A second prototype of the B-21 Raider subsequent technology stealth bomber will likely be used to check weapons and mission techniques for this system, as confirmed by the plane’s major developer Northrop Grumman. The plane made its first flight on September 11 on the agency’s Plant 42 facility in Palmdale, California, after the primary prototype first flew on November 10, 2023. A spokesman from the agency acknowledged that whereas the primary prototype was constructed primarily to “validate flight sciences, dealing with qualities and envelope growth,” the event of the second prototype allowed this system to “transfer right into a extra superior stage of testing: the weapons and mission techniques that make the B-21 Raider a stealth bomber.” The plane is predicted to hold a variety of weaponry together with as much as twelve B61-12 and better yield B61-13 nuclear bombers, AGM-181 nuclear cruise missiles, and a successor to the GBU-57 Huge Ordnance Penetrator.
The U.S. Air Power’s bomber fleet is significantly older than these of each China and Russia, because the service has not made massive scale procurements of any bomber class because the Nineteen Eighties. The one procurements made because the finish of the Chilly Struggle have been 20 serial manufacturing B-2 bombers that entered service from 1997, with main overruns within the plane’s sustainment prices stopping the Air Power from affording the beforehand deliberate fleet of 132 plane. The likelihood has been raised that the B-21 could possibly be procured on a scale unprecedented because the Vietnam Struggle period, with widespread calls made to supply over 200 of the plane. As a a lot smaller plane than the B-2 with a shorter vary and decrease weapons payload, the B-21 was designed to have a lot decrease operational prices which makes the fielding of a a lot bigger fleet extra viable. Main price overruns with and delays to deliberate modernisation of the B-52 bomber fleet, which was anticipated to stay operational alongside the B-21, has raised the probably that early retirement of the older bomber class may lead to an extra enhance in demand for the newer stealth bomber.
