I was really saddened to see this article today on Gizmodo of how a B-2 crashed after takeoff. The pilots apparently ejected safely. Them things is $1.2 billion dollars, wonder if that is coming out of someone’s paycheck. Oh yeah, it comes out of YOUR paycheck in taxes!

Anyway it reminded me of how cool the B-2 is from its looks. Christened the Spirit of Missouri, this thing exemplifies new hotness in aviation. Yeah new hotness even though it was made before 1988 when it was publicly displayed. I also noticed that it is powered by GE’s turbine motors.

GE now has the world record for most powerful turbine motor. Here is an article on that. Oh and cause we are AV centric, a video of it going through GE’s battery of tests:

I think its crazy that when they do the test flight, they only have one GE90-115B engine on that plane out of the 4 engines on that test plane.

But will it blend? You bet your arse it will blend, it will blend 4.5 tons of water per minute and cut up a 5.5 lb bird in milliseconds with no lost in thrust or damage.

115,000 lbs of thrust rated (but brought up to 127,500 lbs of thrust) now compare that to the B2 bomber’s puny F118-GE-100 with 17,300 lb thrust engines (4 of them). Thats some serious power from a single engine.

But with all this power and new hotness, is the loss of sex appeal. The new ones are all cold and doesn’t have that biological feel. The planes from the 60’s and 70’s defiantly had a sex appeal. My love is the B1 bomber:

(photo from Wikipedia Commons)

Now that is a sexy plane with heart! Watch this Fatboy Slim music video “Bird of Prey” and tell me that the plane in it, a Hawker Hunter, doesn’t have more heart and sex appeal than a F-22 Raptor:

BTW if that video was trippy it was. It was about how they used to test LSD on pilots to see affects of drugs and stress. For the old people in the house, you’ll also note that the repeating voice track was taken from Jim Morrison, of The Doors album, “An American Prayer.” Damn good video though and again beautiful plane.