- Northrop Grumman announced on May 7, 2026, that the B-21 Raider Combined Test Force cut a 180-day test plan to 73 days, securing $11.8 billion with half the missions completed.
- The B-21 Raider also completed aerial refueling with a KC-135 Stratotanker during flight testing at Edwards Air Force Base, California, announced April 14, 2026.
Northrop Grumman announced on May 7 that the B-21 Raider Combined Test Force cut its 180-day test plan to 73 days and secured $11.8 billion, with half the missions completed.
“The B-21 Raider Combined Test Force, a partnership with the U.S. Air Force, cut a 180-day test plan to 73 days, securing $11.8B with half the missions,” Northrop Grumman posted on X. “We’re driving next-gen stealth forward, fast and focused,” the company added.
The compressed timeline is the headline number — executing a 180-day test plan in 73 days means the Combined Test Force completed the contracted scope of work in roughly 40 percent of the planned time, a pace of flight test execution that is exceptional by any standard in major defense aircraft programs. The $11.8 billion figure secured through that performance represents the contract value associated with the milestone.
The B-21 Raider is the U.S. Air Force’s next-generation penetrating strike stealth bomber, designed to deliver both conventional and nuclear munitions and serve as the air leg of America’s nuclear triad for decades to come. The Air Force has been developing the aircraft as a central component of its long-range strike architecture, planning to procure a minimum of 100 aircraft. The program received $6.1 billion in its most recent budget allocation and has been consistently described by Air Force leadership as a top departmental priority.
On April 14, 2026, the Department of the Air Force announced that the B-21 had successfully conducted aerial refueling with a KC-135 Stratotanker during flight testing at Edwards — a milestone that validates the bomber’s ability to extend its range and sustain global operations by taking on fuel from tanker aircraft. Air Force Global Strike Command commander Gen. S.L. Davis confirmed at the time that the aerial refueling capability ensures global penetrating strike delivery at any time, framing it as a validation of the aircraft’s core operational promise rather than a routine test event.
The aerial refueling milestone and the Combined Test Force’s compressed timeline are two data points from the same accelerating program, and together they describe a test campaign that is moving faster and performing better than the schedule originally projected. Cutting a 180-day plan to 73 days in a flight test program is not achieved by rushing — it requires the aircraft to perform reliably enough on each flight that the test team can clear multiple objectives per sortie rather than spending additional flights troubleshooting anomalies or repeating events that didn’t produce usable data. A test aircraft that performs consistently close to predictions compresses the schedule by eliminating the rework and investigation cycles that plague programs where hardware and software fall short of their designed behavior.
The B-21’s design philosophy builds on lessons from the B-2 Spirit, which remains the only operational stealth bomber in the U.S. inventory and which entered service in 1997 after a development program that faced significant cost growth and schedule delays. The Raider has been developed under a cost-type contract structure that gave Northrop Grumman incentives to control costs and meet schedule, a contracting approach designed to avoid some of the dynamics that drove B-2 cost growth. The program has largely avoided the public cost and schedule controversies that have plagued other major defense programs, and Northrop Grumman’s May 7 announcement about the test plan compression suggests the program’s performance is tracking in the right direction on both dimensions.
The Combined Test Force structure itself is worth noting. Combining the Air Force Test Center’s 412th Test Wing with Northrop Grumman’s test personnel under a joint test organization is a model that integrates government and contractor test capabilities rather than running them in sequence, allowing the team to share resources, reduce duplication, and accelerate the overall test flow. When that organization claims to have cut a 180-day plan to 73 days, it is a government-contractor team making that claim jointly, which carries more weight than a contractor’s self-reported performance metric alone.