Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed

by Ben R Rich

  The reason why Kelly could move so quickly building the U-2 was that he could use the same tools from the prototype of the XF-104 fighter. The U-2, from nose to cockpit, was basically the front half of the F-104, but with an extended body from cockpit to tail. Using that tooling would save many months and a lot of money. Our goal was to put four birds in flight by the end of the first year. Each airplane would cost the American taxpayers $1 million, including all development costs, making it the greatest procurement bargain ever.

  By April 1955, the first U-2 was being built under tight wraps inside the assembly area of Building 82, and Kelly sent for his chief engineering test pilot, Tony LeVier, who had flight-tested all of Johnson’s airplanes since the days of the P-38. “Close the goddam door,” he said to Tony. “Listen, you want to fly my new airplane?” Tony replied, “What is it?” Kelly shook his head. “I can’t tell you—only if you say yes first. If not, get your ass out of here.” Tony said yes. Kelly reached into his desk and unrolled a large blueprint drawing of the U-2. Tony began to laugh. “For chrissake, Kelly, first you have me flying your goddam F-104, which has the shortest wings ever built, and now you got me flying a big goddam sailplane with the longest wingspan I ever saw—like a goddam bridge.”

  Kelly rolled up the drawing. “Tony, this is top secret. What you just saw you must never ever mention to another living soul. Not your wife, your mother, nobody. You understand? Now, listen. I want you to take the company Bonanza and find us a place out on the desert somewhere where we can test this thing in secret. And don’t tell anyone what you’re up to.”

  LeVier knew the vast sprawl of desert terrain shared by California and Nevada as well as any mule-packing Forty-Niner; as a test pilot he had mapped in his mind nearly every dry lake bed between Burbank and Las Vegas as a possible emergency landing strip. So he took off on his scouting expedition, after telling fellow pilots he was off to count whales for the Navy—a project Lockheed had actually done from time to time—and headed north toward Death Valley. Two days later, he found the perfect spot. “I gave it a ten plus,” he told me years later. “Just dandy. A dry lake bed about three and a half miles around. I had some sixteen-pound cast-iron shotput balls with me and dropped one out to see if the surface was deep sand. Damned if it wasn’t hard as a tabletop. I landed and took pictures.” A few days later Tony flew Kelly and a tall civilian introduced to him only as “Mr. B.” to the site to take a look. His wife had packed a picnic lunch, but a stiff wind began howling, blowing large stones across the surface of the dry lake. “This will do nicely,” Mr. B. remarked. The area was not only remote but off-limits to all unauthorized air traffic because of its proximity to nuclear testing. As Kelly noted in his private log that day: “Flew out and located runway at south end of lake, then flew back (very illegally) over the atomic bomb sitting on its tower about nine hours before it was set to go off. Mr. Bissell pleased. He enjoyed my proposed name for the site as ‘Paradise Ranch.’ ”

  From mid-May to mid-July the pressure on the workers building the first U-2 grew in intensity to a point where three shifts were working eighty hours weekly. To put an airplane in the sky in only eight months was a tremendous achievement. On June 20, 1955, Kelly noted in his log: “A very busy time in that we have only 650 hours to airplane completion point. Having terrific struggle with the wing.”

  That long narrow wing was two-thirds as long as the length of the fuselage and crucial to sustained high-altitude flight. But wings that long created structural problems, including a bending instability in flight known as aeroelastic divergence, a fancy way of describing wings flapping like a seagull’s and possibly tearing off. We worked on the problem around the clock. Kelly, meanwhile, was a blur of activity, juggling five or six production problems simultaneously. As our airplane neared completion, he was also sweating out the construction of our remote facility. Fronting for the CIA under the phony C & J Engineering logo, he hired a construction company to put in wells, two hangars, an airstrip, and a mess hall in the middle of a desert in blistering 130-degree summer heat. At one point, the guy Kelly used as his contractor put out a subcontracting bid. One subcontractor warned him: “Look out for this C & J outfit. We looked them up in Dun & Bradstreet, and they don’t even have a credit rating.” This base was built for only $800,000. “I’ll bet this is one of the best deals the government will ever get,” Kelly remarked to several of us. And he was right.

  By early July both the airplane and the test site were nearing completion when Kelly suffered a nearly fatal car wreck, after a driver ran a red light in Encino and clobbered him. He was hospitalized with four broken ribs but hobbled back to work in less than two weeks, just in time for what he referred to in his log as “a terrific final drive to finish the airplane.”

  The first U-2 was completed on July 15, 1955. I remember the sense of shock I experienced the first time I stood next to it on the assembly floor. The airplane was so low slung that although I was slightly less than six feet tall, my own nose was higher than the airplane’s. Over the next few days, the airplane was subjected to all kinds of flutter and vibration and control tests, culminating in the most severe test of them all—Kelly’s personal final check and inspection. “I found thirty items to improve,” he told Dick Boehme with a grimace.

  On July 23, the airplane was disassembled and loaded into special shipping containers. At four in the morning, the containers were loaded in a remote section of the Burbank Airport onto a C-124 cargo plane and roared off before sunrise, headed for the desert base. Kelly followed in a C-47. We unloaded the bird on schedule into the semi-completed hangars and assembled it. We were ready to fly.

  Other Voices

  Tony LeVier

  In early July, Kelly called me in and told me to get ready to go up to the “Ranch,” as he called the base, and start flight tests. First time I flew there since the day I took Bissell and Kelly up, I almost fainted at the changes. Holy mackerel, they had put in a runway, had a control tower, two big hangars, a mess hall, a whole bunch of mobile homes. We had on hand only four engineers and twenty maintenance, supply, and administration people. Nowadays they’d probably use twenty people just to fuel an airplane.

  The U-2 was very light, very fragile, very flimsy. Kelly wanted to know how I planned on landing it. I had never landed on glider wheels before—in tandem. Usually a pilot likes to make a landing approach nose high. But the landing problem was on Kelly’s mind, causing him concern. I got advice from other pilots, who said not to land it on the nose wheel, otherwise I faced the danger of porpoising, which could lead to a structural breakup. But Kelly contradicted that advice. He said, “No. I want you to land it on the nose wheel. Otherwise, if you come in dragging your tail, nose high, I’m afraid you might stall out and lose the airplane totally.”

  Dry lake beds are very tricky to land on at times. Given desert lighting conditions, you can’t always tell how low you are. So I had them lift the U-2 off the ground, so that the wheels were barely touching, just as if I was first touching down on a landing, and the horizon out there was the horizon I would see as I came in. I sat in the cockpit and I took black tape and marked it on the cockpit glass even with the natural horizon. I did that on both sides. The black tape markers would tell me when I was lined up precisely with the horizon and that meant my wheels were just touching the ground.

  On August 2, 1955, I made my first taxi test in the airplane. Towed it out on the lake three hundred feet. Kelly told me to taxi and throttle up to fifty knots and then hit the brakes. I pushed down on the pedals. God, they were sorry brakes. Kelly got on the horn and said, “Okay, now take it up to sixty knots and hit those brakes.” I did as I was told. Then he said, “Now take it up to seventy knots.” So that’s what I did, and I realized we were suddenly in the goddam air. The lake bed was so smooth I couldn’t feel when the wheels were no longer touching. I almost crapped. Holy Christ, I jammed the goddam power in. I got into stall buffet and had no idea where the goddam ground was. I just had to k
eep the goddam airplane under control. I kept it straight and level and I hit the ground hard. Wham! I heard thump, thump, thump. I blew both tires and the damned brakes burst into flame right below the fuel lines. The fire crew came roaring up with extinguishers followed by Kelly in a jeep and boiling mad. “Goddam it, LeVier, what in hell happened?” I said, “Kelly, the son of a bitch took off and I didn’t even know it.” Who’d of guessed an airplane would take off going only seventy knots? That’s how light it was.

  Our first real flight test took place late in the afternoon, a few days later, on August 4. I took off around four in the afternoon, with big black thunderclouds building fast. I took her up to eight thousand feet, with Kelly following behind me in a T-33 piloted by my colleague Bob Mayte. I got on the horn: “Kelly, it flies like a baby buggy.” Rain was starting to splatter the windshield, so we decided to cut the first flight short because of the weather. Kelly was getting edgy as I circled around to make my approach for a landing. “Remember, I want you to land it on the nose wheel.” I said I would. I came down as gently as I knew how and just touched the nose wheel to the ground and the damned airplane began to porpoise. I immediately pulled up. “What’s the matter?” Kelly radioed. The porpoising effect could break up that airplane—that was the matter. I told him I just touched the damned thing down and it began to porpoise on me. He told me, “Take it around and come in even lower than last time.” I did that exactly and the damned thing started to porpoise again. I gunned it again. By now it’s really starting to get black and the rain and wind are kicking up. Kelly is in full panic now. I can hear it in his voice. He’s afraid the fragile airplane will come apart in the storm. He yells at me, “Bring it in on the belly.” I say to him, “Kelly, I’m not gonna do that.” I came around the third time and I held her nose high, just like I had wanted to, and put her down in a perfect two pointer, slick as a cat’s ass. Bounced a little, but nice enough. The minute I was down, the sky opened up and it poured, flooding the lake bed under two inches of water. That night we had a big party and we all got smashed. “Tony, you did a great job today,” Kelly said to me. Then he challenged me to an arm wrestle. The guy was strong as two oxen, but what the hell. He banged my arm down so hard he almost busted my wrist. I had it all bandaged up the next day. “What in hell happened to you?” he asked me. He was so soused he didn’t even remember arm-wrestling me.”

  On that day British and West German intelligence finished tunneling into East Berlin to eavesdrop on Soviet and East German military headquarters. Allen Dulles visited the Oval Office and made his report personally to President Eisenhower: “I’ve come to tell you about two successes today—one very high and the other very low.”

  7

  OVERFLYING RUSSIA

  A MONTH after the first U-2 flight, the Skunk Works’ test pilots were soaring 70,000 feet above the desert, breaking all existing altitude records in secret. After a few months, our pilots had logged 1,000 hours of flight time, had been to 74,500 feet, and had flown ten-hour 5,000-mile missions on one tank of gas.

  Kelly was delighted by the airplane’s performance even though our pilots experienced frequent engine stall-outs at these extreme altitudes, forcing Pratt & Whitney’s engineers to log huge overtime adjusting their high-altitude engine to become more efficient.

  With its enormous wingspan, designed to provide quick lift, the U-2 was able to glide for 250 miles from 70,000 feet, taking more than an hour to do so. Pilots couldn’t restart their engine unless they descended to the more oxygen-rich altitude of 35,000 feet or lower. Meanwhile, that damned engine caused another big headache by spraying oil onto the cockpit windshield via the compressor that ran the cockpit air-conditioning. That was my domain. The airplane held sixty-four quarts of oil, and we often had to replace twenty lost quarts after a flight. Our pilots breathed potentially volatile pure oxygen inside their sealed helmets, while their windshield dripped potentially volatile hot oil. I tried all kinds of solutions, but in desperation I heeded a suggestion made by one of our veteran mechanics: “Why don’t we just stuff Kotex around the oil filter and absorb the mess before it hits the windshield.”

  With great hesitation I approached the boss. Those steely eyes narrowed and he studied me hard. I saw my brief career at his side evaporate in one explosive bellow: “Rich, you’re out of here!”

  Kelly silently heard my sanitary napkin suggestion, then raised his eyebrows, shrugged, and said, “What the hell, give it a shot.” I called the crew out at the facility and told them to stand by for a delivery of industrial-size cartons of sanitary napkins being airlifted their way immediately. And, by God, it worked!

  But then a mysterious problem suddenly developed that held potentially disastrous consequences. The ground crews began reporting broken rubber seals inside engine valves and leaking pressure seals around the cockpit. The rubber had badly oxidized in only a few weeks, leaving all of us scratching our heads. We replaced the seals, but a few weeks later the seals leaked again. As it turned out, the answer to the mysterious malady was revealed one day on the front page of the Los Angeles Times, just beneath the fold. The article reported how European-made automobile tires were proving to be totally unacceptable for Los Angeles motorists. Because of our smog, the article reported, the rubber was badly oxidizing and causing “tire fatigue,” leading to flats and rapid deterioration. The villain was ozone, a key component of our noxious smog. U.S. tire manufacturers, aware of the smog problem, added silicone to the rubber for their tires shipped to Southern California in order to avoid this oxidation problem. Reading that story, I almost jumped out of my chair. The U-2 was flying at the top of the troposphere, which was heavily laden with ozone. I mentioned the article to Dick Boehme, the U-2 program manager, who took it directly to Kelly. The fix was made quickly. All our seals were replaced with silicone and the problem vanished.

  Despite the dreadful hours and the problems they caused in family life, the Skunk Works was for me far more splendid than a misery. Each day I found myself stretching on tiptoes to keep pace with my colleagues. Working with that crew was invigorating and fun. One of my favorites was our hydraulics guru, Dave Robertson, who in his spare time built toy square shells for a toy square cannon he invented, just to prove it could work. One Sunday I went over to his house and we lit the powder charge on the front lawn. Boom! The square projectile shot in a high arc across the street and blasted through the neighbor’s upstairs window. “Wow,” Dave grinned, “that little sucker really works!”

  I turned to Dave for help and advice during that period of U-2 test flights in the summer of 1955, when our test pilots began reporting “duct rumble” at fifty thousand feet, describing the sensation as driving down a deeply rutted road on four uneven tires. In an airplane as fragile as the U-2, such severe shaking was a serious problem. The cause was flying at a slant so that more air was entering one of the twin air-intake ducts than the other. The problem landed directly in my lap since I had designed the intakes. Dave helped me design a splitter to enhance more even airflow and that helped to alleviate the problem, but not entirely. At fifty thousand feet, pilots were continuing to experience a roughness, although not to the point of watching their wing flaps so that they broke into a cold sweat. I told Kelly, “We’ve got it under control, but it won’t go away. I have no idea why it happens only at fifty thousand feet.” He didn’t either. He just told our pilots: “Avoid flying at fifty thousand whenever possible. You should be up higher than that anyway.” Pratt & Whitney finally solved the problem completely a year or so later by revising the fuel control for a better match of air and fuel into the engine.

  But our test pilots had a lot more on their minds than rumbling ducts. Landing the U-2 on its two tandem wheels was neither easy nor routine. Our veteran test pilots warned Kelly that training CIA pilots to fly the U-2 and not getting one or more killed in the process was going to be a major challenge. Pilots were also apprehensive when hitting clear air turbulence and watching those long thin wings flapping like
a bird’s, worrying that the next big gust would snap them off entirely. And, by the way, there were no ejection seats in the early models of the airplane. Ejection seats would add thirty pounds above a regular seat, so to save precious weight, the CIA decided to dispense with them altogether.

  U-2 pilots would be trained to fly 9-hour-and-40-minute missions, flying round-trip on deep-penetration flights over the Soviet Union. The pilot needed an iron butt for ten-hour flights. “I ran out of ass before I ran out of gas,” some U-2 drivers would later complain—and who could blame them? A pilot was jammed inside a cockpit smaller than the front seat of a VW Beetle, laced into a bulky partial-pressure suit, his head encased in a heavy helmet, hooked to an oxygen breathing tube, a urine tube, and fighting off muscle cramps, hunger, sleepiness, and fatigue. If the cabin pressure and oxygen supply cut off, a pilot’s blood would boil off in seconds at more than thirteen miles above sea level.

  The U-2 was a stern taskmaster, unforgiving of pilot error or lack of concentration. No U-2 pilot, no matter how tired, would risk a few winks and leave the driving to his autopilot. The airplane demanded extraordinary pilot vigilance from the moment of takeoff. It was designed for an immediate steep climb, but it was critical to keep the wings level because they stored a very heavy fuel load and as the U-2 rose in the sky the fuel expanded under diminishing air pressure. One wing would sometimes feed the fuel into the engine more quickly than the other and that upset the airplane’s delicate balances. To regain this balance the pilot had to activate pumps that moved fuel from one wing to the other. Another very tricky aspect of flying this particular machine was maintaining carefully controlled airspeed. A pilot could fly up to 220 knots during a climb with a special gust control turned on that stiffened the wings and allowed it to hit wind gusts of up to fifty knots. But he also had to guard against climbing too slowly, that is, below 98 knots, or the airplane would stall and fall out of the sky. Above 102 knots the airplane experienced dangerous Mach or speed buffeting. So the slowest it could safely go was right next to the fastest it could go as it climbed steeply to above sixty-five thousand feet. And the shuddering felt the same whether it was the result of going too fast or too slow, so a pilot had to keep totally alert while making corrections. A mistake might make the buffeting worse and shake the airplane to pieces. And to make life more interesting, our test pilots reported that sometimes during a turn the inside wing would be shaking in stall buffet while the outside wing was shaking even more violently in Mach buffet.