New advanced-technology airplanes are budget breakers. The B-2 bomber, at more than $2 billion a copy, proves that point. But we need stealthy long-range bombers like B-2s, which can fly anywhere in the world in twelve hours and drop a payload of forty conventional bombs. Still, unless we manage to get wildly inflated production costs down, aeronautics could well become an arcane art practiced by one or two manufacturers who somehow manage to survive. (Grumman, the Navy’s principal supplier of fighters for nearly sixty years, recently abandoned the sluggish fighter business entirely, while
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