A B-21 Raider conducts flight testing at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., in September 2024. A second B-21 is expected to be flying by the end of the year, Lt. Gen. Andrew Gebara, the Air Force's deputy chief of staff for strategic deterrence and nuclear integration, said Aug. 27, 2025. (Juan Femath/U.S. Air Force)
The second of the Air Force’s newest long-range stealth bombers is expected to take flight by the end of the year, a top general said this week.
Another B-21 Raider likely will be in the air soon, Lt. Gen. Andrew Gebara said Wednesday during an online discussion hosted by the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, a think tank based in Washington, D.C.
The service flew its first B-21 in November 2023. The aircraft is in its final test flights.
But Gebara cautioned that the Air Force wasn’t going to give the aircraft’s developer, Northrop Grumman, “an artificial date that they have to make.”
“That’s really been the secret sauce to the B-21 right now, is no undue pressures,” said Gebara, deputy chief of staff for strategic deterrence and nuclear integration. “Let them do what they’re doing, and they’ll get us the world’s best aircraft here very soon.”
Realizing that goal is eased by $4.5 billion in additional funding for the program under the recently passed reconciliation bill, helping the Air Force and Northrop Grumman build the aircraft to scale, he said.
The domestic policy bill gave the Pentagon $150 billion on top of its annual budget and was signed into law by President Donald Trump on July 4.
Last month, Northrop Grumman said it was in talks with the Air Force “regarding the potential for an accelerated production ramp on the program,” according to a transcript of a July 22 earnings call with investors.
The Air Force is expected to buy about 100 of the bombers, which can fly intercontinentally and drop conventional and thermonuclear weapons, at a cost of nearly $700 million each. The service’s 2026 budget calls for $10.3 billion to fund the B-21.
The sixth-generation aircraft is the result of a program aimed at producing a more technologically advanced strategic bomber to eventually replace the aging B-52 Stratofortress and the B-1.
The B-21 is the Pentagon’s second stealth bomber in history after the B-2 Spirit, which entered service in the late 1990s.
An F-35 Lightning II fighter jet releases an inert B61-12 nuclear gravity bomb during a test in December 2021. The bomb is now fully deployed throughout Europe, according to Lt. Gen. Andrew Gebara, deputy chief of staff for strategic deterrence and nuclear integration. (Department of Defense)
On a separate topic during the Mitchell Institute event, Gebara declined to comment on recent reports that the U.S. had moved nuclear weapons to the U.K. But later, he said the B61-12 nuclear gravity bomb is “fully deployed throughout Europe.”
“NATO is a nuclear alliance,” Gebara said. “The United States is a huge part of that nuclear deterrence. We provide that extended deterrence in the form of these weapons at certain locations around Europe.”
In July, open-source intelligence analysts said an Air Force C-17A Globemaster III aircraft appeared to have delivered nuclear weapons to RAF Lakenheath.
That report followed one in January 2024 by the BBC identifying a Defense Department contract announcement for the U.S. air base related to an “upcoming nuclear mission.”
Nuclear bombs were removed from Lakenheath in 2008. Since then, no nuclear weapons have been deployed to the U.K. in more than 15 years, the BBC reported.
