But for all the speed and commotion, the B-1 approached its target like a whisper. There was no rush of compressed air or roar from its mighty engines to give warning of the aircraft’s approach. The B-1 was simply too fast to be betrayed by its own treacherous noise. At .98 Mach, the bomber was racing behind the sound of its engines by just a fraction of a second. By the time anyone near the target heard the aircraft approach and turned their eyes upward, it would have already passed overhead.
Dogs were one of the few creatures that knew the B-1 was coming. As they lay on their bellies, they could feel the ground vibrate and shudder as the massive aircraft approached. Their ears could sense the thick wall of compressed air that extended forward from the B-l’s nose cone. The canines would raise their heads and look around anxiously, but few of them knew to look overhead.
Sitting inside the cockpit, Richard Ammon heard none of the noise from his engines. The tight steel walls and thick Plexiglas of the cockpit protected him from all of the commotion. But he wasn’t oblivious to the power. A small nudge from his throttles was all it took to push him back into his seat. A tiny push with his fingers against the control stick was all it took to roll the aircraft up and onto its side.
The cockpit was tight, every inch of it crammed with computer screens, gauges, and switches. Every inch was designed with some purpose in mind.
In front of Richard Ammon sat his main computer screen, or CRT. This was his primary flight and weapons instrument. Running down both sides of the CRT were dozens of other instruments and gauges. In his left hand were the four throttle controls. Extending up from the floor between his legs was a thick control stick. The top of the stick was also covered with buttons and switches.
Ammon sat in an ACES II ejection seat at the front station, allowing him a clear view of the passing terrain. Immediately behind him, separated by a thick bulkhead, was Ivan Morozov. Morozov’s cockpit looked even more intimidating than the pilot’s. Before him sat four CRTs, each of them essential to the navigation and defense of the aircraft. Surrounding the CRTs were dozens of keypads, each button superimposed with a series of coded symbols. It was an intimidating maze of computer screens, keypads, and symbols. To someone unfamiliar with combat aircraft, it would have been hopeless. But not to Morozov. Flying, with all of its subtleties and challenges, was something he understood. As a young officer in the Soviet Air Force, before transferring into the intelligence field, he had spent three years as a navigator/bombardier in the Sukhoi SU-24 fighter, flying reconnaissance along the West German border. In addition, for the past several months, he had been studying the B-l’s weapon and navigation systems until he knew them like the back of his hand. He knew that someone had to fly the mission with Ammon, and from the beginning, he was determined that it be himself.
As Ammon and Morozov busied themselves in the cockpit, the B-1 continued to speed across the flat terrain, skimming above every obstacle while cruising just below the speed of sound.
This was the B-l’s domain. For this purpose was it created. It could cruise at this speed for hours, never tiring, never deviating from its desired course, and always exactly on altitude. With its banks of computers, phased-array radar, low-level terrain following systems, and multiple weapons capability, the B-1 was the most sophisticated aircraft in the world.
But designing and building the aircraft had not been an easy task. For fifteen years the aircraft’s designers had wrestled with one engineering problem after another. Many times they had been tempted to quit, for it seemed that they had been given an impossible job. The pieces just didn’t fit together. There were simply too many mutually exclusive criteria to bring together in one single aircraft.
To begin with, they had been told to design an aircraft that could penetrate the world’s most advanced air defenses to attack a heavily defended target. The aircraft would be required to go against the best surface and airborne threats that the enemy had to offer.
“Okay,” the engineers said. “We can do that. We’ll build a small and nimble fighter. We’ll make it capable of pulling twelve Gs. We’ll make it light and extremely maneuverable. And very small. If we are going to send this aircraft far behind enemy lines, we want it to be as tiny as possible. That will give the enemy a much smaller target to shoot at.”
But then the engineers were told that the B-1 had to be able to carry up to 50,000 pounds of weapons. In addition to that, it had to have an intercontinental range, which meant it had to carry enormous amounts of jet fuel.
So much for developing a small and nimble fighter. The B-1 would have to be huge — maybe half as big as a football field — to carry such a load of weapons and fuel.
The engineers also discovered that the new aircraft had to be an accurate bomber. Very accurate. It couldn’t just scatter a cluster of bombs in any random pattern, hoping a bomb or two would hit the target. Surgical strikes required much more than that. Even dropping a bomb within a few yards of its target wasn’t good enough. It had to fall within a few feet. In some cases even inches.
“Okay, we can do that,” the engineers muttered as sweat started to bead on their brows.
Then the designers were given the bombshell.
“We want the aircraft to be nearly invisible,” they were told. “We want its radar cross section to be one thousandth of the aircraft’s actual size. Make this aircraft look like nothing more than a flock of birds that are cluttering up the enemies’ radar.”
The engineers spent many nights pondering how to make a 400,000 pound aircraft look like nothing but a bunch of speedy sea gulls.
Hey, this will be easy, they used to joke. We can make an aircraft that will do all that. The only problem is, when we are finished, the sucker certainly will never fly.
As the designers wrestled with the problems, they began to realize two important facts that were core to the design of the new aircraft.
First, the new bomber would have to be able to fly incredibly low in order to avoid being detected by the enemy’s radar. To do this it would need a terrain-following system that was better than anything yet developed. It would have to enable the aircraft to fly up the steepest mountains and down the deepest, winding valleys, all at treetop level. And it would have to do it automatically, without the pilot even touching the controls. Because the safest time to go into battle would be at night, when it was more difficult to be detected by enemy fighters and missiles. But at night, the pilot couldn’t see. So the low-level, terrain-following system had to be completely automatic.
In addition to a low-level penetration capability, the aircraft needed speed. A blinding, shattering, screaming speed. A speed so great that it would leave any attacking aircraft sucking up hot exhaust gases as it watched the B-1 screeching by. The aircraft was too big to play with the fighters. It needed speed so it could run away.
For fifteen years, the engineers worked on the bomber. And when they were finished, not only had they produced the most sophisticated aircraft in the world, but also the most deadly. Rockwell and the Air Force called the bomber the “Lancer”. The pilots who flew it called it the “Bone”.
Ammon was using the B-1’ s computers to fly at 200 feet above the trees and telephone wires, hugging the earth like a blanket. This was where the B-1 belonged. This was usually the safest place to be. Usually….