Skunk Works

Kelly Johnson would never double-cross me by bad-mouthing the stealth project in the corridors of the Skunk Works, but all of us knew Kelly too well not to be able to read his mood and mind. If he didn’t like something or someone, it was as obvious as a purple pimple on the tip of his nose. So I had him in for lunch and said, “Look, Kelly, I know you find this design aesthetically offensive, but I want you to do me one favor. Sit down with this guy, Overholser, and let him answer your questions about stealth. He’s convinced me that we are onto something enormously important. Kelly, this diamond is somewhere between ten thousand and one hundred thousand times lower in radar cross section than any U.S. military airplane or any new Russian MiG. Ten thousand to one hundred thousand times, Kelly. Think of it!”

Kelly remained unmoved. “Theoretical claptrap, Ben. I’ll bet you a quarter that our old D-21 drone has a lower cross section than that goddam diamond.”

We had a ten-foot wooden model of the diamond, and we took it and the original wooden model for the manta ray–shaped D-21 drone and put them side by side into an electromagnetic chamber and cranked up the juice.

That date was September 14, 1975, a date etched forever in my memory because it was about the only time I ever won a quarter from Kelly Johnson. I had lost about ten bucks’ worth of quarters to him over the years betting on technical matters. Like me, my colleagues collected quarters from Kelly just about as often as they beat him at arm wrestling. He had been a hod carrier as a kid and had arms like ship’s cables. He once sprained the wrist of one of our test pilots so badly he put the poor guy out of action for a month. So winning a quarter was a very big deal, in some ways even more satisfying than winning the Irish Sweepstakes. (Depending on the size of the purse, of course.)

I really wanted a photographer around for historical purposes to capture the expression on Kelly’s big, brooding moon-shaped mug when I showed him the electromagnetic chamber results. Hopeless Diamond was exactly as Denys had predicted: a thousand times stealthier than the twelve-year-old drone. The fact that the test results matched Denys’s computer calculations was the first proof that we actually knew what in hell we were doing. Still, Kelly reacted about as graciously as a cop realizing he had collared the wrong suspect. He grudgingly flipped me the quarter and said, “Don’t spend it until you see the damned thing fly.”

But then he sent for Denys Overholser and grilled the poor guy past the point of well-done on the whys and hows of stealth technology. He told me later that he was surprised to learn that with flat surfaces the amount of radar energy returning to the sender is independent of the target’s size. A small airplane, a bomber, an aircraft carrier, all with the same shape, will have identical radar cross sections. “By God, I never would have believed that,” he confessed. I had the feeling that maybe he still didn’t.

Our next big hurdle was to test a ten-foot wooden model of the Hopeless Diamond on an outdoor radar test range near Palmdale, on the Mojave desert. The range belonged to McDonnell Douglas, which was like Buick borrowing Ford’s test track to road test an advanced new sports car design, but I had no choice since Lockheed didn’t own a radar range. Our model was mounted on a 12-foot-high pole, and the radar dish zeroed in from about 1,500 feet away. I was standing next to the radar operator in the control room. “Mr. Rich, please check on your model. It must’ve fallen off the pole,” he said. I looked. “You’re nuts,” I replied. “The model is up there.” Just then a black bird landed right on top of the Hopeless Diamond. The radar operator smiled and nodded. “Right, I’ve got it now.” I wasn’t about to tell him he was zapping a crow. His radar wasn’t picking up our model at all.

For the first time, I felt reassured that we had caught the perfect wave at the crest and were in for one terrifically exciting ride. I saw firsthand how invisible that diamond shape really was. So I crossed my fingers and said a silent prayer for success in the tests to follow.