(Luft) Northrop-Grumman B-21 Raider (Long Range Strike Bomber)

[Schneemann]

New B-21 Raider Being Accelerated With Overlapping Development and Production

The Air Force is accelerating the B-21 program, Northrop Grumman President and Chief Executive Officer Kathy Warden told reporters on a quarterly earnings call. The Air Force apparently permitted Northrop to discuss more of the highly classified program’s progress than in recent years.

Warden, talking with financial reporters April 28, said “the government is looking at layering” production of the Raider “on top of” its development phase. [...] Moreover, costs for full-rate production aircraft “have yet to be negotiated,” said David Keffer, Northop Grumman’s executive vice president and chief financial officer.

As for the production phase, “you can think of that as notionally around the ’25-’26 timeframe—he middle part of the decade,” Warden said. Air Force budget documents released earlier in April show the Air Force will spend $20 billion to build B-21s over the five-year future years defense plan. [...] Under the initial 2015 contract, LRIP will include 21 aircraft in five lots. Warden confirmed that the B-21’s cost will come in under the Air Force’s initial ceiling production unit cost of $550 million in 2010 dollars. The last time the Air Force officially re-set the figure was in 2019, she said, when it was “a little over $600 million” average procurement unit cost. Using the CPI escalation method from 2010, it would be $741.69 million today.

https://www.airforcemag.com/new-b-21-rai...roduction/

Schneemann