Roaring Over Streets: A B-2 Spirit Stealth Bomber Flying Over in California

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U.S. Air Force B-2 Spirit Stealth Bomber Flying Over Streets in California

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USAF leader confirms manned decision for new bomber

The US Air Force has confirmed for the first time that the Long Range Strike-Bomber (LRS-B) will be manned on entry-into-service, one of a few new details revealed about the classified programme. 

Several military experts have predicted the LRS-B programme would eventually become optionally-manned but enter service with a flight crew or a pilot, but the USAF has never revealed such details publicly.

Secretary of the Air Force Michael Donley said today at a Defense Writers Group breakfast that the service will initially field the new stealth bomber as manned aircraft. "It's likely that we'll start the bomber programme as a manned programme," Donley says. "It'll have the option to be unmanned at some point and so I think that option will be protected."

Boeing

The USAF is still some distance away from awarding a contract for the new aircraft, but Donley there have been no major changes in design or requirements since the programme was launched. "We're still a year or two away from those, what I would call a downselect decision," Donley says. 

The USAF still hopes to build anywhere from 80 to 100 LRS-B aircraft which would become operational in the mid-2020s. "Cost is a major factor for us," Donley says.

Donley says he is not yet sure when the service will disclose more about the Pentagon's acquisitions strategy for the LRS-B, but he did say contract details are under review. "We are developing a contract strategy at the air force and AT&L [acquisitions, technology and logistics], that work is ongoing," he says.

"We're going to protect the capabilities of this airplane," Donley says. "I think several years down the road [we might disclose more details] because we think the capabilities that it will have represent advantages not unlike those that we have enjoyed with the [Northrop Grumman] B-2."

When the B-2 was new in the early 1990s, that aircraft represented a revolutionary leap in capability for strategic bombers. Even now, nearly two decades after the bat-winged aircraft was declared operational, the USAF is still tight lipped about the stealth bomber's exact performance and capabilities. 

"We have not talked about B-2 capabilities in great depth, we did not reveal the existence of the B-2 programme until it rolled out of the hangar," Donley says. "We're years from that."

Source: flightglobal

U.S. Air Force moving two B-2 stealth strategic bombers closer to China

In November 2012, the U.S. Air Forced announced a series of worldwide training deployments to to each of the US combatant command’s areas of responsibility of the stealthy B-2 Spirit bombers.

The “World Spirit Tour”, as the deployment was dubbed by the Air Force Magazine, will bring the first two radar evading planes from the 509th Bomb Wing at Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri, to the Pacific theater.

Destination: Andersen Air Force Base.

Strategically located 1,800 miles (about 2,900 km) to the east of China, Andersen has hosted a deployed strategic bomber force since 2004.

Even if the B-52s and B-1s are regularly deployed there, the B-2s were pulled out ot the rotations to Guam in 2010 (when up to six Spirits were temporary stationed there), after a serious engine fire earlier that year and the loss of another example in a 2008 crash.

With the deployment of the Spirit bombers once again to the Pacific atoll and, probably in the near future, in Australia, where the Air Force has announced “future rotational deployments” of its batwing bombers, the U.S. reaffirms the focus on a region where China’s military power is causing concern to Washington and its local allies, some of those dealing with territorial disputes.

Image source: U.S. Air Force

Although they have proved to be able to conduct no-stop round trip strike missions from Whiteman AFB during the Allied Force in Kosovo in 1999 and, more recently, in Libya, during the 2011′s Air War, the Spirit stealth bombers must be able to operate from forward operating bases across the world.

First of all in the Asia-Pacific region, and then in Central and South America, Southwest Asia, and Europe, where there are no permanently assiged bombers.

It must be remembered that the B-2 is the only platform capable to deliver the Massive Ordnance Penetrator 30,000lb bomb. Capable to destroy bunkers in Syria, Iran. Or North Korea, not far from Guam either…