Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed

by Ben R. Rich

Kelly was the shining light in the company’s six-man aviation department—the expert aerodynamicist, stress analyst, weight expert, wind tunnel and flight test engineer—and he did some test flying himself. He once said that unless he had the hell scared out of him once a year in a cockpit he wouldn’t have the proper perspective to design airplanes. Once that guy made up his mind to do something he was as relentless as a bowling ball heading toward a ten-pin strike. With his chili-pepper temperament, he was poison to any bureaucrat, a disaster to ass-coverers, excuse-makers, or fault-finders. Hall Hibbard, who was Kelly’s first boss at Lockheed, watched Kelly work for three days during the war to transform Lockheed’s Electra into a bomber for the British called the Hudson. The transformation was so successful that the RAF ordered three thousand airplanes, and Hibbard was so awestruck by Johnson’s design skills, he claimed “that damned Swede can actually see air.” Kelly later told me that Hibbard’s remark was the greatest compliment he had ever received.

The engineers dressed very informally—no suits or ties—because being stashed away, no one in authority except Kelly ever saw them anyway. “We don’t dress up for each other,” Kelly’s assistant, Dick Boehme, told me with a laugh. I asked Dick how long I could expect to stay. He shrugged. “I don’t know exactly what Kelly has in mind for you to do, but I’d guess anywhere from six weeks to six months.” He was slightly off: I stayed for thirty-six years.

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.