Skunk Works

In those early days of my tenure at the Skunk Works, Kelly Johnson was still coming in twice a week as my consultant as part of his retirement deal. I had mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, Kelly was my mentor and close friend, but it pained me to see so many colleagues crowding into his small office down the hall from mine, taking their work problems to him instead of to me. Of course, I really could not blame them. No one in our shop came close to possessing Kelly’s across-the-board technical knowledge, but he didn’t just limit himself to providing aerodynamic solutions for stumped engineers; he damned well wanted to know what I was up to, and he wasn’t exactly shy about firing off opinions, solicited or not. After a quarter century of working at his side, I knew Kelly’s views nearly as well as my own, and I also knew that he would not be thrilled about stealth because he thought the days of manned attack airplanes were definitely numbered. “Goddam it, Ben, the future belongs to missiles. Bombers are as obsolete as the damned stagecoach.”

I argued back, “Kelly, the reason they call them missiles, instead of hittles, is that they miss much more than they hit.” But Kelly just shook his head.

Several years earlier, we had built a pilotless drone, the D-21, a forty-four-foot manta ray–shaped ramjet that was launched from B-52 bombers to streak high across Communist China and photograph its nuclear missile test facilities. That drone achieved the lowest radar cross section of anything we had ever built in the Skunk Works, and Kelly suggested that we offer our D-21 to the Air Force as a radar-penetrating attack vehicle, with or without a pilot. I put together a small team to begin a modification design, but I couldn’t stop thinking about stealth.

That first summer of my takeover, our in-house expert on Soviet weapons systems, Warren Gilmour, attended a meeting at Wright Field, in Ohio, and came back in a dark mood. He marched into my office and closed the door. “Ben, we are getting the shaft in spades,” he declared. “One of my friends in the Tactical Air Command spilled the beans. The Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency has invited Northrop, McDonnell Douglas, and three other companies to compete on building a stealthy airplane. They’re getting a million bucks each to come up with a proof of concept design, trying to achieve the lowest radar signatures across all the frequencies. If one works, the winner builds two demonstration airplanes. This is right up our alley and we are being locked out in the goddam cold.”

This was exactly the kind of project I was looking for. But we had been overlooked by the Pentagon because we hadn’t built a fighter aircraft since the Korean War and our track record as builders of low-radar-observable spy planes and drones was so secret that few in the Air Force or in upper-management positions at the Pentagon knew anything about them.

Warren read my mind. “Face it, Ben, those advanced project guys don’t have a clue about our spy plane work in the fifties and sixties. I mean, Jesus, if you think racing cars, you think Ferrari. If you think low observables, you must think Skunk Works.”

Warren was absolutely right. The trouble was getting permission from our spy plane customer, that legendary sphinx known as the Central Intelligence Agency, to reveal to the Pentagon’s competition officials the low observable results we achieved in the 1960s building the Blackbird, which was actually the world’s first operational stealth aircraft. It was 140,000 pounds and 108 feet long, about the size of a tactical bomber called the B-58 Hustler, but with the incredibly small radar cross section of a single-engine Piper Cub. In other words, that is what a radar operator would think he was tracking. Its peculiar cobra shape was only part of the stealthy characteristics of this amazing airplane that flew faster than Mach 3 and higher than 80,000 feet. No one knew that its wings, tail, and fuselage were loaded with special composite materials, mostly iron ferrites, that absorbed radar energy rather than returning it to the sender. Basically 65 percent of low radar cross section comes from shaping an airplane; 35 percent from radar-absorbent coatings. The SR-71 was about one hundred times stealthier than the Navy’s F-14 Tomcat fighter, built ten years later. But if I knew the CIA, they wouldn’t admit that the Blackbird even existed.