Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed

by Ben R Rich

  When we in the Skunk Works first built the U-2, we thought it would be in production for about eighteen months, but it is still in service. During Operation Desert Storm, the U-2 overflights monitored Iraqi tank movements, and its side-band radar proved effective in revealing the presence and configuration of enemy mine fields. In January 1993, when the outgoing Bush administration decided to bomb Saddam Hussein’s missile batteries in the southern “no-fly” zone, the U-2 was once again providing the vital intelligence data preliminary to the bombing. On the day before the bombing raid, I received a call at home from an official of the CIA. “Ben,” he said, “we just got a call from President-elect Clinton. He wants to know the altitude of the U-2. No one at this end is sure, so I thought I’d go straight to the horse’s mouth.”

  “Tell the president-elect that our bird flies at seventy thousand feet.” And I said it with pride.

  9

  FASTER THAN A SPEEDING BULLET

  The Blackbird, which dominated our work in the sixties, was the greatest high-performance airplane of the twentieth century. Everything about this airplane’s creation was gigantic: the technical problems that had to be overcome, the political complexities surrounding its funding, even the ability of the Air Force’s most skilled pilots to master this incredible wild horse of the stratosphere. Kelly Johnson rightly regarded the Blackbird as the crowning triumph of his years at the Skunk Works’ helm. All of us who shared in its creation wear a badge of special pride. Nothing designed and built by any other aerospace operation in the world, before or since the Blackbird, can begin to rival its speed, height, effectiveness, and impact. Had we built Blackbird in the year 2010, the world would still have been awed by such an achievement. But the first model, designed and built for the CIA as the successor to the U-2, was being test-flown as early as 1962. Even today, that feat seems nothing less than miraculous.

  KELLY JOHNSON’S disappointment over our failure to produce a workable hydrogen-powered airplane had him pouting for a day or two, but he quickly recovered and began lobbying the CIA for a new spy plane to fly over Russia that would be a quantum leap over the U-2 in every way. He assembled the small group of us who had worked on the hydrogen plane and had us brainstorming ideas for new designs and approaches for an airplane that used conventional engines and fuel but still could outrace any Russian missile. “It makes no sense,” he said, “to just take this one or two steps ahead, because we’d be buying only a couple of years before the Russians would be able to nail us again. No, I want us to come up with an airplane that can rule the skies for a decade or more.”

  At that point, in April 1958, the U-2 overflights of Russia were in their second year and going well. In fact, it would be two more years before Francis Gary Powers was shot down, and the high priority at the Skunk Works was Operation Rainbow, our attempt to lower the U-2’s radar cross section. But Kelly declared the U-2 doomed. The Russians had made it a matter of national honor to find a way to stop U-2 overflights and were investing billions of rubles in rushing to develop a missile system to do so. Dick Bissell shared Kelly’s glum outlook for the U-2’s future and encouraged him to begin sketching out a successor spy plane. “We’ll fly at ninety thousand feet, and jack up the speed to Mach 3. It will have a range of four thousand miles,” Kelly told a group of us. “The higher and faster we fly the harder it will be to spot us, much less stop us.”

  I didn’t know about Richard Bissell of the CIA, but Ben Rich of the Skunk Works reacted to Kelly’s idea with jaw-dropping disbelief. He was proposing to build an airplane that would fly not only four times faster than the U-2 but five miles higher—and the U-2 was then the current high-altitude champion of the skies. A Mach 3 airplane was 60 percent faster than the maximum dash capability of our top-performance jet fighter. Experimental rocket airplanes had flown at blinding Mach 3 speed using powerful thrusters for two or three minutes at a time until fuel ran out. But Kelly was proposing an airplane to cruise at more than three times the speed of sound, that could fly coast to coast in less than an hour on one tank of gas.

  Kelly’s audacious idea would probably not have been taken seriously by the CIA coming from anyone other than the boss of the Skunk Works. After all, in 1954 we had built the F-104 Starfighter, the world’s first Mach 2 fighter. So a Mach 3 airplane seemed a logical extension of our skills. However, there was a Grand Canyon–size gulf between designing an airplane like the F-104 that could kick in its afterburners on takeoffs and in dash modes lasting a minute or two, and designing an airplane whose “normal” cruising speed was nearly twice as fast as the fastest fighter’s dash speed. On afterburners, a fighter was burning fuel at a rate four times faster than at cruise speed, so afterburners were saved for combat threat situations—escaping flak after a bombing run or outflying missiles or dogfighting MiGs. We were proposing to fly whole missions on afterburners. The technology confronting us was so far beyond anything on the drawing boards of any other aerospace company in the world that we might as well have been proposing commuter rocket service between the moon and the outer ring of planets.

  For openers, to be able to fly sustained at such heights and speeds would require radical departures in how we designed and built propulsion systems.

  “Rich,” Kelly said, turning my way, “I’m making you program manager for the propulsion system.” He ignored my stunned expression. “How hot do you suppose the airplane will get at Mach 3 in sustained flight?” he asked me. “Somewhere between a blowtorch and a soldering iron, I guess,” I replied when my voice returned. He nodded. “Probably around nine hundred degrees at the nose,” he said. “Just imagine that kind of thrust! You’re the lucky one. You’ll at least have known laws of physics to guide you. The rest of us are going to have to do some fancy stretching to find out what can work. We start from scratch as if we are building the first airplane, just like the Wright brothers.”

  If I had been older and smarter, I would’ve run for the nearest exit. I had to produce a propulsion system more efficient than any other ever designed. I was then only a thirty-two-year-old fledgling, still on probation to prove my worth as a propulsion and thermodynamics engineer among many of my senior colleagues. But I was cocky enough to shrug off Kelly’s challenge and think, A Mach 3 airplane! Why in hell not? Kelly surrounded himself only with the kind of can-do guys that made American aerospace technology preeminent. To him, the word “impossible” was a gross insult.

  Kelly promised to deliver the world’s first Mach 3 airplane to the CIA only twenty months after we signed a contract. That also seemed to me, in my pathetic innocence, a reasonable deadline. After all, it had taken us only eight quick months to deliver the first U-2. Had I really thought about it, in complexity the U-2 was to the Blackbird as a covered wagon was to an Indy 500 race car.

  To action-oriented guys like Bissell and Kelly, President Eisenhower often moved too cautiously. In pique, they referred to him as “Speedy Gonzales,” while being forced to cool their heels for weeks or months awaiting Oval Office decisions, whether for approving a particular U-2 mission over Russia or signing off on a new spy plane project. Kelly’s airplane was bound to cost millions, and would be a tough sell. The president was already spending a billion dollars in covert funds on the Agena rocket that would boost our first spy satellite into orbit. Bissell was in charge of that program, too, and the first twelve test firings had all been failures. Lockheed’s Missiles and Space Company in Sunnyvale, California, had that contract, and Bissell asked Kelly to evaluate and reorganize their operation. Kelly set up a mini Skunk Works and, coincidentally or not, the thirteenth test shot was a success. But spy satellites had distinct limitations: their pictures in those days were not very sharp, and their orbits were fixed, so the Russians would learn to hide secrets before each scheduled overflight. By contrast, a spy plane operated on no fixed schedules, could loiter in areas of interest, and could overfly tension spots within hours. Our photography was vastly superior to a satellite’s.

  Ike tremendousl
y valued the U-2 photo takes but continually worried about the consequences of a shoot-down. He was attracted to the satellite alternative because he felt it was a less aggressive and threatening way to obtain overhead intelligence. Nations would learn to live in the age of satellites, but a spy plane flight would always be regarded as a provocative and aggressive violation of a country’s territory. So Bissell wisely decided to seek the backing of Ike’s two most influential technology advisers—Dr. James Killian, the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Dr. Edwin Land of Polaroid, who chaired the presidential advisory panel on aerial espionage and was the godfather of the U-2 program. In May 1958, Kelly flew to Cambridge to meet with Dr. Land and his associates. At that first meeting he was amazed to learn that the Navy had its own Rube Goldberg blueprint for a high-flying spy plane. Theirs would be a ramjet, lifted high into the stratosphere by a balloon. At 100,000 feet, the pilot would release the balloon, light booster rockets to get his ramjet started, then roar up to 155,000 feet. A Navy commander presented this unique idea to the panel while Kelly sat scribbling figures on a pad. “By my calculations,” Kelly told the group, “in order to lift that ramjet, the Navy’s balloon would have to be over one mile in diameter. Gentlemen, that’s one hell of a lot of hot air.”

  A more serious proposal came from Convair, which had also been solicited by Bissell for ideas on a high-flying, high-speed spy plane. They had built the B-58 Hustler bomber, a highly regarded Mach 2 tactical strike airplane, which they presented as a “mothership” that would launch a piloted rocket plane that supposedly could reach 125,000 feet at Mach 4. The piggyback launch concept interested Land, but as months passed and the idea was further refined and tested, it became increasingly obvious that the B-58 could not go supersonic while carrying a smaller bird under its belly. Kelly was also skeptical about whether Convair’s plan could produce a reliable photo platform, and he wasn’t shy in passing along his doubts to his CIA friends.

  Over the next year Kelly shuttled back and forth to Washington, meeting with Bissell, Land, and other panel members, offering them our latest designs and radar test data, often returning dejected by rumors that Convair’s proposals promised better performance and radar-cross-section data than ours, even though our first preliminary design drawing looked terrific. It was designated A-1, and showed a striking single-seat, two-engine airplane—a long, sleek, bullet-shaped fuselage with rounded inlets on big engines mounted on the tip of small delta wings that were two-thirds of the way back on the fuselage. One look and even a schoolboy would realize that this bird was designed for blazing speed. But the president was less interested in performance and more intent on pushing for the lowest radar cross section possible. It wasn’t that he just didn’t want to get us shot down—he didn’t want the Russians to know we were even up there.

  Kelly argued with Washington that our tremendous height and speed advantages were the most potent factors in making us difficult to detect, but the White House and the CIA were not mollified. So we decided to apply radar-absorbing ferrites and plastics to all the airplane’s leading edges—a first in military aviation. We kept the twin tails as small as possible and decided to try to construct them entirely with radar-absorbing composites—a significant technological breakthrough if we could actually do it. But “hiding” this airplane seemed impossible. The tremendous heat generated in supersonic flight made infrared detection inevitable. How do you hide a meteor? Our Mach 3 airplane would streak across the sky like a flaming arrow.

  About six months into the design phase I could see discouragement clouding Kelly’s big round face. Our design was now numbered A-10 and we still were not achieving lower radar-cross-section results than Convair, according to Dick Bissell. So, in late March 1959, we began a series of almost around-the-clock brainstorming sessions to review all our previous work and to somehow find a design that would elude Soviet radar. But it seemed fruitless, and Kelly invited Bissell and a couple of agency radar experts to Burbank for what was to be a showdown “where we stand” meeting. He asked me and two others from the design team to sit in and lend him moral support.

  The meeting was tense and somber; Kelly was typically candid. “We’ve put in six months of intensive design and study, and by God, we know what we’re doing, but we will never get to the point where the president will be happy with the results. I’m convinced that current improvements in Russian radar will allow them to detect any airplane built in the next three to five years. Radar technology is far ahead of antiradar technology, and we’re just going to have to live with that fact. We’ll never achieve the zero degree of visibility the president seems so stuck on. That technology is way beyond what we know how to do at this point. Maybe Convair can deliver it for you. But we can’t.”

  Not much more was said. And when the CIA officials left, Kelly said to us, “Well, boys, I think we’re out. Ike wants an airplane from Mandrake the Magician.”

  But later he took me aside. “Keep after this, Ben. Maybe Land or someone else will get Ike to see the light.”

  We kept working mostly because it was an unusually slack period at the Skunk Works, without too many other competing distractions. By design A-11, in May 1959, we felt we had scored a breakthrough in dramatically lowering the radar cross section of the aircraft. One of the structural designers presented the idea of modifying the bullet-shaped fuselage by adding a chine, a lateral downward sloped surface that gave the fuselage an almost cobralike appearance. Now the underbelly of the airplane was flat, and the radar cross section had magically decreased by an incredible 90 percent.

  By July, we decided to lay out a final revised drawing of the entire airplane making full use of the new chine configuration. In those days I shared an office with four others working on the new airplane—aerodynamicist Dick Fuller, two others who did performance and stability control, and my own sidekick in propulsion, a brilliant twenty-four-year-old Caltech grad named David Campbell, an aerothermodynamicist. (Dave was destined for true greatness, but only two years later, during his daily two-mile jog, he dropped dead from a massive coronary; he was only twenty-six years old.)

  I was separated by a connecting doorway from the office of four structures guys, who configured the strength, loads, and weight of the airplane from preliminary design sketches. They put skin and muscle onto the original design concept.

  After lunch one blazing summer afternoon, the aerodynamics group in my office began talking through the open door to the structures bunch about calculations on the center of pressures on the fuselage, when suddenly I got the idea of unhinging the door between us, laying the door between a couple of desks, tacking onto it a long sheet of paper, and having all of us join in designing the optimum final design to make full use of the chines. My object was simple. I said, “We’re never going to get this design a hundred percent right. We could play around forever. But I think we now know enough to nail it down at eighty percent. And that’s plenty good enough.”

  One of the participants later wisecracked that it was like the Russian and American soldiers joining up on the banks of the Elbe River during the last days of World War II. It took us a day and a half; Ed Baldwin did the basic design and Ed Martin the systems. Henry Combs and Ray McHenry did the structures. Merv Heal figured the weights and Lorne Cass the loads. Dan Zuck designed the cockpit, and Dave Robertson handled the fuel system requirements. Dave Campbell and I weighed in with propulsion and Dick Fuller and Dick Cantrell with the aerodynamics. Everyone chipped in with changes and modifications from previous designs. The airplane weighed 96,000 pounds without fuel—keeping it light to maximize fuel consumption and minimize cost—and was 108 feet long with an extremely thin double delta wing attached at mid-fuselage. The wing edge was designed so razor-thin that it could actually cut a mechanic’s hand. We took the long sheet of paper to Kelly Johnson and unrolled it on his desk. We told him, “Kelly, everything is now exactly where it should be—the engines, the inlets, the twin tails. This is probably as close to the
best we can come up with.”

  It was our twelfth design, number A-12, which would later become its official CIA project designation. Kelly took the design and ran with it to Washington. Throughout midsummer 1959, he shuttled back and forth to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, nearly a dozen times, meeting with Bissell, Land, Allen Dulles, and others, noting at one point in his private journal, “There is a good deal of concern that Speedy Gonzales [Ike] will cancel. Too expensive.”

  But the deal was finally nailed on August 28: “Saw Mr. Bissell alone. He told me that we had the project and that Convair was out of the picture. The agency accepts our conditions that our method of doing business will be identical to that of the U-2. Mr. Bissell agreed very firmly to this latter condition and said that unless it was done this way he wanted nothing to do with the project either. He and Allen Dulles stated following conditions: (1) We must exercise the greatest possible ingenuity, an honest effort in the field of radar. (2) The degree of security on this project is, if possible, even tighter than on the U-2, and (3) We should make no large commitments, large meaning in terms of millions of dollars.”