Pentagon wants Star Trek stealth planes
"The B-21 will have the range to operate independently but if it's required to fly deep into enemy territory then an accompanying stealthy tanker would be useful."
Colonel Mace Carpenter, former combat pilot
UNITED STATES: The Pentagon is planning a new generation of stealth aircraft – inspired by the Star Trek films – that would be invisible to radar.
It has deployed America’s brightest aviation engineers to design and build new bombers and refuelling aircraft that will safeguard the country’s ability to fight wars from the air with minimal risk to pilots.
The Russians are leaders in the field of ‘‘shadow’’ aircraft that vanish from radar, while their own radars can detect targets at a range of up to 550 kilometres.
The US engineers will be expected to get as close as they can to the Klingon cloaking system in the Star Trek films. They are developing the most advanced radarabsorbing material for the frame and a new cooling system for reducing the aircraft’s heat signature.
The bat-shaped B-21 bomber, each of which will cost an estimated US$550 million (NZ$808m) , is under development at Plant 42, a huge, heavily guarded facility in the Californian desert northeast of Los Angeles. Details of the programme to replace the ageing B-52 and B-1B strategic bombers, and eventually the B-2 stealth bomber, are classified. But the selected shape mirrors the revolutionary radarevading B-2 Spirit which has been in service since 1997.
Plant 42, which is run by Northrop Grumman, the company that won the $80 billion bomber contract, is said to be a hive of activity as newly recruited staff arrive at the site in Palmdale. More than 5000 employees will be working there by 2019 to ensure the new bomber is ready for delivery by the mid-2030s. The Pentagon wants 100 B-21s.
The key to the bomber’s lifespan will be its ability to make itself partly invisible. Colonel Mace Carpenter, a former combat pilot who flew America’s first stealth aircraft, the F-117 Nighthawk, said it would be amazing if a cloaking device could be designed for the B-21 to make it ‘‘disappear’’.
In reality, however, advanced stealth technology combined with special tactics would still be necessary to protect the bomber from attack, he said. ‘‘Stealth is not about making an aircraft completely unseen but harder to see,’’ he said.
Carpenter who believes that a quarter of all US combat aircraft will fly with stealth technology by 2022, supported the idea of having stealthy refuelling tankers, ‘‘if there’s money for it’’. There are already artist’s impressions produced for a US Air Force programme called KC-Z.
‘‘The B-21 will have the range to operate independently but if it’s required to fly deep into enemy territory then an accompanying stealthy tanker would be useful,’’ he said.
Even more relevant, he said, would be a stealthy tanker to escort the next-generation jet fighter known as the ‘‘penetrating counter air’’ aircraft, which will replace the F-22 Raptor.
Carpenter, who was chief of strategy during Operation Iraqi Freedom, the codename for the USled invasion of Iraq in 2003, said radar would remain the greatest threat during warfare, emphasising the importance of the next generation of stealth aircraft.
– The Times