B-21 Gears up for First Flight with Expectation to Hold Any Target at Risk, Anywhere in the World

Video Above: The Long Range Hypersonic Weapon and Status of United States Hypersonic Weapons

By Kris Osborn – President & Editor-In-Chief, Warrior Maven

The sleek-looking, stealthy new B-21 Raider Air Force bomber is quickly being prepared for its first flight as subsystems components arrive and undergo testing and elements of the aircraft’s flight trajectory, landing gear and mission systems undergo testing.

Expectations for the new bomber are quite high, as the mostly secret program has remained on time, and on-budget for several years now, something which Air Force senior weapons developers explain as the result of deliberate measures to ensure steady requirements and a codified technical baseline.

B-21 Raider

“We have codified the approach that capitalizes on the attributes of the mission systems and kept stable requirements. Owning the technical baseline has helped so we are not stuck in proprietary systems. We have codified the roadmap for requirements and a roadmap for research,” former Commander of Global Strike Command, Gen. Tim Ray, told The Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies last year.

The entire modernization strategy for the Air Force’s B-21 is based upon the use of a common set of technical standards, IP protocols and interfaces to ensure that software upgrades, new weapons systems and other enhancements can be integrated quickly without having to re-architect major parts of the platform.