✅ Almost invisible to radar ✅ Can refuel in mid-air ✅ Never been lost in combat ✅ Only a few hundred pilots ✅ $2 billion each Everything you ever wanted to know about the stealth B-2 Spirit bomber:
The Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit first flew in 1989 and 21 B-2s are still in service with the US Air Force. It is designed to be completely invisible to radar.Concordski: What ever happened to Soviets' spectacular rival to Concorde?
The B-52 first introduced the idea of flying a bomber at very high altitudes, to make it harder for anti-aircraft missiles to reach it, while the B-1 tried the opposite: flying so low and fast that radar would have trouble picking it up. Neither strategy was perfect nor immune to enemy fire, and Cold War tensions were calling for the ultimate nuclear deterrent: a bomber capable of carrying atomic weapons while being virtually undetectable by enemy air defenses.
Radar -- an acronym for"radio detection and ranging" -- was invented during World War II and works by sending an energy pulse through the air and waiting for it to bounce off objects such as airplanes, and then come back. The intensity and angle of this reflection gives the size and location of the target.
An on-board system alerts the crew if the plane is creating contrails -- the vapor trails that form when ice crystals coalesce around aircraft exhaust gases -- allowing them to change altitude. Finally, the B-2 is very quiet, and can only be heard once it's passed overhead.These features, known collectively as low observable technology, are not always in operation, but are activated when the plane needs to become invisible.
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