Northrop Grumman has updated software used by the U.S. Air Force to manage weapons onboard the B-2 bomber in an effort to give the branch a single program for managing the plane’s missions, said Dave Mazur, a Northrop vice president and B-2 program manager.
The company went through a preliminary design review of the software, which is designed to take the place of several onboard platforms currently in use to manage different mission types, Mazur said Thursday.
B-2 planes are designed to fly at ranges of up to around 6,900 miles without refueling.
Northrop focused its upgrades on refreshing the bomber’s communication functions with new processors, fiber optics and increased data storage.