The USAF still insists that it expects the new Next Generation Bomber (NGB) or Long Range Strike (LRS) project – with consensus settling on a stealthy, subsonic mini-B-2 – to be operational by 2018. That date would put NGB in service only five years after JSF, a program that started in earnest 11 years ago.

The fastest major aircraft program in recent history is the Super Hornet, which reached initial operational capability (IOC) nine years after the contract date, with a derivative aerodynamic design and off-the-shelf avionics.

The Ares Advisory Group (all three of us) has been noodling this problem and has reached three tentative conclusions: that the NGB demonstration project has already started, using black project money, that the project owes a lot to some earlier intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) related activity, and that the 2018 aircraft will be the start of a serious spiral development program.

An important event on the road to NGB was the shut-down in early 2006 of the Joint Unmanned Combat Air System (J-UCAS) program. The Navy took its share of the J-UCAS money into UCAS-D – now awarded to Northrop Grumman – and the USAF put its money into classified demonstrations. The result is a peculiar NGB/LRS funding profile in which the budget shows zero funding between FY07 – the last year of J-UCAS – and the start of system demonstration and development (SDD) in 2011.

Also, several reports indicate that the black funding in the interim years was bumped up in 2007 – quite possibly to maintain two demonstrators at least through the design phase. Several documents including the USAF’s own LRS White Paper suggest that the downselect – to a single demonstrator – could take place later this year, which ties in with this chart from the 2007 budget:

The link between J-UCAS and NGB is more than fiscal. One reason that the J-UCAS project fissured was that the USAF saw UCAS as a long-range, long-endurance aircraft with a large mixed weapon load, and much larger (and more ambitious) than the Navy aircraft. So the NGB can be considered either as a mini-B-2 or a much larger, optionally piloted UCAS.

One source of technology for the project is a long-running USAF program called SensorCraft, aimed at developing a high-altitude, long-endurance, stealthy UAV with a radar built into its wings.

In the course of this program, Northrop Grumman’s talented aerodynamics team demonstrated (in the wind tunnel) flying-wing shapes with unprecedented efficiency, powered by relatively simple adaptations of commercial engines and capable of high-altitude operations.

Before J-UCAS fell apart, Northrop Grumman was proposing to build its third demonstrator aircraft as an X-47C, with a B-2’s 172-foot wingspan, CF34 regional-jet engines and a design compatible with a 10,000-pound bomb load.

The long wing clearly had much in common with the company’s SensorCraft design (which was unexpectedly revealed in model form at the 2005 Avalon air show in Australia).

Lockheed Martin, meanwhile, built the ill-fated Polecat demonstrator to prove out the same characteristics: efficient propulsion and aerodynamics and high-altitude operation.

Why high altitude? Because the limitation on stealth operations is the risk of visual detection. The F-22 is supersonic, and the F-35 will have the ability to defend itself, but the F-117 and B-2 fly only at night. The risk is an encounter with a fighter. But an aircraft at 65000 feet is in a dark sky, leaves no contrails and is four to five miles above the cruising altitude of most fighters. High altitude can permit 24-hour stealth.

Now, if one was thinking of building a high-altitude demonstrator, and one already owned 40 per cent of a prototype shop that had built such a thing recently – and very successfully – one might be tempted to buy the rest of the operation. Which would explain why nobody wanted to explain the deal.

Meanwhile, Boeing will be using the Phantom Works to support its own demonstrator proposal, which like the Northrop Grumman design will borrow systems from the near-complete J-UCAS airframe:

The fact that demonstrator work is underway is why the USAF can talk about having technology ready for SDD by 2011. Getting from there to IOC by 2018 is a different matter, and involves spiral development.

Many advanced technologies have been talked about for NGB, including unmanned operation, autonomous inflight refuelling, next-generation engines and even directed-energy weapons. None of these are at a stage where anyone wants to bet the program on them, though. There are several reasons, for example, why 2018 is too early for an all-unmanned NGB force: opposition from pilots; political squeamishness about 14,000 pounds of bombs on an unmanned platform; the immaturity of unmanned inflight refueling and access to foreign bases.

The result, most likely, is that the “Block 10” version of NGB will be manned, with derivative engines and a lot of avionics hardware taken straight off the F-35. NGB could actually be a good candidate for spiral development, given two likely features of the program: the production rate will not be high and it will replace the entire US bomber force, so the production line will run for some time.

Future versions will have more advanced engines – providing power for DE weapons, improving performance but extending endurance beyond human limits – and will be built in manned and unmanned versions. They may also have the wing-integrated radar arrays planned for SensorCraft – improving the bomber’s own targeting capability but also covering some ISR missions. Other upgrades will include the integration of hypersonic weapons for stand-off attack.

Pix: Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Bill Sweetman