Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed

by Ben R. Rich

In the end we had to team up with Northrop to pay for the poles, because the Air Force wasn’t about to foot the bill. It cost around half a million dollars. And I designed a double-wedge pylon which they tested on a 50,000-watt megatron, state of the art in transmitters, that could pick up an object the size of an ant from a mile away. On that radar the pole was about the size of a bumblebee. John Cashen, who was Northrop’s stealth engineer, was in the control room when they fired up the radar. And I overheard their program manager whisper to John: “Jesus, if they can do that with a frigging pole, what can they do with their damned model?”

And as the day heated on the desert, inversion layers sometimes bent the radar off the target. One day, while using supersensitive radar, the inversion layer bent the beam off the target, making us four decibels better than we deserved. I saw that error, but the technician didn’t. What the hell, it wasn’t my job to tell him he had a false pattern. I figured Northrop probably benefited from a few of them too, and it would all come out in the wash.

But then Ben Rich called me and said, “Listen, take the best pattern we’ve got, calculate the cross section level, and tell me the size of the ball bearing that matches our model.” This was a Ben Rich kind of idea. The model was now shrunk down from a golf ball to a marble because of bad data. But it was official bad data, and no one knew it was bad except little me.

An Air Force general called me, snarling like a pit bull. “Rich, I’m told you guys are pulling a fast one on us with phony data.” I was so enraged that I hung up on that son of a bitch. No one would have ever dared to accuse Kelly Johnson’s Skunk Works of rigging any data, and by God, no one was going to make that accusation against Ben Rich’s operation either.

The pilot tells the flight control system what he wants it to do just by normal flying: maneuvering the throttle and foot pedals directing the control surfaces. The electronics will move the surfaces the way the pilot commands, but often the system will automatically override him and do whatever it has to do to keep the system on track and stable without the pilot even being aware of it. Our airplane was a triumph of computer technology. Without it, we could not even taxi straight.

Once he ejected from an SR-71 that began to flip over on takeoff. I was sure Park was about to become a grease spot on the tarmac, but his chute opened just as his feet hit the ground, yanking him upward as he was impacting. He left three-inch-deep heel imprints in the sand, but was unhurt. Bill is damned thorough and damned lucky, a great combination for someone in his line of work.

Before the F-117A flew on the first night of combat in Operation Desert Storm, we had been forced to ponder how many days and sorties it would require before we could grind down enemy air defenses to the point where we could conduct a full-scale air campaign. The combination of stealth with its high-precision munitions provided an almost total assurance that we could destroy enemy defenses from day one and the air campaign could be swift and almost devoid of any losses. In the past, you would have been betting your hat, ass, and spats on a lot of wishful thinking to conceive a battle plan that would eliminate most of the highest-value enemy targets over the most heavily defended city on earth on the opening night of the war.

As young and green as I was, I had already earned my very own patent for designing a Nichrome wire to wrap around and electrically heat the urine-elimination tube used on Navy patrol planes. Crewmen complained that on freezing winter days their penises were sticking painfully to the metal funnel. My design solved their problem and I’m sure made me their unknown hero. Both my design and patent were classified “Secret.”

The projects at Lockheed were all big-ticket items, and workrooms as big as convention halls were crammed with endless rows of white-shirted draftsmen, working elbow to elbow, at drafting tables. We engineers sat elbow to elbow, too, but in smaller rooms and a slightly less regimented atmosphere. We were the analytical experts, the elite of the plant, who decreed sizes and shapes and told the draftsmen what to draw.

Edwin Land, who designed the Polaroid camera, is also designing our cameras, the highest-resolution camera in the world. He’s got Jim Baker, the Harvard astronomer, doing a thirty-six-inch folded optic lens for us. We’ll be able to read license plates. And we’ve got Eastman Kodak developing a special thin film that comes in thirty-six-hundred-foot rolls, so we won’t run out.”

If I screwed up, I quickly admitted it and corrected my mistake. For example, one day I suggested something that would have added a hydraulic damper into the design and that meant decreasing altitude by increasing weight. I saw Kelly’s face cloud over before I even finished speaking, and I immediately slapped my forehead and said, “Wait a minute. I’m a dumb shit. You’re trying to take off pounds…. Back to the drawing board.”

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.

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?

I was a twenty-six-year-old with a thousand hours of fighter time, who had almost died of disappointment the first time I saw the U-2. I looked in the cockpit and saw that the damn thing had a yoke, or steering wheel. The last straw. Either you flew with a stick like a self-respecting fighter jock or you were a crappy bomber driver—a goddam disgrace—who steered with a yoke, like a damned truck driver at the steering wheel of a big rig.

Vito had a close call. The ground crew had put his poison cyanide pill in the wrong pocket. We were issued the pill in case of capture and torture and all that good stuff, but given the option whether to use it or not. But Carmen didn’t know the cyanide was in the right breast pocket of his coveralls when he dropped in a fistful of lemon-flavored cough drops. The cyanide pill was supposed to be in an inside pocket. Vito felt his throat go dry as he approached Moscow for the first time—who could blame him? So he fished in his pocket for a cough drop and grabbed the cyanide pill instead and popped it into his mouth. He started to suck on it. Luckily he realized his mistake in a split second and spit it out in horror before it could take effect. Had he bit down he would have died instantly and crashed right into Red Square. Just imagine the international uproar!

By the Pentagon’s own estimate, 90 percent of all hard data on Soviet military development came directly from the cameras on board the U-2.

Kelly sighed and said he agreed with me. He picked up the phone and called Secretary of the Air Force James Douglas Jr. “Mr. Secretary,” he said, “I’m afraid I’m building you a dog. My recommendation is that we cancel Suntan and send you back your money as soon as possible. We don’t have the range to justify this project.”

The CIA had been covering Cuba with U-2 flights for years. And then, in August 1962, they hit pay dirt and came up with the pictures that showed the Russians were planting ballistic missiles right next door, SS-4s and SS-5s. When Kennedy was shown the site constructions, he asked, “How do we know these sites are being manned?” They showed Kennedy a picture taken from 72,000 feet, showing a worker taking a dump in an outdoor latrine. The picture was so clear you could see that guy reading a newspaper.

The DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) was involved in a test project on the U.S.–Mexican border in the late 1970s to test infrared film filter combinations on poppy fields photographed from high altitudes. Every growing thing has its own infrared signature, and the agents wanted to discover how poppies photographed at various stages in their growth cycle; photo interpreters could tell how close to harvesting a particular field was. The field in question was in Yuma, Arizona, specially cultivated under the DEA’s supervision, using fugitive Mexican poppy planters. A U-2 would overfly the field at various stages in the growth cycle and photograph it. Finally, the agency, after conferring with the Mexican planters, ordered a last flight for photos showing poppies ready to harvest. The U-2 flew over the field, as scheduled, only to discover the poppy field had been swept clean: the workers had harvested the crop the night before and slipped back into Mexico. The first U.S. government–subsidized and grown heroin was probably on the streets a few weeks later.

Kelly was now so desperate to save weight that he upped the ante to one hundred and fifty bucks to anyone who could save him a measly ten pounds. I suggested we inflate the Blackbird’s tires with helium and give each pilot a preflight enema. Kelly tried the helium idea, but helium bled right through the tires. The enema idea he left to me to try to promote among the pilots.

Several of us escorted the official party during the inspection tour of the Blackbird inside the giant assembly building. One of the generals on the secretary’s staff took me aside. “Mr. Rich,” he said, “I don’t understand why you’re building those large spikes to block air coming into the inlet. What is the principle here? It seems to me you’d want the air unimpeded.” I couldn’t believe that an Air Force general would ask such a naive question. I said, “General, the object is to build up pressure at high altitudes. Did you ever try to squirt water from a hose by placing your thumb over the opening?” His nod showed a glimmer of understanding.

But my theory was that the hostiles realized that reconnaissance flights were actually stabilizing. We knew what they were looking at and they knew what we were looking at. If they denied us, we’d deny them. And then everyone would get the jitters. In this game, you didn’t deny access unless you were ready to get serious about preventing it.

We decided to cross France without clearance instead of going the roundabout way. We made it almost across, when I looked out the left window and saw a French Mirage III sitting ten feet off my left wing. He came up on our frequency and asked us for our Diplomatic Clearance Number. I had no idea what he was talking about, so I told him to stand by. I asked my backseater, who said, “Don’t worry about it. I just gave it to him.” What he had given him was “the bird” with his middle finger. I lit the afterburners and left that Mirage standing still. Two minutes later, we were crossing the Channel.

Kelly called me late at home one night and personally lobbied me about Ben. He had a couple of belts in him and he said, “Goddam it, Roy, I raised Ben in my own image. He loves the cutting edge as much as I do, but he knows the value of a buck and he’s as practical as a goddam screwdriver. He’ll do great, Roy. Mark my words.”

Kelly and his third wife, Nancy, quickly embraced Hilda, and she, in turn, became close to both of them over the next eventful years. Kelly, in particular, loved the story of Hilda’s first trip with me to the Paris Air Show in 1983. The Russians invited us to visit their new C-5-like cargo plane, and when the CIA heard about it, they asked me if they could have one of their own technical experts accompany me while posing as just a personal friend I dragged along. The expert turned out to be a young and attractive brunette, and Hilda walked with her arm-in-arm on board the Soviet C-5 and introduced her as her cousin.

Arming our friends was good business, but being able to shoot them down if they became our enemies was good strategy.

Extremely difficult but specific objectives (e.g., a spy plane flying at 85,000 feet with a range of 6,000 miles) and the freedom to take risks—and fail—define the heart of a Skunk Works operation.

Dr. Ufimtsev came to teach electromagnetic theory at UCLA in 1990. Until his arrival here he had remained blissfully unaware of his enormous impact on America’s stealth airplane development, but clearly wasn’t surprised by the news. “Senior Soviet designers were absolutely uninterested in my theories,” he wryly observed.