The Pentagon has confirmed that a U.S. Air Force B-2 bomber which was forced to make an emergency landing and suffered a fire on December 10, 2022 will not be returned to service, with a report confirming that the aircraft “is being divested in FY [Fiscal Year] 2025 due to a ground accident/damage presumed to be uneconomical to repair.” The aircraft was reported to have suffered damage after experiencing an “in-flight malfunction during routine operations” including an onboard fire at the time. This decision to retire it was taken despite a prior B-2 which suffered a similar-looking accident the previous year at the same facility, namely Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, having been made airworthy, which made the decision to retire the aircraft involved in the second incident an unexpected one. The aircraft involved in the 2021 incident has yet to be returned to service, however. The two accidents, alongside a more serious crash and Andersen Air Force Base, Guam in 2008 have led to the fleet’s contraction to just 18 aircraft, with just 20 serial production airframes having been built under the program while one prototype was also modified to be able to serve in the air force.
The B-2 is by far the most costly class of combat aircraft in the world, at $4.04 billion in 2023 dollars, although the price of operating the aircraft and their immense maintenance needs were considered the primary factors in the decision to cut production from an originally planned 120 aircraft. Although B-2s have at times been forward deployed to Guam, which allows them to generate higher sortie rates against targets in East Asia if required, the aircraft are permanently based only at Whiteman Air Force Base. The December 2022 crash notably highlighted the vulnerability of the B-2 fleet to disruptions at their primary operating facility, with the runway left blocked for an extended period while B-2s at the base were grounded for six months. The small size of the B-2 fleet has left it highly vulnerable to such incidents. The confirmed loss of a B-2 closely coincided with the 25th anniversary of the class’ first combat operations which began in March 1999, and just days after the class’ most well known operation during which a B-2 on a CIA mission dropped a JDAM precision guided bomb on the office of the military attache in the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia.