it is the most advanced and most
expensive aircraft in world history
it became a legend before it even rolled
off the production
with its state-of-the-art technology and
shrouded by a mantle of stealth it can
go into harm's way deliver 40,000 pounds
of conventional or nuclear bombs and is
almost undetectable by any radar for
years this awesome deliverer of death
has been shrouded under a cloak of
secrecy it is the b-2 stealth bomber in
the final year of the 20th century the
flying wing had come of age and gone
into battle
but nearly 100 years earlier men had
dreamed that the flying wing was the
future of flight and the future of war
but it wasn't until the early 1930s that
the dream became a reality when two
young brothers Reimer and Volta Horton
first began to design wings for the new
Nazi regime in Germany the Horton
brothers were very interested in highly
efficient gliders and it's it's not such
a great leap of imagination to realize
that the most efficient form for any
flying machine is just a pure wing with
the outbreak of World War two in 1939
the Horton brothers continued the
groundbreaking work under a shroud of
secrecy by 1941 they were exploring the
use of a transport wing to help in the
planned invasion of Britain at the same
time another german alexander lippisch
was working on his own wing design when
in late 1941 his me-163 komet crossed
the 600 mile per hour barrier for the
first time the potential of rocket power
combined with a flying wing design would
change aviation history meanwhile the
Horton brothers had gone down another
path by 1942 they were working on a 61
feet wingspan aircraft called the ho9
it would be powered by the Yonkers
turbojet engine that would be fitted to
the me-262 the curtain number nine was
pinnacle for the brothers development of
the flying wing and the prototype
achieved a speed of something like 500
miles an hour
they had clearly demonstrated that you
could build a vehicle with jet engines
that you could fly it the deed had very
high speed potential and so they had
really validated the concept another of
Rymer hortons designs was the ho2 2/9
built of wood and with the den jhin's
housed in the wings with their exhausts
vented on the top of the wing this
aircraft would have been extremely
difficult to detect also if it could
have flown it would have had a top speed
of 620 miles per hour the fastest
aircraft in world war ii
but while the Germans were developing
their wings a 40 year old American
aircraft designer called Jack Northrop
was quietly working on a flying wing
design of his own Jack had been dreaming
about flying wings since the 1920s and
had long held the belief that the way to
success in wing design was by reducing
the drag created by a tail and fuselage
Northrop's idea was first of all to
minimize the tail in the fields enlarged
and then as a last step to get rid of
the tail altogether so he went through a
whole series of smaller steps in order
to achieve the old wing configuration
in December 1942 his n1m flying wing
took to the air and over the next few
years more and more of his designs were
being refined and tested but by May 1945
the long and bitter struggle to defeat
Nazi Germany was over its industrial and
technological centers lay in ruins along
with its dreams of a flying winger but
Jack Northrop was convinced that where
the Germans had failed his wing would
become the greatest aircraft in the
world all he would need was the raw
power to do it
May 1945 Nazi Germany was smashed into
submission and with it went it's hopes
and dreams of building a flying wing
aircraft
but while post-war America continued to
build conventional aircraft such as the
b-29 one man pursued his vision in 1946
Jack Northrop tested his massive 400
mile per hour xB 35 flying wing powered
by four turboprop engines this aircraft
was seen by some as the bomber of the
future
this was where naw flops vision really
started to take shape because the ex b35
had a wingspan of about 60 meters this
is a big airplane even by today's
standards its problem was that whilst
its top speed was about 400 miles an
hour its speed in long-range cruise was
only 185 miles an hour Northrop led this
challenge when in 1947 he introduced his
new YB 49 powered by 8 Allison jet
engines this 172 feet wingspan goliath
was capable of flying at over 500 miles
per hour at a ceiling of 40,000 feet
Jack Northrop had taken the American
flying wing off the design boards and
into the air
now a preview of the flying wing plans
part of tomorrow Jack northrop's vision
for his flying wing was not just as a
bomber he also saw it as a passenger
aircraft because the wing could carry
far greater loads than conventional
aircraft his airliner will be capable of
carrying 80 passengers with an
observation lounge and an ability to fly
across America in four hours
but the YB 49s days were numbered
although years ahead of its time it was
incredibly difficult to fly and without
computers to help control it the US Air
Force felt that as a bomber it was too
unstable and dangerous
in late 1949 and in an unprecedented
decision the US government ordered that
all Northrop's YB 49s were to be
destroyed the flying wing looked
destined to be confined to just a
footnote in history from the Air Force's
point of view I don't think you could
quibble with the decision they made on
the day given the the vehicles that were
on the table in front of them but the
destruction of the first flying wing
came at a perilous time in history
relationships between East and West were
rapidly deteriorating and the Cold War
was heating up the world was entering a
new era of nuclear power and nuclear
testing
the Soviet Union had built up a huge
arsenal of weapons and the West
responded in a policy that was known as
mad mutually assured destruction the
heavy bomber was seen as the first line
of attack sac Strategic Air Command put
into place a global system called
Operation chrome-dome in which massive
b-52s would constantly patrol the earth
ready at a moment's notice to fly to any
target deep within the Soviet Union and
attack but sac was also alarmed at the
Soviet Union's new improved radar and
Sam's surface-to-air missiles sac was
determined not to let it Jayant b-52
bomber fleet become sitting targets for
the Soviet Union
it became apparent that any bomber
aircraft that had to penetrate Soviet
airspace was going to have to run a
later gauntlet of air defense missiles
that could shoot down aircraft no matter
how high or how low they were flying the
only way to evade Soviet air defense
missiles was to fly so high that you're
never going to hit a target with your
ball what the u.s. needed was an
aircraft that could evade the Soviet
defense system fly to its target deliver
its weapons and bring its crew safely
home all under the cloak of invisibility
but to do this meant a complete rethink
on designing and constructing aircraft
every aircraft has what is called its
radar cross-section when an
electromagnetic radar beam hits an
aircraft it bounces off anything that is
large or pronounced such as engines
straight wings or copies the radar
operator sees all this information
coming back and can determine the size
height and direction of an aircraft this
is known as the aircraft's radar
signature
but if you can deny this information to
the enemy's radar then the plane will
become almost invisible the mantle that
will shroud the aircraft from its
pursuers has a new name stealth during
the mid-1970s the US government put out
a top-secret tender to selected aircraft
manufacturers our objective was to come
up with a feasible design for an
advanced technology bomber capable of
long-range high payload and low
observability by some strange irony the
winner was Northrop's 30 years after
seeing the destruction of their fleet of
YB 49s northrop's were back in the
flying wing business during the early
1980s northrop worked on designs for
their stealthy bomber the entire project
was buried deep within the highly
classified and ultra secret black
program
at the time the u.s. black program was
so secret that even those who knew about
it were forbidden from ever
acknowledging its existence even
Congress was denied the knowledge of
what or where money was being spent the
Soviet Union was carefully examining
things like American technical journals
and the American defense budget so that
they would know what threats they'd have
to deal with in the upcoming years and
in order not to have this very nifty new
bit of stealth technology apparent to
the Soviets just by picking up the
annual published defense budget they had
to make it what's called a black program
with costs rising higher and higher
Northrop and its partners worked against
the clock originally the contract had
been clear in its requirement build a
heavy bomber that could never be seen by
enemy radar the solution like the
aircraft they were developing seemed
impossible what Northrop had to do was
develop a computer system that would
enable the b2 as it came to be called to
stabilize itself using feedback and the
fastest computers they could get so the
stabilization of a b2 flying wing
configuration becomes a software and
computer hardware problem it becomes a
cybernetic problem
by the mid-80s and despite some of the
most stringent checks rumors began to
circulate about what might be going on
behind Jack Northrop's door press
reports artist's impressions magazine
articles began guessing as to what was
happening in Palmdale California on
November the 22nd 1988 the Northrop
corporation staggered the world when it
unveiled its b-2 stealth bomber after
years of working behind a complete
screen of secrecy the team of
visionaries of northrop had rewritten
the rules of aircraft design the
technological array was awesome with
over a hundred and thirty onboard
computers controlling every element of
the aircraft the b2 was lightyears ahead
of anything yet built a variety of
techniques were combined to make this
aircraft almost invisible to radar it's
smooth surface and shape consists of
curves yet they are not consistently
identical
the aircraft appears to continually
change shape from whatever angle it is
viewed thereby confusing the radar and
whatever beams lock onto it are either
reflected into outer space or are
reduced and disappear coated with Ram
radar absorbent materials such as carbon
fiber composites and top-secret
reflective paint further reduces its
detection from the enemy finally its
electronic countermeasures such as
jamming an enemy's radar makes this
aircraft almost undetectable
in fact the b-2s radar cross-section is
1,000 times less than that of the b-52
if you take a really big aircraft but
make it essentially really flat then
when radar looks at it instead of seeing
a big round thing flying towards him it
will it'll just have a sort of pancake
it's like seeing me the edge of a knife
when the b2 made its maiden flight on
July the 17th 1989 it flew every bit as
good as it lived
the b2 has a hundred and seventy-two
foot wingspan is 69 feet long and
seventeen feet high
weighing in at nearly one hundred and
fifty four thousand pounds empty can
three hundred and seventy-five thousand
loaded it is a monster
approximately 80% of its structure is
made of carbon fiber composite lighter
than aluminium stronger than steel it's
for low noise General Electric f11 eight
engines each provide almost 19,000
pounds of thrust
they have special exhaust vents on the
top of the wings which when it's hot
gases are mixed with cooler air make it
almost undetectable to heat-seeking
sounds with a top speed of about 680
miles per hour and a service ceiling of
50,000 feet this massive aircraft can
also fly approximately 6,000 miles
without refueling
no target anywhere in the world is safe
from its weapons and the amount of
weapons it can carry is awesome 40,000
pounds of conventional laser-guided or
nuclear bombs and missiles the airplane
can carry a variety of weapons almost
anything in the Air Force inventory our
primary weapons though are the guided
munitions our bread and butter is the
GPS aided jdam the joint direct attack
munition we can carry that in several
flavors the 2,000 pound is the most
common we do have the 5000 pound
GPS a munition we have a few of those
left and we're getting some more and we
can carry some standoff guided munitions
the joint standoff weapon JCL by the
1990s the top-secret b2 began to enter
service but it would take on a
completely different role in plan as an
answer to Soviet aggression
the Soviet Union finally crumbled in
December 1991 and with the collapse of
the Iron Curtain the new b2 had an
uncertain future
originally a hundred and thirty-two b-2s
were to have been built but Congress
wanted cutbacks and with the b2 costing
almost two billion dollars each
something had to go it was decided that
only 21 B twos would be built the b2 is
designed to penetrate the airspace of
the Soviet Union undetected once the
Soviet Union is no longer there you
don't need a big fleet of bombers
designed to deliver nuclear weapons to a
state the dough doesn't exist anymore as
the b-2s began to come off the
production line with them came a new
breed of aviator based at Whiteman Air
Force Base in Missouri the B two
squadrons became home and schoolhouse
for all crews who would fly the very
latest in bomber technology but the
first hurdle many must cross is the
initial impression of this secret
airfield just the shape of the airframe
the glass cockpit the displays and the
amazing contributions that some very
smart engineers made to make that plane
possible and just looking at it fly was
pretty amazing
you