sections. “Its nose shaped design would be the same aerodynamic profile but house equipment and cockpit instrumentation in constant alignment and suited to one particular mission. McDonnell argued, drawing on the then vogue notion of the learning curve, that such multimission aircraft made economic sense. Designing flexibility into the end product, they argued, allowed more standardization in the production line. Also, interchangeable noses could simplify maintenance and supply in the fleet and give Navy squadrons more flexibility in planning maneuvers. The standard nose would be a single-seat attack version, with four 20-millimeter Colt Mark-12 guns, or fiftysix 2-inch unguided rockets and a refueling probe. Other single-seat versions included an all-weather photo reconnaissance version and an electronic countermeasures version. Two seat versions could be used for flight or electronics training, air-strike coordination, or electronic countermeasures action during search and strike. McDonnell estimated that four crewmen on an aircraft carrier could completely change the nose module in eight hours, though the Navy evaluators were skeptical. More importantly, McDonnell could design no ballast system to rectify shifts in the center of gravity when the noses were changed. The Navy took until June 1955, however, to definitively tell McDonnell to drop the idea of interchangeable nose sections. By that time the design had progressed very far on the assumption that the electronic equipment should all go into the nose. Thus, when the aircraft was changed for various missions, in the 1960s, most of the changes easily took place within the nose. The project F4 jet was specialized enough to fit on the older Essex class of carriers. So Lewis and Barkey explored ways to make the plane a multimission aircraft, capable of flying attack and reconnaissance missions as well as interceptor missions. They submitted a supplementary proposal, in January 1954, to build the aircraft with interchangeable nose sections. Each nose would have the same aerodynamic profile but house equipment and cockpit instrumentation in constant alignment and suited to one particular mission. McDonnell argued, drawing on the then vogue notion of the learning curve, that such multimission aircraft made economic sense: The twin engines allowed the F4 Phantom to carry more armament, reach a greater attack speed, and provide more reliability without a real crease in range. The original project proposal had included twin engine apparatus. The Navy had used twin engines successfully, primarily McDonnell engineers Engineering the F-4 Phantom began an interviewing process of aviators and wives who always boasted they preferred single engine jets because they were sprightly, though their wives reported during pillow talk they preferred the reliability of twin engines so there would be no appreciable loss in range. The decision to use two seats relaxed the usual constraints on pilot workload. Aviators were the strongest advocates for a single seat. They thought themselves capable of managing any amount of radar and missile equipment, to have an extra fuel tank where missile equipment could accompany their flight into battle. There were few Navy advocates for the second seat because only one fighter aircraft then arried a radar operator, the Douglas F3D Skynight packed with night monitoring tech. The Navy made it clear that it wanted radar equipment. However, once the engineers agreed to pack the F4H-1 with the electronic equipment needed to fight in all kinds of weather, McDonnell engineers began advocating an extra seat. A second crew member was mandatory in some roles, they argued, but superfluous in none. Because they were contractually obligated to design a viable cockpit, they had a more objective view on how much electronic information the pilot could reasonably handle in the heat of battle. The Navy tentatively approved a second seat in June 1955, approved a mock-up in September 1955, and made it official in April 1957. The front seat was for the aviator, who controlled the aircraft and determined when the missiles would be launched. The radar intercept officer (RIO, though sometimes called the “GIB” for “guy in back”) scanned the radarscope for enemy blips, set up the missile shots and bombing runs, and handled most navigation and radio communication. As new equipment was added to the aircraft, and especially when missiles were added, McDonnell engineers rearranged the switches and dials between the front and rear cockpits to balance the workload. This divisibility of the crew’s labor made the F4 jet much more flexible. By dividing the interception mission between the aircraft and the guided missiles, McDonnell again made the aircraft more flexible. The Phantom had been armed with four 20-millimeter cannons, useful in both ground attack and dogfighting. However, flight tests of newly developed guided missiles increasingly persuaded Navy engineers that missiles provided a better interception system than a combination of cannon and aircraft. Through the use of speed, altitude, and guidance, an interception system moved an explosive warhead from the aircraft carrier to the intruding aircraft. The interception system could allocate all the tasks of speed, altitude, and guidance to a ship to air missile, it could allocate most of them to a fighter aircraft carrying a cannon, or it could divide the tasks between an aircraft and a guided missile. With the F4, McDonnell adjusted the system so that the aircraft provided less speed, altitude, and maneuvering to the target, and the missile provided more. The worst nightmare for Navy strategists in the mid 1950s was that the Soviets would develop an aircraft like the America B-58 Hustler, which could drop a nuclear bomb on a carrier group from a cruising altitude of 50,000 feet, higher than any fighter aircraft could then reach. The Navy's best plan for knocking out such bombers were small 2-inch diameter unguided Mighty Mouse rockets, much like bullets but with a thrust to Mach 5. The pilot of the interceptor performed a snap-up maneuver, building up speed at cruising altitude, then pulling back on the stick to launch the nose into a ballistic trajectory and, as the aircraft peaked in altitude before running out of momentum, firing off a flurry of Mighty Mouse missiles from the wing-mounted rocket pod. The Phantom was, at one point, also designed for this mission, with reinforced wings to withstand the snap-up, plus a good navigation computer to time the rocket launch.