Every Failed US Bomber Ever Built & Why They Failed

Added: 2026-05-07

[00:00:00]The problem with the XB-42 was not the aircraft. It was the calendar.

[00:00:05]The result was a bomber that flew at 433 mph, faster than most contemporary fighters, while carrying 8,000 lb of bombs.

[00:00:16]It was genuinely the most aerodynamically efficient piston bomber [music] anyone had built.

[00:00:22]The Army Air Forces were interested.

[00:00:25]Then, the war ended.

[00:00:27]The jet age was already visible on the horizon, and a brilliantly engineered piston design was not what the Air Force needed in 1946. [music] The XB-42 had solved the wrong problem in the wrong year.

[00:00:41]Jack Northrop had been trying to build a flying wing since the 1930s.

[00:00:45]In 1946, one finally flew. A tailless wing with a span of 172 ft that demonstrated the aerodynamic concept was sound, that the wing generated lift efficiently, and that its radar cross-section was naturally small in ways nobody yet understood.

[00:01:04]The propulsion system was another [music] matter.

[00:01:07]The contra-rotating propeller gearboxes failed repeatedly.

[00:01:11]The power delivery was unreliable. The program fell behind schedule while Convair's B-36 accumulated flight hours.

[00:01:19]When the Air Force eventually canceled the contracts, it ordered all 11 completed aircraft destroyed.

[00:01:25]Northrop was told it was for scrap metal recovery.

[00:01:29]He believed there were other reasons.

[00:01:31]The jets consumed fuel at a rate that cut the bomber's combat radius in half, removing it from the strategic mission that justified its existence.

[00:01:40]The YB-49 also demonstrated stability problems in yaw that the addition of four small fins could not fully resolve, making precision bombing difficult.

[00:01:51]On June 5th, 1948, the second prototype broke apart in flight during a test maneuver, killing its five-man crew.

[00:01:59]The aircraft that would eventually define the B-2 Spirit's configuration half a century later >> [music] >> was canceled in 1950.

[00:02:07]And all surviving examples were ordered scrapped.

[00:02:11]Jack Northrop did not see a flying wing bomber fly again until he was shown the B-2 in a secret hangar in 1980, two years before his death.

[00:02:21]It was the first American jet bomber to fly, and it was obsolete before it left the ground.

[00:02:28]It flew in 1946 and demonstrated that a jet-powered bomber was viable.

[00:02:34]What it did not demonstrate was any advantage over the North American B-45 Tornado, >> [music] >> which had been designed from the beginning as a jet aircraft rather than a conversion.

[00:02:45]The B-45 was faster, had better range, and was entering service by the time the XB-43's evaluation was complete.

[00:02:53]Two XB-43s were built. Both were eventually used as ground instructional airframes.

[00:03:00]The first American jet bomber [music] had the misfortune of arriving at the same moment as aircraft specifically designed to render it unnecessary.

[00:03:09]At a glance, the XB-48 looked competitive. [music] Six jet engines, tandem main landing gear, a cigar-shaped fuselage designed to minimize drag.

[00:03:20]The XB-48 flew in June 1947, three weeks before the competing Boeing XB-47, and demonstrated exceptional performance for its era.

[00:03:32]The problem was that acceptable performance was not the standard.

[00:03:36]The Boeing design had swept wings, a configuration that Martin had evaluated and rejected as too risky.

[00:03:43]And those swept wings gave the XB-47 a decisive speed advantage.

[00:03:49]The Air Force selected the B-47.

[00:03:52]Two XB-48 prototypes were built and eventually scrapped.

[00:03:57]Martin's decision to avoid the risk of swept wings had produced an aircraft that was competitive in every category where being competitive was insufficient.

[00:04:06]It was the most revolutionary bomber of its generation, and it was obsolete within six [music] years.

[00:04:13]By 1957, the B-52 had arrived.

[00:04:17]The B-47's range was insufficient for the intercontinental mission without forward basing.

[00:04:23]Its altitude ceiling was being challenged by Soviet interceptors.

[00:04:27]It required aerial refueling on most operational missions.

[00:04:31]The aircraft that had transformed bomber design served for 14 years, contributed to no combat operations in any shooting war, and was retired in 1965, having spent most of its service life as a training aircraft for the crews that would fly the aircraft it had made possible.

[00:04:50]The B-47 taught the Air Force how to fly swept-wing jets.

[00:04:55]Then the Air Force moved on.

[00:04:57]It flew in April 1952, one day after the competing Boeing YB-52 made its first flight. And the evaluation that followed was direct.

[00:05:08]The B-52 was faster.

[00:05:11]It had longer range.

[00:05:13]Its design had been built for jets from the beginning rather than converted from pistons.

[00:05:18]The YB-60 was cheaper and offered some advantages in payload, but none of those advantages was significant enough to justify [music] a separate production line.

[00:05:28]Convair was awarded no production contract. Two YB-60s were built and scrapped.

[00:05:35]The aircraft that was supposed to save the B-36 program demonstrated instead that the B-36 program needed no saving because it was already being replaced.

[00:05:47]Three engines, a variable incidence wing.

[00:05:50]The XB-51 was Martin's answer to a 1946 Air Force requirement for close support and interdiction bomber. And it was one of the most unusual-looking aircraft ever to taxi down an American runway.

[00:06:05]Two of the three engines were mounted in pods at the fuselage sides. The third was in the tail.

[00:06:11]The configuration produced excellent low-altitude speed, 522 mph, and reasonable handling.

[00:06:20]The competition was won by the English Electric Canberra, built under license in the United States as the Martin B-57.

[00:06:28]The XB-51 lost an American bomber competition to a British design.

[00:06:34]Two prototypes were built. Both crashed [music] during test programs, killing their crews.

[00:06:40]It carried its nuclear weapon and fuel in a pod slung under the fuselage because the aerodynamic demands of Mach 2 flight left no room for a conventional bomb bay.

[00:06:51]The pod configuration meant the aircraft could carry one weapon on one mission.

[00:06:57]The high-speed, high-altitude approach it was designed for had already been made obsolete by Soviet surface-to-air missiles before the aircraft entered service.

[00:07:07]The B-58 was redesigned for low-altitude penetration, >> [music] >> at which point its range fell below the B-52 it was supposed to replace.

[00:07:17]It served for 10 years.

[00:07:19]When the Air Force retired it in 1970, the replacement it had been unable to become was still flying.

[00:07:26]It still is.

[00:07:28]It was designed to be unreachable.

[00:07:31]The design worked.

[00:07:33]When the two XB-70 flew in 1964 and 1965, they demonstrated Mach 3 flight sustained at altitude.

[00:07:43]What they could not demonstrate was relevance.

[00:07:47]The Soviet S-75 surface-to-air [music] missile system had shot down a U-2 at 68,000 ft in 1960.

[00:07:56]Altitude was no longer protection.

[00:07:59]The Air Force had already shifted to low-level penetration tactics.

[00:08:04]The 1.5 billion dollars that had been spent produced two aircraft without a mission.

[00:08:12]On June 8th, 1966, >> [music] >> the second prototype was destroyed in a midair collision with an F-104 Starfighter during a General Electric publicity formation flight.

[00:08:23]Two pilots died.

[00:08:25]One aircraft remained.

[00:08:28]It is in a museum in Dayton, Ohio.

[00:08:31]The Navy's variant was too heavy for carrier operations and was eventually canceled after seven prototypes.

[00:08:38]The Air Force variant, the F-111A, entered service in 1967 and was sent to Vietnam for combat evaluation, where three of the first six aircraft deployed were lost in six weeks to causes that were eventually traced to deficiencies in the terrain-following radar system.

[00:08:58]The aircraft was eventually developed into a capable tactical bomber.

[00:09:03]What it was not, and could never be, was the aircraft that the Navy had needed.

[00:09:08]And the Navy's rejection had cost the program the scale economies that had been used to justify building a compromise in the first place.

[00:09:17]Not one dropped a bomb on an enemy target.

[00:09:21]The B-36 was the largest piston-engine bomber ever mass-produced, with a wingspan of 230 ft and a range sufficient to fly from the continental United States to the Soviet Union and return without refueling.

[00:09:37]It was the only aircraft capable of carrying the first-generation thermonuclear weapons that would have been needed if deterrence [music] failed.

[00:09:46]Strategic Air Command maintained it on continuous alert posture for 11 years.

[00:09:53]The Korean War was fought without it.

[00:09:56]It deterred a war that its own limitations would have prevented it from fighting.

[00:10:02]In 1959, the last B-36 flew to a museum.

[00:10:07]Its mission had been accomplished without it >> [music] >> accomplishing anything.

[00:10:12]A B-36 was modified to carry an operational air-cooled nuclear reactor in its aft bomb bay with extensive lead and rubber shielding installed to protect the crew from a reactor that would be running throughout the flight.

[00:10:27]The NB-36H flew 47 test missions between 1955 and 1957 over Texas and New Mexico.

[00:10:38]The reactor operated.

[00:10:40]The aircraft flew.

[00:10:42]The crew survived.

[00:10:44]The nuclear-powered bomber was canceled in 1958.

[00:10:49]The aircraft represented, [music] more precisely than any other program in this list, the point at which the pursuit of the ultimate bomber had left the domain of engineering and entered the domain of ideas that sounded compelling until someone built them.

[00:11:07]The United States had been developing it since 1960.

[00:11:11]Britain had canceled its own nuclear missile program specifically because Skybolt was coming.

[00:11:18]When McNamara canceled Skybolt, citing cost overruns and five consecutive test launches in which the missile failed to hit its target, he simultaneously canceled the strategic case for the manned penetrating bomber.

[00:11:33]A long-range missile launched from outside defended airspace did not need a supersonic aircraft to carry it.

[00:11:41]It needed a launch platform that could survive long enough to fire.

[00:11:46]The bomber was not replaced by a better bomber.

[00:11:50]It was replaced by the question >> [music] >> of whether a bomber was still necessary.

[00:11:54]Four prototypes were built. 244 were planned. And on June 30th, 1977, President Carter announced the program's cancellation.

[00:12:06]It flew in 1974 and performed as specified.

[00:12:11]Carter's cancellation cited two arguments.

[00:12:14]The AGM-86 air-launched cruise missile, which could be carried by B-52s and would [music] penetrate Soviet defenses at low altitude and low cost, and early work on stealth technology that suggested a fundamentally different approach to survivability.

[00:12:31]The B-1A was not canceled because it failed to fly.

[00:12:36]It was canceled [music] because two technologies had emerged that made a supersonic penetrating bomber look like the wrong answer to the right [music] question.

[00:12:46]76 were built. The FB-111A could carry two B-28 or B-43 nuclear weapons.

[00:12:55]Its range with those weapons required aerial refueling to reach most Soviet targets.

[00:13:01]>> [music] >> Its payload was a fraction of the B-52's.

[00:13:05]Its bomb bay had been designed for tactical weapons, not strategic ones.

[00:13:10]SAC accepted it because it was what was available and kept it until better options appeared.

[00:13:17]The aircraft that had been bought as a temporary strategic solution served for 20 years.

[00:13:23]By the time it was retired in 1991, the B-1B that was supposed to be its permanent replacement had been in service for 5 years and was already developing a reputation for the same category of problems.

[00:13:37]On January 7th, 1991, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney canceled the A-12 program.

[00:13:44]At that point, the largest contract termination in American defense history.

[00:13:49]The Navy's stealth strike aircraft, a tailless flying wing designed to replace the A-6 Intruder with low observable technology, had been under development since 1988.

[00:14:02]The classified program had consumed nearly 5 billion dollars.

[00:14:07]Not a single flyable aircraft had been delivered.

[00:14:11]The Navy was eventually awarded a 2 billion dollar judgment against the contractors, which was itself contested for decades in courts.

[00:14:21]The A-12 was not canceled because someone decided a stealth strike aircraft was unnecessary.

[00:14:27]It was canceled because no one involved in building it could explain what they had built.

[00:14:33]132 were planned. 21 were built.

[00:14:37]The aircraft was genuinely capable. The flying wing configuration and radar-absorbing materials produced a radar cross-section measured in fractions of a square meter, allowing it to penetrate defenses that would have destroyed any previous bomber.

[00:14:53]The Cold War ended during its development. The threat it had been designed to penetrate no longer existed at the scale that justified a 132 aircraft fleet.

[00:15:04]Each aircraft that was not built added its share of development costs to the price of each aircraft that was.

[00:15:12]The B-2 became the most expensive bomber ever built by the process of becoming too expensive to build in the numbers that would have made it affordable.

[00:15:22]The B-1 returned. 100 were built.

[00:15:25]Then the START Treaty nuclear arms reductions removed its nuclear weapons.

[00:15:30]Then the Cold War ended.

[00:15:33]The bomber that had been designed to fly at low altitude into Soviet airspace found itself flying conventional strike missions in Iraq and Afghanistan for which its systems had not been optimized and its maintenance requirements had not been planned.

[00:15:49]The B-1B's availability rate, the percentage of the fleet operational on any given day, remained consistently below what the Air Force required.

[00:15:59]The aircraft was finally retired in 2021.

[00:16:03]The 100 that were built had spent their careers performing a mission that had not existed when they were designed.

[00:16:08][music] Boeing's entry in the medium jet bomber competition had swept wings and won.

[00:16:16]Convair's entry had swept wings and lost.

[00:16:19]Martin's entry had straight wings and lost.

[00:16:23]It flew in April 1947, 2 months before the Boeing XB-47.

[00:16:29]The evaluation gave the Air Force the comparison it needed.

[00:16:33]The XB-47 was faster, had longer range, and demonstrated [music] the advantages of swept wing design in terms that no amount of engineering refinement on the XB-46 could have matched.

[00:16:47]One prototype was built and used for aerodynamic research.

[00:16:51]Douglas had produced a competent aircraft that was simply not competitive with a better idea.

[00:16:58]In the jet transition era, competent was not a category that survived contact with breakthrough. [music] The National Aerospace Plane would take off from a runway, accelerate through the atmosphere using scramjet engines, reach Mach 25, and deliver weapons anywhere on Earth within 2 hours.

[00:17:17]The scramjet engines that were the program's central technology could not be made to function reliably at the speeds and altitudes required.

[00:17:26]The materials that would be needed to survive sustained hypersonic flight at the temperatures involved did not exist at acceptable cost.

[00:17:34]The concept was sound.

[00:17:36]The numbers required to build it [music] were not.

[00:17:39]The X-30 demonstrated the difference between a flight envelope that physics permits and one that engineering can actually produce.

[00:17:48]7 years and 2 billion dollars was the cost of that demonstration.

[00:17:53]The first attempt in 2004 produced a study.

[00:17:57]The second in 2006 produced a program requirement.

[00:18:01]The fourth attempt produced the long-range strike bomber competition that Northrop Grumman eventually won in 2015, producing what became the B-21 Raider.

[00:18:13]Each canceled iteration left behind the costs [music] of the design work invested in it and added those costs to the schedule delay accumulated by its failure.

[00:18:23]The bomber that the Air Force needed to replace the B-2 and B-1B was urgently required for a decade [music] before a viable program path was established.

[00:18:33]The aircraft that eventually emerged from that process faces the same cost pressure, the same requirement instability, and the same industrial base limitations that canceled its predecessors.

[00:18:45]Before the B-2 program was officially announced, there was a program [music] that became the B-2.

[00:18:52]The Advanced Technology Bomber requirement of 1979 was the Air Force's response to the B-1A cancellation.

[00:19:00]A long-range penetrating bomber that used stealth technology to survive where speed had failed.

[00:19:06]Northrop's proposal, based on flying wing configuration, was selected in 1981.

[00:19:13]By the time the B-2 emerged from its classified program in 1988, the Soviet threat it was designed to penetrate was collapsing.

[00:19:22]The aircraft that entered service in 1997 cost 2 billion dollars each because it had been designed for a world that no longer existed and procured in numbers too small to distribute the cost.

[00:19:35]At least 100 B-21s are required.

[00:19:39]The industrial base that builds stealth bombers consists in the United States of one prime contractor, one facility, and a supply chain that was allowed to atrophy during the gaps between major bomber programs.

[00:19:52]The history of every program in this video suggests that the gap between the aircraft the Air Force requires and the aircraft that procurement funding can sustain is the defining variable in American bomber development.

[00:20:06]The B-21 will be the answer to whether that gap has been closed [music] or whether it will be closed the same way it was closed before by building fewer aircraft than planned and calling the result a success.

[00:20:20]Every bomber in this video was built to replace something.

[00:20:24]The B-52 was replaced six [music] times.

[00:20:27]The B-58 Hustler was faster.

[00:20:30]The B-70 Valkyrie flew at three times the speed of sound.

[00:20:34]The B-1A was canceled before it arrived.

[00:20:38]The FB-111A was a compromise that satisfied nobody.

[00:20:43]The B-1B entered service and survived by finding different missions.

[00:20:48]The B-2 cost $2 billion each and was built in insufficient numbers to replace anything.

[00:20:55]The B-52 flew its first mission in 1954 and will fly its last in the 2050s, a service life that will exceed 100 years maintained by crews whose grandfathers flew the same airframe in Vietnam.

[00:21:11]The B-52 is still flying because the answer is still wrong.