Laser that warns B-2 pilots of contrails gets $34.6M deal

The U.S. Air Force has awarded Ophir Corp. of Littleton, Colorado, a $34.6 million contract to repair the laser system that warns B-2 Spirit crews when their stealth bomber starts leaving a visible condensation trail.

The firm-fixed-price contract, announced Oct. 9, covers repairs of the B-2 Pilot Alert System, with work done in Littleton and expected to run through October 2036. The Air Force Sustainment Center at Tinker Air Force Base, Oklahoma, awarded it as a sole-source deal and obligated the full amount from fiscal 2026 working capital funds. The Pentagon did not say how many units will be repaired under the contract.

A B-2 is designed to be hard to find on radar, but a contrail, the white streak of ice crystals that forms behind jet engines at high altitude in cold, humid air, can reveal its position to anyone looking up. The Pilot Alert System is a lidar sensor, which uses a laser instead of radio waves, that looks behind the aircraft, detects when a contrail begins to form and tells the crew so they can change altitude.

The original B-2 design included tanks outboard of the main landing gear for a chemical meant to suppress contrails, but that approach was never used. The U.S. Air Force funded development of the lidar alert system in the mid-1990s as part of a retrofit of the bomber fleet. To avoid making the aircraft easier to detect, Ophir built the sensor around a continuous-wave laser instead of a pulsed one, which the company said would contrast too sharply with the background, according to a technical article by an Ophir executive. The company, founded in 1978, makes laser-based sensors for measuring air data, icing and wind.

The award will keep the system supported for about another decade on a bomber the U.S. Air Force plans to replace with the Northrop Grumman B-21 Raider. The service flies 19 B-2s from Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri, after one was retired following a 2022 accident, and the fleet has been kept in service with new communications and other upgrades while B-21 production ramps up. B-2s carried out the June 2025 strikes on Iran’s Fordow and Natanz nuclear sites with GBU-57 bunker-busting bombs, a weapon only the B-2 can currently drop in combat.