The Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit requires a two-man crew of a pilot and a commander (co-pilot). They train for another six months after the regular pilot course. It is sixty-nine feet long, has a wingspan of one hundred and seventy-two feet, and is seventeen feet tall. Its maximum speed is Mach 0.95 (six hundred and thirty miles per hour) at an altitude of forty thousand feet. It needs refueling after six thousand nautical miles. The Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit has two internal bays for fifty thousand pounds of ordinance and payload. Inside it is equipped with a full-color, nine-tube Electronic Flight Instrumentation System (EFIS) that displays flight, engine and sensor data, as well as avionics systems and weapons status. The cost of all its fancy weaponry is around $1.157 billion, which is worth it when trying to avoid detection during a mission. After all, the crew has no rockets, no high-speed missiles to respond with. They only have one thing to protect them. Their stealth. It all began when two brothers began designing wings for the new Nazi regime in Germany. With the outbreak of World War II in 1939, the Horton brothers continued their pioneering work under a veil of secrecy. But while the Germans were developing their wings, a forty-year-old American aircraft designer named Jack Northrop was quietly working on a flying wing design of his own. Jack had dreamed of flying wings since the 1920s and had long believed that the path to success in wing design was to reduce the drag created by the tail and fuselage. Eventually he got rid of the tail altogether. But with the end of the war, the need for a flying-wing aircraft also ended. However, Jack Northrop was convinced that…the central part of the card…was chosen to have military or communications significance. During Operation Allied Force, B-2s flew 45 sorties, often in weather conditions other Allied aircraft could not fly in, and produced incredible target success rates. The B-2, if ever it were needed, had become the most fearsome bomber in history. But its role as peacekeeper was about to change with the turn of the twenty-first century, when B-2 bombers were among the first to lead the fight against terrorism. From 9/11 onwards, in Operation Enduring Freedom, the stealth bomber was used against Taliban forces in Afghanistan. But it was in 2003, during Operation Iraqi Freedom, that the B-2s were put to their toughest test. They were to attack the most heavily defended targets in the world. Once the mission is over, they return home to friendly land, their flight complete.