First B2 Stealth Bomber Crashes, $1.2 BILLION dollars lost!

[TruckDriver]

No injuries. I knew they cost a lot, but not that much. It's a good thing our government makes its own counterfit money to build them

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080223/ts_nm/usa_bomber_crash_dc_4

[Brock Samson]

here's a working link..
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/02/22/national/a195605S51.DTL

[TruckDriver]

Thanks Dave. I don't know what happened there. The link worked when I posted it I put a new one up to.

[Brock Samson]

   here's an interesting article on Bird Strikes...

"bird-strikes are a well known and much researched hazard of aviation; they actually account for the single greatest cause of accidents sustained by military aircraft" (.)

http://scienceblogs.com/tetrapodzoology/2008/01/birds_vs_planes.php#more

another link on bird strikes and how raptors are used at air fields to reduce them..


http://www.mod.uk/DefenceInternet/DefenceNews/EstateAndEnvironment/BirdsOfPreyKeepBirdstrikesAtBay.htm

[John_Kunkel]

Just think, the financial loss of that one B-2 is less than the accrued national debt for one day!!!

[Mike DC]

Yeah, the price of those planes is staggering. 

An entire Nimitz-class aircraft carrier was only costing about $4-5 billion to construct.



The plane's price numbers must be drastically inflated by the R&D.  I can't imagine any object only a few dozen feet long that could cost that much just for the tangible materials & assembly. 

 

[Chad L. Magee]

Yeah, the price of those planes is staggering. 

An entire Nimitz-class aircraft carrier was only costing about $4-5 billion to construct.



The plane's price numbers must be drastically inflated by the R&D.  I can't imagine any object only a few dozen feet long that could cost that much just for the tangible materials & assembly. 

 

Being an inorganic chemist, I can understand how one plane can cost that much initally.  They have advanced technology and material development built into each part and you have to pay for that if you want it done right (ie USA manifactured) on the critical componets.  Sure, we could build them for a quarter of that but then we would be having to trust other countries for vital parts being produced for us (which I bet in some cases, we do but it is not reported that way).  Yes, there is a bit (ok, a lot) of profiet taking on the contract side of building these, but that is the price you pay to have them.  It is not like an adverage joe can construct one in their shop (which is a good thing, or other countries would be using them against us).  Don't get me wrong, I am not complaning as I may someday be working for such a government contract company doing R&D on such projects.  The absorbant coatings on the skin of B2s cost alot of money and time to develop/perfect.  The price comparison with the older aircraft carriers is a different game since most of them did not use classified materials to make the entire ship, just certain parts on the inside.  If you think of it, the hull is good old steel like most other ships, while the B2s are definately not like other planes......

[daytonalo]

as mentioned about Counterfeit , the Money is not worth the paper it is printed on !!! Both parties are controlled by special interest and lobbyist , and Lookheed and Northrop are no different .

Larry

[Troy]

as mentioned about Counterfeit , the Money is not worth the paper it is printed on !!! Both parties are controlled by special interest and lobbyist , and Lookheed and Northrop are no different .

Larry

No, Lockheed and Northrop are controlled by businessmen...

Troy

[John_Kunkel]

Lockheed and Northrop are controlled by businessmen...

So is the U.S. but most citizens are in denial.

[dukeboy_318]

i bet it was a computer system failure.  having seen one in person and knowing about them, much of them is classified however, it has two pilots to help it take off and land because if its shape, it also uses a computer to make thousands of small movements every second in the control systems to help maintain control of the aircraft.  It is said that if the computer fails in flight and misses the right control and the right time, that the aircraft could spin wildly out of control and crash.  But since this is the first, itll be curious to find out what happened.  At least the crew is safe, the plane costs a lot, but it can be replaced, the lives of the pilots cant. 

[Mike DC]

 
My last comment about the "drastically inflated price" wasn't meant to be a complaint that the price is a scam or anything.  I probably should have used the term "increased" rather than "inflated." 

I just meant to say that the huge cost must be mostly a product of the R&D costs incurred to design the plane, rather than the materials & assembly costing that much each time another one is buillt. 

[TUFCAT]

I wonder if it will be parted out after the insurance company totals it? 

[Mike DC]

 
If the money actually is mainly R&D costs, then it wouldn't cost the full total to replace a downed plane.

----------------------------------------------------------


Suppose the manufacturer gets contracted to design & produce 10 planes.  Each plane only costs $100 million in direct materials & construction costs.  But they spent an additional $9 billion on R&D for the project, so the total bill is $10 billion. 

Now each plane gets called a "$1 billion dollar plane." ($10 billion for the project, divided by 10 planes produced, = $1 billion each plane)

But that doesn't mean the 11th plane they produce will really cost another $1 billion dollars.  The 11th plane will only take the same $100 million dollars that each of the previous 10 planes needed for the actual materials & assembly. 

 
 

[twenty mike mike]

 
If the money actually is mainly R&D costs, then it wouldn't cost the full total to replace a downed plane.

----------------------------------------------------------

Suppose the manufacturer gets contracted to design & produce 10 planes.  Each plane only costs $100 million in direct materials & construction costs.  But they spent an additional $9 billion on R&D for the project, so the total bill is $10 billion. 

Now each plane gets called a "$1 billion dollar plane." ($10 billion for the project, divided by 10 planes produced, = $1 billion each plane)

But that doesn't mean the 11th plane they produce will really cost another $1 billion dollars.  The 11th plane will only take the same $100 million dollars that each of the previous 10 planes needed for the actual materials & assembly. 

Unfortunately, that's not usually the case. Unless the Air Force is paying Lockheed to store it, the tooling is either converted to other projects or destroyed (lots of tech info to be gained by studying the tooling), so much of the "D" in the R&D would have to be regenerated, adding millions to the cost of reopening the line.

[TheGhost]

Lockheed and Northrop are controlled by businessmen...

So is the U.S. but most citizens are in denial.

John, stick to transmissions, and keep your incredibly off topic politics out of this thread.

[Brock Samson]

i agree with John Everette, just who do you think is pulling the strings?..

[Charger_Fan]

I say it was hit by a piece of debris from the blown up satellite.

[69bronzeT5]

[TheGhost]

i agree with John Everette, just who do you think is pulling the strings?..

Then post another thread about it, don't hijack this one.

[Mike DC]

   
I can't help but think the entire B2 flying wing design is a bad idea.  I've thought that for a long time. 


It's an interesting way to push the envelope for a stealth bomber plane.  But how necessary is its combination of extreme range and payload capabilities? 

Lots of planes can be a challenge to fly but the B2 is a league by itself.  Flies LONG missions deep into hostile territory + always stuffed to the gills with bombs & fuel + it literally ceases to be airworthy if there's a computer glitch. 



I know they thought they had good reasons for the design parameters, but the B2 program still never really passed the smell test in my mind.  Seems like they could have made shorter-range and more stable plane with decent stealth characteristics that could have done the job. 

 

[GreenMachine]

   I heard the tail fell off.





   

[Chad L. Magee]

It is a combination of the surface coatings and the wing design that allow it to be "invisible" to most radar scans (from an aviation friend who is nuts for these type of planes).  If you take a typical plane and coat it with those materials, the radar signal will still show up, but muted quite a bit.  I think it is some type of aerogel (or possibly xylogel) that literally "absorbs" the signal rather than reflects it. Similar type of materials are used on spacecraft but for different reasons (heat protection being one).  The same effect of muted radar pinging would happen if you used the B2 design without the coatings on a standard airplane skin.  Add the two together........

[Chad L. Magee]

Mike DC-  If I remember right, the basic design was barrowed from an experimental WWII German airplane that was not used during the war.  I can't for the life of me remember the name (I am not an airplane buff, just a history buff), but it was shown on a History TV channel show on WWII secrete weapons a few months ago.......

[Mike DC]

 
Yeah, I know about the WWII prototype "flying wing" thing.  It was basically abandoned because it was too unstable. 

(Remember that prop-plane thing in "Raiders of the lost Ark?"  The one that Indy got into the fistfight underneath and Marion got trapped inside the cockpit?  That fictional Nazi plane in the movie was inspired by the real WWII-era flying wing designs.)

------------------------------------------------------------------------


The modern military dusted off the concept & built it because computer systems are advanced enough to control the plane now.  But the core problem remains -- humans still can't control the B2 without the software's full-time oversight/overruling of input from the pilots. 


I don't see how the Military can justify the efficiency gains of that design when you're dealing with something with so much potential for catastrophic trouble.

We're not talking about something that needs to go Mach 50 with Soviets hot on its tail.  It's just a heavy-payload bomber.  It relies on stealth to stay out of trouble, not its flight-performance capabilities.  And a bomber isn't the greatest thing to have turning up with stability problems. 

I just think the military should have thrown more raw size at the project if they wanted more payload capacity THAT badly.