Originally Posted by
Bevo
Ken - it's a shame that the Bone structural upgrades will be overly expensive. I'm not sure many folks appreciate the B-1's capabilities.
USAF is well aware of the superiority of the Bone over the Buff. It basically has the performance of a fighter with the range and payload of a bomber. It's a remarkable airplane. That's why they've been working so hard for over 10 years to figure out how to keep it flying. It just can't be done in any kind of effective manner. It's not like they can just "re-skin" the wings and/or the fuselage like they've done on other aircraft.
Remember this is a swing-wing airplane. There are some massive, monolithic, fracture critical structural components that are flight critical. Even if they had saved the production tooling (which they didn't) repairing/replacing those structures is just not feasible. A lot of money has been spent and a whole bunch of very smart engineers have been working for over a decade to crack this nut. They've found that it would cost more to fix than it did to build, and even then, the final result is shaky at best.