Northrop Grumman continues to deliver strong performance across test and production on the B-21 Raider, with an LRIP Lot 2 award late last year signaling further confidence in the program’s technical performance and progress.
Follow Aeronews on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok and Bluesky
In partnership with the U.S. Air Force, Northrop Grumman prioritized adaptability, affordability and producibility from program inception, with a focus on long-term successful outcomes and delivering the U.S. Air Force a strategic deterrent to project peace through strength.
Early in the design phase, the B-21 digital ecosystem enabled engineers to conduct agile testing on production hardware and software, first in integration labs and later in a flying test bed. Before the B-21 ever took to the sky, the flying test bed completed more than 200 test sorties totaling more than 1,000 flight hours, testing production hardware, software and sensors in a dynamic environment and enabling teams to tackle discovery well in advance.
Through the digital ecosystem, the Northrop Grumman team has realized a 50% reduction in time to certify software in the lab. Similarly, flight test teams are validating aircraft performance in real time as opposed to days of post-mission processing and analysis. This speed and efficiency powers a robust flight test cadence.
Northrop Grumman’s investment – upward of $2 billion in infrastructure and development effort – in its digital ecosystem provides the entire B-21 team enterprise-wide access and integration to a single source of truth in the design and build processes. Where the digital environment meets the production floor, this digital technology expedites configuration management, facilitating communication between technicians and engineers during the build, in some areas already reducing manufacturing hours by roughly a third.
In addition to the benefits of the digital ecosystem in manufacturing, Northrop Grumman’s expanded implementation of augmented reality, advanced robotics and artificial intelligence technologies are further enabling technicians planeside to drive efficiency and quality throughout the build. Northrop Grumman has leveraged commercially available technologies within a secure environment to form the highly sophisticated manufacturing facilities that are scaling into production on B-21.
The tools deployed in B-21 manufacturing today are paving the way for operational sustainment. The B-21 was designed from inception to be a daily flyer, with minimal maintenance required between missions. Decades of experience operating stealth aircraft systems, combined with the Highly Immersive Virtual Environment – or HIVE, that enables engineers to visualize how sustainment tasks will be performed by future maintainers – all informed the B-21’s design to drive affordability and support operational needs. Already, the Combined Test Force (CTF) has demonstrated ability to conduct multiple test flights in a week, a positive early indicator for B-21 as a daily flyer.