B-2 builders: Prototype not needed
The Philadelphia Inquirer, April 24, 1989.
By Mark Thompson, Inquirer Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON - The builders of the Pentagon's B-2 Stealth bomber are boasting
that their computer-aided design for the revolutionary boomerang-shaped
aircraft is so good that the $500 million plane will leap from the computer
screen into the air by July without benefit of a prototype model to test the
blueprints.
"The first B-2 is a production aircraft," the Northrop Corp. said
in its just-released annual report. "There are none of the prototypes
that have been required in previous generations of aircraft."
But critics warn that the Air Force decision to begin building the
$68 billion fleet of 132 sinister-looking planes before flight
testing has even started could prove disastrous.
"I think the B-2 will crash the first time it flies," said Kosta
Tsipis, director of the Program in Science and Technology for
International Security at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"I wouldn't be a passenger aboard it for anything in the world."
The lack of a prototype will make the planes' first flight "pretty
exciting," agreed John Pike, associate director of the Federation
of American Scientists in Washington.
"I'm perfectly prepared to see the airplane fly more or less as
advertised," he said. "At the same time, I'm equally prepared to see
the airplane crash more or less immediately."
But Capt. Jay DeFrank, an Air Force spokesman, said, "We're confident
that it will make a successful first flight." The plane's two seats
will be occupied by pilots from Northrop and the Air Force for the
inaugural flight, which may occur secretly, he said.
The top-secret B-2, successor to the troubled B-1B, has been designed to
fly into the Soviet Union undetected by radar. The not-ready-to-fly
B-2, unveiled in November, is scheduled to be operational within the
next several years, but Defense Secretary Dick Cheney said yesterday
on NBC-TV's _Meet the Press_ that full production would not start in
the 1990 fiscal year as planned.
Asked whether he would consider killing the program, Cheney replied,
"We're going to postpone actually going into full procurement because
I'm not comfortable with the program yet, there are a lot of technical
problems with it, and it is extremely expensive. And until I have time to
review it, which I've not yet had, I'm not prepared to make that
judgement."
The B-2's flying-wing design is an updating of Northrop's YB-49 aircraft,
a 1940s-era prototype bomber that the Air Force killed before production
began. The B-2's shape is naturally unstable, and the lack of a tail
means it will be much harder to control than a conventional airplane.
"It is essentially a boomerang," said James W. Kelley, a former Northrop
aerodynamicist. "Once it goes into a spin, it cannot recover."
B-2 skeptics question both the plane's radical flying-wing design, first
revealed a year ago, and the Air force's decision to save money by
going straight from the drawing board to the production aircraft.
Historically, new aircraft designs are tested with a series of
custom-built planes, each flown and modified until all major problems
have been eliminated. Only then does production begin.
But in the case of the B-2, about a dozen planes are under construction,
although not a single one has flown, several sources said.
In recent years, experts have urged the military to build prototypes
to let them "fly-before-buy," confirming the designs before committing
billions of dollars to production. Prototyping should be done "to uncover
operational as well as technical deficiencies before a decision is made
to proceed with full-scale development," the presidentially appointed
Packard commission said in its 1986 study critical of Pentagon purchasing.
But while the Air Force is requiring prototypes for its fledgling and
highly secret Advanced Tactical Fighter, it does not believe the B-2
needs them.
"It was determined because of its revolutionary technology and the
highly sensitive nature of the program that prototyping was not the best
way to go," DeFrank said. The secret nature of the program prevented
further elaboration, he said.
Others contend the plane's radical flying-wing design and high price
tag demand prototyping.
"A $70 billion program with no prototypes?" asked an incredulous Thomas
S. Amlie, an Air Force engineer at the Pentagon, who said computers
and models could not replicate the rigors of flight. "Of course we
should prototype. We ought to fly one, and wring the hell out of it,
with zero-zero ejection seats so the pilots can eject at zero
altitude and zero air speed and live through it."
Amlie dismissed Air Force arguments that there were classified reasons
why prototyping the B-2 makes no sense.
"They always say there are classified things that we can't know about
because we don't have the clearance," Amlie said. "Well, I've been in
the business for 37 years, and every time someone has told me that it
turns out they were lying."
But Northrop says its battery of high-powered computers, whose data base
contains drawings of all of the B-2's parts down to the smalles rivet,
has "systematically eliminated" most of the risk inherent in a new
aircraft design.
With the computers, design changes can be made before production begins.
Such changes are particularly painstaking aboard the B-2, where the
plane's radar-evading design requires a frozen exterior shape into which
all of the plane's systems and weapons must be crammed.
"Given all the aerodynamic and performance compromises they've had to
make to reduce the radar cross-section of the B-2, you're just
flying much closer to the margin," said Pike of the Federation of American
Scientists. "That's precisely why you need to do prototyping."
"It's very strange that they're not being required to prototype," added
Joseph V. Foa, an aeronautical engineer at George Washington University
who first studied flying wings 40 years ago. "When you have an aircraft
that's going to cost a half-billion dollars apiece, it's a good idea
to prototype.
Pike said recurring delays — the plane's first flight originally was set
for 1987 — showed that Northrop's computers had not eliminated the B-2's
problems. "That tells me this thing is no different from anything else,"
he said. "Just because it looks right on the computer screen doesn't
mean that it's going to work in the real world."
Without prototyping, the Air Force — if it discovers problems — will
argue that the $20 billion investment it already has made in the
program requires repairs instead of cancellation, Pike said.
"They're basically front-loading the program so that regardless of what
the test results are, they'll already have spent so much money on it
that it will be difficult to cancel," Pike said. "You're paying to have
the work done twice — first time to do it wrong, and then the second
time to do it right."
