Breaking Defense: Northrop Grumman has extensive experience in designing and maintaining low observable aircraft. What lessons learned is Northrop Grumman bringing to the B-21 to support sustainment?
Sullivan: The B-2 Spirit, which we designed and built in the 1980s, was revolutionary not only for the shape of the airframe but also the low observable (LO) treatments and coatings that were applied for survivability. These have set the standard for the last three decades.
Our advancements in LO were not without their challenges, however. At the time, the overwhelming focus of the build was the LO design; maintenance consequences of the design had not yet been fully realized. Early stealth aircraft have required extensive resources, including specialized personnel with unique training, and aircraft hangars and other facilities with narrow temperature and humidity requirements for both aircraft maintenance and storage of materials.
Today, with the
B-21 Raider, our team has made maintainability an equally important requirement to stealth performance, and the results have been better than we could have hoped. Through the application of lessons learned on B-2 and other stealth aircraft, and the use of digital engineering techniques, not only do we have a design that has significantly improved over the B-2 from both a survivability and aero-performance perspective, we also now have a coating system that is as revolutionary in its maintainability as the original B-2 systems were in their stealth performance.
Furthermore, we’ve exceeded performance requirements.
Supportability issues that affected the availability and performance of early, stealthy aircraft are being addressed by Northrop Grumman on this new program.
breakingdefense.com
The B-21 is much more advanced than B-2 and the first true 6G and ELO aircraft.