AURORA, Colo.—The first B-21 bomber is making good progress through its flight testing campaign and has required minimal software tweaks, building on extensive shakeouts of its systems carried out on a flying test bed, the president of Northrop Grumman’s aeronautics division said at the AFA Warfare Symposium on March 5.
Tom Jones, speaking on a panel about next-generation aircraft, said he is “very pleased” with both the test results and the cadence of B-21 testing, saying the new bomber flies sorties at least twice a week at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif.
The B-21 has been in testing for a little more than a year now, but the program is largely classified, and Jones’ remarks are the first update on the aircraft’s performance in months.
Given that it has been the first year of testing an aircraft with so many new technologies, Jones said, the B-21’s progress has been ahead of expectations and “we’re seeing a good margin” on performance. He also said there has only been one software change for the B-21 in its first year.
Jones chalked up those successes in large part to extensive ground testing and more than 1,000 flight hours on a flying test bed that evaluates the B-21’s internal systems like “hardware, software, navigation, communication suites.”
Combined, ground and flying test bed activities have helped account for “about a 50 percent reduction in the period of time it takes to certify software builds, which is pretty phenomenal,” he said. That achievement also stems from having a “commercially inspired software factory” for the B-21, he said. “Having a software development factory that captures that entire process and speeds up” the writing of code is paying dividends, Jones said.
The air and ground testbeds operate out of Northrop’s Melbourne, Fla., facilities, while the B-21 is assembled in Palmdale, Calif.
Jones also noted that the B-21 is being maintained by a combination of contractor and Air Force personnel and is confident Northrop will make good on its pledge to make the bomber a “daily flyer.”
The first B-21 test aircraft is heavily instrumented to capture test data, so engineers are getting “real time feedback” from each test, and the analysis of what was learned on each flight begins “while the aircraft is still in the air,” he said.
Jones demurred on a question of whether Northrop could speed up production of the B-21 or build more than planned. The program was structured to be a low-rate effort yielding only a handful of aircraft per year.
“Ultimately, it is up to the administration … to determine what the right number of bombers are,” he said. As the contractor, he said, “my responsibility to make sure that the Air Force has an option to help you make that decision.”
Providing those options means “we need to be performing on schedule. Check,” he said. Second, “we need to be performing on budget as well, and we need to be performing … in terms of our test program.” He said the B-21 is shaping up to be “most lethal weapon system in the world.”
Jones also said he believes the defense industrial base writ large is capable of scaling up production to the levels senior Air Force leaders have said are needed to credibly deter or fight a major war with a peer adversary. Northrop is recruiting from secondary schools and primary schools, to maintain its workforce and is having success, he said, turning people “with no skills” into valuable technicians in a few years.