The Air Force Is Having To Reverse Engineer Parts Of Its Own Stealth Bomber
Twenty-one years after the last Spirit was delivered, the Air Force is working out how to build the exotic spare parts the bomber requires.
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In a surprising turn of events, the United States government is calling upon its country’s industry to reverse engineer components for the Air Force’s B-2 Spirit stealth bomber.An official call for this highly unusual kind of assistance was put out today on the U.S. government’s contracting website beta.SAM.gov.
Mark Thompson, a national-security analyst at the Project On Government Oversight, brought our attention to the notice, which seeks an engineering effort that will reverse engineer key parts for the B‐2’s Load Heat Exchangers. While it is not exactly clear what part of the aircraft’s many complex and exotic subsystems these heat exchangers relate to, the bomber has no shortage of avionics systems, for example, which could require cooling.
All in all, the search for reverse-engineered components for the B-2 fleet is keeping with the Air Force’s current trend of moving toward the latest digital engineering and manufacturing techniques to help ensure its aircraft can be sustained not just easier and more cheaply, but in some cases, possibly at all. Above all else, it underscores how America's tiny fleet of aging stealth bombers, which were largely built on highly experimental technology at the time of their fielding, is a uniquely obvious candidate for using reverse engineering to keep it flying. For something as critical as a heat exchanger, which is essential to keeping the jet in the air, these new processes and techniques may have come just in time.
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https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zon...stealth-bomber