Skunk Works

In early April 1976, I got the word that we had officially won the competition with Northrop and would go on to build two experimental airplanes based on our Hopeless Diamond design. The program was now designated under the code name Have Blue. We knew we could produce a model with spectacularly low radar signatures, but the big question was whether we could actually build an airplane that would enjoy the same degree of stealthiness. A real airplane was not only much larger, but also loaded with all kinds of anti-stealth features—a cockpit, engines, air scoops and exhausts, wing and tail flaps, and landing gear doors. In any airplane project the design structures people, the aerodynamics group, and the propulsion and weight specialists all argue and vie for their points of view. In this case, however, I served notice that Denys Overholser’s radar cross section group had top priority. I didn’t give a damn about the airplane’s performance characteristics because its only purpose was to demonstrate the lowest radar signature ever recorded. I joked that if we couldn’t get her airborne, maybe we could sell her as a piece of modern art sculpture.

I assigned the design project to Ed Baldwin, who was our best and most experienced structural engineer. “Baldy” had started out with Kelly designing the P-80, America’s first jet fighter, in 1945, and had designed the configuration of the U-2 spy plane. His task was to take the preliminary design concept of the Hopeless Diamond and make it practical so that it could actually fly. Dick Scherrer had done the preliminary design, laying out the basic shape, and Baldwin had to make certain that the shape’s structure was sound and practical; he would determine its radius, its thicknesses, its ability to withstand certain loads, the number of parts. “Baldy” would put the rubber on the ramp.

All of our structure and wing guys worked for him, and Baldwin enjoyed badgering aerodynamicists, especially in meetings where he could score points with his fellow designers by making aerodynamicists squirm or turn beet red in fury. One on one, Baldy was a pleasant chap—at least moderately so for a crusty Skunk Works veteran—but in meetings we were all fair game and he was a bad-tempered grizzly. Early on, for example, he got into a heated exchange with a very proper Britisher named Alan Brown, our propulsion and stealth expert, about some aspect of the structure he was designing. Baldwin turned crimson. “Goddam it, Brown,” he said, “I’ll design this friggin’ airplane and you can put on the friggin’ stealth afterwards.”

The airplane Baldy designed was a single-seat, twin-engined aircraft, 38 feet long, with a wingspan of 22 feet and a height of slightly more than seven feet. Its gross weight was 12,000 pounds. The leading edge of the delta wing was razor-sharp and swept back more than 70 degrees. To maintain low infrared signatures, the airplane could not go supersonic or have an afterburner because speed produced surface heating—acting like a spotlight for infrared detection. Nor did we want the airplane to be aurally detected from the ground. For acoustical reasons we had to make sure we had minimized engine and exhaust noise by using absorbers and shields. To keep it from being spotted in the sky, we decided to use special additives to avoid creating exhaust contrails. And to eliminate telltale electromagnetic emissions, there was no internal radar system on board.

Our airplane wasn’t totally invisible, but it held the promise of being so hard to detect that even the best Soviet defenses could not accomplish a fatal lock-on missile cycle in time to thwart its mission. If they could detect a fighter from a hundred miles out, that airplane was heading for the loss column. The long-range radar had plenty of time to hand off the incoming intruder to surface-to-air missile batteries, which, in turn, would fire the missiles and destroy it. Early-warning radar systems could certainly see us, but not in time to hand us over to missile defenses. If the first detection of our airplane was at fifteen miles from target, rather than at fifty miles, there simply would be no time to nail us before we hit the target. And because we were so difficult to detect, even at fifteen miles, radar operators would also be thwarted while trying to detect us through a confusing maze of ground clutter.