The Plane That Cost $2 Billion Each- The Insane Technology of the B-2 Stealth Bomber

Video from the channel Fact Quickie about Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 54:40. Language: English. Video type: Documentary.

An explainer documentary on the Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit that devotes much of its runtime to the history of the flying wing. It covers John W. Dunne's tailless stable aircraft from the early 20th century, Geoffrey Hill's Pterodactyls with Westland, the gliders and the Go 229 built by the Horten brothers in Germany, and Jack Northrop's projects, from the N1M and N9M demonstrators to the XB-35 bomber and its jet-powered version, the YB-49. Only in its final third does it reach the B-2 itself.

The video links the B-2 to a persistent strategic problem: how to deliver a nuclear weapon into the interior of the Soviet Union. After the B-36, the B-52, the B-58, the XB-70 and the B-1, Viktor Belenko's 1976 defection revealed that new Soviet fighters could detect aircraft flying at low altitude. The answer was stealth. Northrop's Tacit Blue program, fly-by-wire controls and the supercritical airfoil finally made the flying wing viable. Northrop's proposal was chosen in October 1981. The first aircraft was unveiled on November 22, 1988, at Plant 42 in Palmdale, made its first public flight on July 17, 1989, and the type entered service in January 1997.

With a 52 m wingspan and just two crew members, the B-2 carries four F118 engines buried in the wing, S-shaped air intakes and a composite-material structure that absorbs radar. It can carry 18,000 kg of conventional or nuclear ordnance. Including development, its cost is put at around 2.3 billion dollars per aircraft, and each flight hour requires 119 hours of maintenance. The order was cut back, leaving the fleet at 21 aircraft, assigned to the 509th Bomb Wing at Whiteman (Missouri). It debuted in combat in Kosovo in 1999 and later operated in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. Its only loss was the Spirit of Kansas at Guam, on February 23, 2008, due to moisture in the pressure sensors. Its planned successor is the B-21 Raider.