SMARTER BOMBER

摘要

Turning a fighter into a bomber may seem like . trying to convert a Honda S2000 roadster into a pickup truck. Fighters, which are designed to dogfight with hostile airplanes and perform short-range attack missions, are fast and agile; bombers are made to haul heavy loads for thousands of miles. But Lockheed Martin is designing a fighter-bomber hybrid based on the F-22 Raptor fighter that's in flight-testing at Edwards Air Force Base in California. The proposed bomber variant―informally known as the FB-22―has been attracting increasing interest since the September 11 attacks and the start of U.S. operations in Afghanistan. Before Afghanistan, the Air Force considered its current fleet of bombers adequate and had no plans to build new ones until the late 2030s. In the 1991 Persian Gulf War, after all, B-52s―slow and as unstealthy as battleships but loaded with more than 30,000 pounds of guided bombs―were successfully deployed against both ammunition dumps and frontline troops. A few heavy airplanes, the Air Force reasoned, went a long way.