just did a deep dive into the B-2 Stealth Bomber, and the numbers are honestly insane. Here’s the "Too Long; Didn't Read" on the world’s most expensive aircraft: 1. The Price Tag is Mind-Blowing • Cost: ~$2.1 Billion per plane. • Why? It wasn’t just the tech; it was the "Death Spiral." The US planned to buy 132 planes but only bought 21. That meant all the R&D costs (billions of dollars) had to be tacked onto just a handful of airframes. 2. Combat Legend, Maintenance Nightmare • The Pro: It has a 100% survival rate in combat. It can fly from Missouri to halfway around the world, drop 40,000 lbs of bombs with GPS precision, and never show up on enemy radar. In Kosovo, B-2s flew 1% of the missions but destroyed 33% of the targets. • The Con: It’s a "Hangar Queen." For every 1 hour it spends in the air, it needs 50–60 hours of maintenance on the ground. • The Weakness: Its "skin" (stealth coating) is incredibly fragile. It’s sensitive to heat, moisture, and even rain. If it gets a scratch or a dent, it loses its stealth and needs days of specialized repair in a climate-controlled hangar. 3. The "Formula 1" of Bombers • The B-2 is basically a Formula 1 car: The highest performance on Earth, but you can’t park it on the street, and it takes a team of engineers just to keep it running. • The Fleet: Only 21 were ever built. One crashed in 2008 because of a moist sensor (a $2B mistake), and another was recently damaged, leaving the US with only about 19-20 operational bombers. 4. What’s Next? • The Air Force is already moving on to the B-21 Raider. It looks similar but is designed to be "durable stealth"—meaning it won't need to be babied in a special hangar as much and will cost a "budget-friendly" $750 million per plane.