Eight Things You Wish You Didn't Know About The B-2 Bomber

They're practically iconic now - black, triangular objects, gliding silently overhead at massive heights. Since 1989, the US military has been flying its flagship aircraft, the B-2 bomber. You'll certainly have seen pictures of it before, and you might even have seen one in the sky. But how much do you know about them? Here's 8 things I didn't know about the B2 until I started researching tonight. And I wish I still didn't know.

1. The aircraft's full name is the Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit. Northrop Grumman is one of the world's largest arms companies. Their projects range from the very small (like electronic gyroscopes) all the way up to the very, very big (the Nimitz class aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush). And, like most major arms companies, they've been involved in a scandal or two. As for calling your enormous flying machine of death something as ethereal as "Spirit"...
   
2. The US Congress had no idea what it was paying for when it funded the B-2's construction. The B-2 began its life as a "black project", a secret military program that no-one ever officially acknowledged existed. The US military carves off a piece of its (gigantic) budget every year so that the public can see how much money is being spent on these secret projects; however, that's not really much help when what is being produced could be literally anything. Having no kind of legal or judicial oversight on such projects doesn't sound like the best idea in the world.
   
3. The total cost of the B-2 project is somewhere in the region of $2.1 billion per aircraft. The exact cost is known by no-one except the military, but that's probably not a bad estimate. To put that in perspective, if you laid out 2.1 billion one-dollar bills in a line, that line would reach over a third of the way to the Moon.
   
4. Only 20 B-2s are active anywhere in the world. That used to be 21, until one of them crashed in February of this year. Originally, though, there were supposed to be 132, with this number only dropping when the Soviet Union collapsed. Had the whole order been completed, the average cost per aircraft would have been somewhere around $550 million, putting the hypothetical total project cost nearer $73 billion. Our line of one-dollar bills is now roughly as long as the entire road network of the European Union.
   
5. The B-2 can refuel in flight, giving it a theoretically unlimited range. That's not quite true, actually — planes can only fly for a given amount of time before they really need going over with a team of mechanics. More to the point, there's no way of changing the crew in flight, so the flight range is also limited by the capacity of that crew not to drop dead from exhaustion. The crews have come up with creative ways of getting round this problem, for example by installing a toilet and the means to make a hot meal. And a lawn recliner, according to some reports, so they can take turns sleeping. That's meant that B-2s have flown missions from the US to Afghanistan and back again entirely non-stop.
   
6. A maximum of 16 large bombs or 80 smaller ones can be carried on each run. And no, there's no way of restocking the bombs in flight. That means that for the mission to Afghanistan, there was a total flight distance of somewhere around 14,000 miles, or 875 miles per thousand-pound bomb. Flying the equivalent of Land's End to John O'Groats to drop a single bomb sounds a little odd.
   
7. The B-2 has seen service in a grand total of three campaigns. These were Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq (the second time around). Although these are undoubtedly the three largest campaigns that the US has fought since 1989, they're by no means the only ones; it's strange that no B-2s were involved in the Gulf War, in Panama, in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in Iraq pre-2003, or indeed anywhere else. That may be because they weren't declared fully operationally capable until 2003, meaning that non-officially-capable (but very, very expensive) aircraft were sent into combat twice.
   
8. Conventional munitions aren't the only thing a B-2 can carry. Somewhat unsurprisingly given its Cold War heritage, the B-2 was designed to carry nuclear weapons as well as conventional bombs. Despite no-one being all that likely to point nuclear bombs at the US (although the US and Russian governments sometimes seem to be trying their very hardest to restart the Cold War), B-2s are still officially capable of using nuclear bombs. The same kind of aircraft that is designed to infiltrate enemy airspace without ever being detected is also designed to drop the most destructive weapon ever created by man.
   

Are you feeling safe and secure?