It takes maintainers—officer and enlisted—deployed from the 509th Bomb Wing at Whiteman AFB, Mo., to Andersen AFB, Guam, about 24 hours to wash one of the wing’s B-2 bombers. And, they have to perform the cleaning job every 30 days with a special concentration of soap for the stealthy bomber.
A new think tank analysis finds a hypothetical blended-wing body tanker could offer twice as much refueling performance as the KC-46A Pegasus and recommends the Air Force buy scores of them, as the service prepares to evaluate a BWB demonstrator next year and must juggle its future tanker plans with…