The highly classified B-21 Raider took its first flight on Friday and there was nothing secretive about it. The aircraft took off from Palmdale Airport in California on a bluebird day with hundreds of people watching from the roads ringing the airport. The stealth bomber that will eventually replace the B-2 Spirit is optionally piloted and employs numerous system and cloaking technologies designed to overcome the advances in detection technology that have eroded the B-2’s strategic advantage over its 20 years of service. The Air Force is planning to buy 100 B-21s, which are estimated to cost $700 million each. The overall program cost will be about $200 billion.

Russ Niles
Russ Niles
http://www.avweb.com
Russ Niles is Editor-in-Chief of AVweb. He has been a pilot for 30 years and joined AVweb 22 years ago. He and his wife Marni live in southern British Columbia where they also operate a small winery.

8 COMMENTS

  1. ‘The Air Force is planning to buy 100 B-21s…’
    So, between 10 and 50 will actuality be delivered? Seems rare to get anywhere near planned acquisition numbers in recent decades, especially of the pricey high-end stuff like B-2s and F-22s.

  3. @bobscrew – It could also be test instrumentation for measuring static source, ambient air pressure for altitude. You can also see a red boom on the front, for measuring pitot pressure, to calculate airspeed. At Gulfstream we use those on test planes for that purpose, to calculate static source error corrections charts.

  4. If it’s so “highly classified”, why are there photos of it for all the world to see? China would never announce such a thing let alone photograph it.

    • It looks just like a B-2 from the outside…big deal. If you want to know what “highly classified” means, try to take a peek on the inside.

    • It’s plausible that the B-21 is cover for a more-highly classified “dark” program, maybe even a variant of the B-21 itself. It wouldn’t be the first time something like that was done (like how some people are still conviced that the F-117 was capable of dogfighting because it had an F- prefix).

    • Because deterrence requires advertising your capabilities (and leaving for the imagination that they’re much greater than you said). “I have a big plane that I can’t tell you about” is much less effective than, “This amazing plane you can see with your own eyes can do at least 100 knots and drop a bomb or two”.

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