B2 bomber crew skin#

The Air Force selects B-2 pilots from both fighter and bomber camps. (To protect identities, the 509th Bomb Wing requested that I use only the pilots’ call signs.) Pita had been flying F-16 fighters for seven years at bases in Japan and the United States. That’s the year that then-Major “Pita” joined the ranks. The learning began in early 1999, when the B-2 first went into combat over the former Yugoslavia.

But almost two decades of experience can. “Pilots are one hard limit that upgrades can’t change. Since 1993, new precision-guided weapons have been added to the quiver, and more are on the way, including a nuclear-tipped cruise missile. Its radar and communications have been improved.

B2 bomber crew skin#

Its stealthy skin is now easier to maintain, and the time spent on maintenance per flight hour has been cut in half. From some angles, the bomber looks as compact as a business jet and without nearly enough interior space to carry 30 tons of bombs, but the maintainers who met me there on a Friday afternoon last May assure me it has the wingspan of a B-52, though the fuselage is only as long as an F-15 fighter’s. The B-2 still appears to be a shape-shifter, an optical illusion. “Standing in Dock 12 alongside the Spirit of South Carolina-each bomber is commissioned with a state’s name-I don’t notice any change. It doesn’t have the weaknesses it had before.” Now the crew chief walks them out and we do six to seven flights a day. And before every flight, the commander personally briefed the wing commander. “Early in the aircraft’s history, a pilot (who asked for anonymity) told me: “When I first came in 1995, the wing commander walked them out of the dock and there was a fire truck ready. After 20 years of service-the Air Force is planning a celebration at Whiteman in late September-the B-2 is a different bomber than the ones pilots flew on their first training missions. Today, the fleet has served in four wars: Kosovo (1999), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), and Libya (2011). Two decades later, the B-2 Spirit of Missouri touched down at Whiteman, the first stealth bomber of 22 to be delivered. Even so, over the 11-day operation, waves of Soviet-built missiles shot down 27 aircraft. Daily attacks to protect a 70-mile-long column of B-52s required up to four dozen support aircraft at a time to jam, blind, and destroy surface-to-air-directing radars. America’s last big air action without stealth was Linebacker II, late in the Vietnam War, which sought to bomb the North Vietnamese back to the peace table. “Unless a nation has the technological prowess and the wealth to build stealth aircraft, hitting targets in well-defended lands takes a lot of air power. Twenty years after the first mysterious bomber arrived at Whiteman, the B-2 still stands ready to deter bad behavior, hearten allies, and destroy targets “anytime, anywhere,” as Whiteman’s 509th Bomb Wing puts it. His words capture the reasons the Air Force built such an expensive bomber to launch global-strike missions, which B-2 pilots fly from Whiteman Air Force Base in central Missouri. “Undetected inbound, unscathed outbound.” That’s how one pilot summarized his mission to bomb targets in Baghdad with the $2.2 billion Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit on the first night of Operation Iraqi Freedom in March 2003.