Did the U.S. Air Force Lose the B-2 Bomber’s Blueprints?

[rangerrebew]

Did the U.S. Air Force Lose the B-2 Bomber’s Blueprints?
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By Caleb Larson
March 03, 2021
U.S. Air Force photo by SrA Thomas Barley

It seems that some of the Air Force’s B-2 Spirit stealth bomber parts may have gone missing. A notice on the U.S. federal contracting website reads as follows:

“This engineering effort is to reverse engineer the core of the B‐2 Load Heat Exchangers, develop disassembly process to remove defective cores, develop a stacking, vacuum brazing and welding process to manufacture new heat exchanger cores and to develop a welding process to install the new cores on existing B‐2 Load Heat Exchangers. The requirement includes reverse engineering the re‐core process for the B‐2 Load Heat Exchangers. The B‐2 Load Heat Exchanger (NSN 1660‐01‐350‐8209FW) uses air and Ethylene Glycol Water (EGW) liquid to produce cold air for the cooling system.”

Though the term “reverse engineer” is usually associated with Chinese or Russian work to steal technology from the United States, it seems that the Air Force may have to reverse engineer parts of their own equipment.

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2021/03/03/did_the_us_air_force_lose_the_b-2_bombers_blueprints_766451.html

[PeteS in CA]

The simple answer to the clickbait-grade article headline "question" is "No". First of all, the issue concerns one part in the B-2, not the whole plane. Second, the part in question is produced by a sub-contractor, not the USAF or Northrup-Grumman. Third, retaining the documentation for the part is the responsibility of the sub-contractor, not the USAF or Northrup-Grumman.

As the article eventually opines, the B-2 has been out of production long enough that the sub-contractor may have gone out of business and the whereabouts of its documentation unknown.

Believe it or not, development cycles and equipment life-cycles of military equipment are long enough that re-engineering parts of a product due to some key part being obsoleted is not unusual.