A new computer upgrade system of Northrop Grumman’s [NOC] B-2 stealth bomber is ready to enter low-rate initial production (LRIP) and the company expects authority to proceed from the Pentagon before the end of June, according to a company program manager.
Ron Naylor, Northrop Grumman’s director for the B-2 program at Tinker AFB, Okla., told Defense Daily in a phone interview yesterday that an Extremely High Frequency (EHF) Increment 1 system verification review, which took place in August of 2011, demonstrated the computer upgrade system successfully satisfied the Air Force’s requirements. Naylor said the system verification review is a final meeting with the service to review and agree that the laboratory evidence meets the specification requirements.
At the same time the system verification review was taking place, a B-2 validated new flight management software to be used in the computer upgrade system by flying an 18.5-hour sortie over the North Pole.
Naylor said Northrop Grumman received a signed acquisition decision memorandum in February.
The computer upgrade system is the cornerstone to all future B-2 upgrades, according to a company statement.
Naylor said the flight management software is legacy software that was taken out of the old B-2 computer, translated into a modern computing language and is now operating in the new system.
“So we’ve taken an existing capability, moved it into a modern language, integrated it into a new computer and went out and did a lot of lab and flight testing to validate that we retained all the capability that we previously had,” Naylor said.
Naylor said the system verification review was one of two important approaches in acquisition for delivering a new capability: verification and validation. He said the first one, verification, is a “detailed look of all the development spec requirements and compared to objective evidence through various levels of testing, generally at the major subcontractors or Air Force labs,” he said.
Naylor said validation, the second effort, occurs during flight testing.
“Two separate activities, both successfully completed,” he said.