Boeing Company and Lockheed Martin Corporation, two of the Pentagon’s largest military contractors, announced last week that they are teaming up to develop a new bomber for the Air Force.
The companies are likely to face Northrop Grumman as they compete for the program, which will cost tens of billions of dollars. The fleet of B-2 bombers, the most recent bomber program, cost the Pentagon at least $40 billion.
Hint: Click in map to explore connectionsStory continues below interactive map 
The Air Force’s current bomber inventory includes approximately 94 B-52s, 65 B-1s and 21 B-2 bombers.
Defense Department officials believe that the Air Force needs a new bomber to replace older aircraft as they are retired. Some of the older model B-52s are 50 years old.
“I think we have no alternative but to look at a next generation bomber,” John Young, the top weapons procurement official in the Pentagon, said last October.
Air Force plans call for a new bomber to be funded beginning in 2010 and in service by 2018. But the service faces the possibility that it might have to delay the bomber because of a myriad of other high-priority weapons procurements competing for primacy in Air Force budgets such as a fleet of new aerial tanker aircraft and a fleet of new fighter jets.
Darryl Davis, the president of Boeing’s Advanced Systems unit in St. Louis, said the bomber team will draw on expertise “from across the Boeing Co.”
“We are at the beginning of putting a larger team together,” Davis told reporters Friday. “They are coming from across the Boeing Company, from Puget Sound, from southern California, from St. Louis, some from our folks on the East Coast.”
Boeing and Lockheed Martin have jointly worked on military projects before, most notably on the F-22 Raptor fighter jet, which the Air Force fielded beginning in 2005. Boeing builds the aircraft’s wings and aft fuselage, while Lockheed Martin builds the forward fuselage, the cockpit and the mid fuselage.
In addition to building bombers from earlier eras such as the B-17 and B-29 bombers that saw action during World War II, Boeing has built the Air Force’s current B-52 fleet and is a major system contributor to the B-1 bomber fleet, also still in service.
With its fabled Skunkworks development center at Burbank and Palmdale, Calif., Lockheed Martin has extensive experience building aircraft that push the boundaries of design, such as the U-2 and SR-71 spy planes and the F-117 radar evading bomber.
In a statement released Friday, the two defense contractors said that they “will team to perform studies and system development efforts including collaborative research and development in pursuit of the anticipated U.S. Air Force next-generation bomber program.”
Lockheed Martin, the top Pentagon defense contractor in terms of awarded contracts, is headquartered in Bethesda, Md. Boeing, the No.2 defense contractor, is based in Chicago.
The Air Force has thus far sketched only very broad goals for the new bomber fleet. The service wants the new bomber to be subsonic - not capable of traveling faster than the speed of sound - and capable of traveling roughly 2,500 miles without refueling. The bomb payload would be between 14,000 and 28,000 pounds and the plane would be equipped to carry nuclear weapons.
In comparison, some versions of the B-52 can carry 70,000 pounds of bombs, the B-1 can carry 75,000 pounds of bombs and the B-2 can carry 40,000 pounds.
Air Force officials have not yet said whether the new aircraft should resemble the $2.2 billion per copy B-2 bomber, built by Northrop Grumman, which is specially designed to evade radar, or the B-52, which is at the other end of the technological spectrum and can’t evade radar.
The Air Force is expected to announce its requirements for the new bomber sometime this year.
Contact: eric@muckety.com
Click here to sign up for the Muckety Newsletter
0 Comments
There are no comments yet, be the first by filling in the form below.
Leave a Comment