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B-21 Raider flight testing footage released by US Air Force

The US Air Force has released footage of the new B-21 Raider stealth bomber conducting flight testing, which includes ground testing, taxiing, and flying operations in California.

Flight testing is a critical step in the test campaign managed by the Air Force Test Center and 412th Test Wing’s B-21 Combined Test Force (CTF) to provide survivable, long-range, penetrating strike capabilities to deter aggression and strategic attacks against the US, allies, and partners.

The B-21 will be the backbone of the service’s future bomber force, and will possess the range, access and payload to penetrate the most highly-contested threat environments and hold any target around the globe at risk.

US Air Force leaders and industry partners provided updates on B-21 during a panel at the Air and Space Force Association’s Air, Space and Cyber Conference yesterday.

Panellists who provided updates included Gen. Thomas Bussiere, Air Force Global Strike Command commander; Maj. Gen. Jason Armagost, Eighth Air Force and Joint-Global Strike Operations Center commander; William Bailey, Department of the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office director; and Thomas Jones, Northrop Grumman Aeronautics Systems sector president.

Bailey and Jones provided updates about how the B-21 programme is progressing: “We’re really starting to strike up quite a cadence [and] generate two flight test flights in a given week,” Jones said. “When we started this journey, we made a vow that we were going to design this system to be a daily flyer. It’s been a phenomenal year of progress, and we hope to continue that through the next year.”

The panellists also described a significant milestone in which the B-21 completed its static test on the G-1 asset, a ground-based test article used to evaluate the structural integrity of the aircraft. This test was essential to “confirming the structural design of the aircraft is sound and validated confidence in the digital models,” Bailey said. The aircraft is now going through a fatigue testing campaign.

The B-21 programme has a production goal of a minimum of 100 aircraft.