From Aviation Week

 

Northrop Apparently Lands NGB Prototype

May 28, 2008

Bill Sweetman/Aerospace Daily & Defense Report

 

Northrop Grumman received contracts totaling more than $2.5 billion for secret aircraft programs in the first quarter of 2008, strongly supporting reports and indications that the company has won a U.S. Air Force contract to build a prototype for the Next Generation Bomber (NGB) program.

 

First-quarter results issued April 26 state that Northrop Grumman “was awarded approximately $2.6 billion for restricted programs during this period.” The results showed a comparable increase in backlog for the company’s aircraft business, the Integrated Systems sector.

 

The existence of a “black” demonstration program explains a number of anomalies in the Air Force’s planning for NGB. The unclassified budget shows no funding for the new bomber in 2008-2010, despite the fact that the service is planning initial operating capability (IOC) in 2018.

 

Rivals Boeing and Lockheed Martin announced in late January that they were teaming on NGB, and Lockheed Martin Skunk Works leader Frank Cappuccio said at the time that Lockheed Martin had decided not to team with Northrop Grumman because of “openness issues.” Boeing and Lockheed Martin stated that they did not have any government funding.

 

Northrop Grumman proposed building a bomber-sized demonstrator for the Air Force in 2005 as part of the Joint Unmanned Combat Air System (J-UCAS) program. Shortly afterward, the Pentagon decided to terminate J-UCAS and divide its funding between a Navy program – which Northrop Grumman won last year – and a classified Air Force project.

 

Scaled Composites, acquired by Northrop Grumman last August, is likely to play a major role in the program. Northrop Grumman CEO Ron Sugar described the acquisition as “very important and very strategic to us, with respect to advanced aircraft programs we’ll be competing for in the near future.”

 

The Air Force and other sources have indicated that a full-scale competition for NGB will start around 2010, suggesting that the demonstrator should be flying by then and validating the basic concepts behind the design, probably including a high level of stealth combined with advanced aerodynamics. The operational aircraft may be produced in unmanned and manned variants, and may take on a penetrating reconnaissance mission in addition to its bomber role.

 

For more on this story, see Defense Technology International's feature this month, Ultra Stealth

From Aviation Week's ARES Blog

 

NGB Questions

Posted by Bill Sweetman at 5/29/2008 10:38 AM CDT

 

The $2.6 billion in black project money that fell into Northrop Grumman's lap in the first quarter of 2008 is almost certainly for the USAF's new bomber, for two reasons. First. the other two suspects, Lockheed Martin and Boeing, have stated flat-out that they didn't get any bomber money. Second, there is no way that a 2018 bomber is going to happen without some major investment between now and FY2011.

 

A Northrop Grumman demo program, however, jump-starts NGB in two ways. Not only will it "de-risk" stealth and aerodynamic technology before 2011, but because it is probably related to the Navy's X-47B UCAS-D, it draws directly on work that's been under way since J-UCAS started in the early 2000s.

 

But the USAF still has some important decisions to take and some problems to solve.

 

One decision that's probably already been made is when the program will be taken out of the black. Doing that in advance of first flight would save money, because secure flight testing at Groom Lake incurs all sorts of restrictions and costs. That would mean that the big new hangar at Groom Lake is for something else, though. Also, the earlier the project is declassified, the less likely it is that Boeing and Lockheed Martin will see the contest as unbalanced, and either protest any decision or lobby against the entire program.

 

Manned or unmanned? An unmanned bomber would cost less and have greater endurance. Some USAF people are nervous about a nuclear-capable unmanned bomber (but then, there's no pilot in a cruise missile) and are concerned that allies will not let a UAV carrying tons of bombs fly in their airspace.

 

One compromise: the first aircraft are manned, and some subsequent blocks, including a reconnaissance version, are either unmanned or optionally piloted. An incidental benefit would be to forestall covert opposition from the pilot Maf... I mean community.

 

How long will stealth assure survival? The new bomber will be ultra-stealthy, but it has to be designed to be survivable against the worst threats envisioned until 2050 and beyond. One possible answer: the design provides for new stealth technologies, or even is an early platform for a defensive directed-energy weapon to take out "leaker" threats. In case you didn't notice, Air Combat Command had put the J-UCAS in the same office as its DE weapons.

 

The overarching challenge is risk and money. If JSF hits its IOC date of 2013 (which it may not) it will have taken 17 years from the point where NGB is now - a contract for a demonstrator - to the flightline. The bomber's trying to do it in ten years. And, absent a dramatic increase in the share of gross domestic product going to defense, or an increase in the USAF's share of the defense pie, how is the bomber going to be afforded when the USAF can't

 

One answer to many of these questions is an ironclad commitment to spiral development, backed by a solid plan and resources, combined with a focus on efficient low-rate production (did someone mention Scaled Composites?). The result would be a manned 2018 "Block 10" with derivative engines and a lot of JSF avionics, but with a design that offers space for a DE weapon and has potential to exploit new engine technologies.

From Defense Aerospace

 

Research Study: Technology Readiness For a New Long Range Bomber

(Source: The Lexington Institute; issued September 15, 2008)

 

Executive Summary

 

America has counted on bombers for tough missions for decades, but the bomber fleet will struggle to do its job as a capability void opens after 2015.

 

Talk of a new bomber has come in fits and starts since the Pentagon reached the decision to curtail the B-2 program over fifteen years ago. However, new threat assessments and the relative decline of older systems have made a new program urgent. According to General John D. W. Corley, Commander, Air Combat Command, direct attack of mobile or moving targets will grow difficult after 2015 and the new threat environment will be at full flush by 2020. The fleet of 20 B-2 bombers is just too small for persistent attacks in heavily defended airspace, and the B-1s and B-52s are not survivable there.

 

In February 2006, the Department of Defense called for a new long-range bomber to be fielded by 2018. Since then, there have been signs of activity, but questions linger. Is the Air Force ready to settle on requirements for a new bomber? Can industry partners really produce a bomber that fast?

 

The Air Force has set clear top-level criteria for the new bomber. It will have a combat radius of between 2000 and 3000 miles, high subsonic speed, improved survivability, and a whole new approach to the battlespace information architecture.

 

Despite the dark threat forecast, there is a silver lining in the form of increased technology maturity which has grown out of the stealth fighter and unmanned vehicle programs. As the paper discusses, early stealth programs like the F-117 and B-2 assumed considerable risk to pioneer new technologies. The B-2 was an example of a major weapons program explicitly designed to mature critical technologies. The F-22 closed many gaps, but still took on the challenges of supercruise, better maintainability and more integrated avionics. By the time of the Joint Strike Fighter down-select in 2001, the art of stealth had matured to the point where customers deliberately set requirements so as to control risk and cost.

 

Most technologies for the 2018 bomber are already closer to the Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 7 than for any previous stealth aircraft program. Old obstacles such as the integration of antennae, improved maintenance, and the best in lean manufacturing have largely been mastered. Focused program management in government and industry can drive forward technology maturation in critical areas. Four decades of investment in research and development of stealth combat aircraft since the1970s are about to pay off in rapid fielding of a vital new system.

 

Click here for the full report (28 pages in PDF format) on the Lexington Institute website.