Nearly all schedule details about the B-21 Raider are classified, but the U.S. Air Force and Northrop Grumman have now provided four completed milestones:

— Contract award: October 2015

— Critical design review (CDR): December 2018

— Rollout: December 2022

— Power-on: Second quarter 2023

Northrop released the last milestone during a second-quarter earnings call on July 27, offering a revealing marker of progress on the path to a first flight milestone later this year that Air Force officials say remains on schedule. 

But the pace of the B-21’s journey from contract award to first flight also reveals another startling fact. During the first nearly eight years of development, the Raider program is moving at a slower pace than the delayed path of the Northrop B-2A Spirit more than 34 years ago. 

On July 17, 1989, the B-2 completed first flight within 3.75 years of passing the CDR milestone and 238 days after the public rollout event on Nov. 22, 1988. 

For the B-21, the program is now more than 4.5 years after achieving CDR and 241 days after rollout, but first flight still remains weeks or months away. If the B-21 completes first flight at the end of the year, more than five years will have passed since the CDR event, putting the program about 1.25 years behind the B-2.

The nearly eight-year-old B-21 development program, however, currently compares better to the 7.75-year interval between the contract award milestone for the B-2 and the Spirit’s first flight. 

But the B-2’s 7.75-year march to first flight was longer than expected. An aircraft redesign after contract award and other smaller setbacks had delayed Northrop’s flying-wing bomber by 18 months before first flight. 

Although Air Force and program officials have insisted that B-21 development remains on schedule, the program’s classification means there are no public documents to verify those claims. 

Asked to explain why the B-21 is moving slower than the B-2’s pace in development, an Air Force spokesperson replied a day later but did not address the difference between the schedules. 

“First flight is event driven and we expect first flight to occur in calendar year 2023,” the spokesperson said. 

During a panel discussion at the Air Warfare Symposium in March, Doug Young, Northrop’s vice president and general manager for strike programs, elaborated on the company’s process for deciding when the first B-21 will be ready to fly. 

“We want to make sure when we fly that airplane that it is not something we’re going to have to work on for another two months before we go fly it again,” Young said. “We want to get into a very productive flight test program. So part of that is all around making the trade-offs in the near term on schedule in order to implement things that we know we have to fix so that we can get through a good flight test program.”

In other words, the B-21 may be moving slower than the B-2 before flight test, so that the former will accelerate through flight testing much faster than the latter. In a period of sharp budget cutbacks, the B-2 needed another 7.5 years after first flight to pass the initial operational capability (IOC) milestone. The B-21 program wants to reach the same status within roughly half the time or even sooner.

Northrop officials remain optimistic that the B-21 can reach first flight by the end of this year, but Chief Financial Officer David Keffer noted on a second-quarter earnings call that the schedule can change.

“That timing continues to depend on events and data, of course, over time,” Keffer said. 

Offering Northrop an extra incentive to make the next schedule milestone, the Air Force has tied the award of the first lot of low-rate initial production to the B-21’s first flight, Keffer said. 

Meanwhile, the Air Force also offered Northrop partial relief on a pressing financial issue. 

Upon the B-21 contract award in 2015, Northrop agreed to priced options on the first five years of low-rate initial production between 2024 and 2028. More than seven years later, supply chain disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and an unexpected surge of inflation increased the risk of major losses. 

During a January call with analysts, Northrop CEO Kathy Warden warned that Northrop could lose up to $1.2 billion over that five-year period. 

But the Air Force has agreed to allocate $60 million to offset the inflation impact on the cost of the first lot of production, Warden said on July 27. She noted that Northrop still remains exposed to inflation effects from 2025 to 2028.