The Air Force Association’s Air and Space Conference has come to a close with little in the way of new information about one of the its top priorities, the long range strike bomber (LRS-B) program. However, after the service awards a contract—which could happen in a matter of weeks—it will release more information about the amount of money spent to develop the plane, its top acquisition official said.
Photo: U.S. Air Force.
“The amount of money that has been spent on risk reduction and the R&D (research and development) has mainly been in the classified budget. We intend to provide that information,” William LaPlante, the assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, told reporters during a roundtable at the conference. “We’re not trying to hide it, but I would rather wait and I think we’d all rather wait until after we get the source selection done.”
Currently, the only publicly-releasable number concerning the program is the target cost per plane: $550 million, he said. After the Air Force chooses between designs from either Northrop Grumman [NOC] and a Lockheed Martin [LMT]-Boeing [BA] team, it will disclose LRS-B development costs, including those of the canceled Next Generation Bomber program that proceeded it. LaPlante also noted that the industry competitors have spent their own internal funding to develop the plane.
The service is slated to wrap up source selection “very soon,” LaPlante said during a speech at the conference, adding that “the people who actually know what’s going on” are not talking to the media about when a contract will be awarded. The service plans to buy at least 80 LRS-Bs and field the first bomber in the mid 2020s.
“Everything is going extremely well,” he said. “You’ll see risk reduction on this program that’s been going on for the last several years under this contract and based upon earlier work. We’ll have brought the level of designs to maturity that is going to be almost unprecedented.”
Most of the risk reduction work centered on integrating components, and sometimes necessitated building prototypes to test whether hardware would mesh as planned, he said.
LaPlante declined to comment on whether the competitors had produced working planes that had conducted flight tests. “Flying can help sometimes,” but sometimes engineers find more value in wind tunnel or ground testing, he said.