Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed

by Ben R. Rich

I began picking up rumors that certain officials at the Pentagon were accusing me of rigging the test results of the radar range competition against Northrop. 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. Our integrity was as important to all of us as our inventiveness. The accusation, I discovered, was made by a civilian radar expert advising the Air Force, who had close ties to leading manufacturers of electronic jamming devices installed in all Air Force planes to fool or thwart enemy radar and missiles. If stealth was as good as we claimed, those companies might be looking for new work. His motivation for bad-mouthing us was obvious; but it was equally apparent that we were unfairly being attacked without any effective way for me to defend the Skunk Works’ integrity from three thousand miles away. So I invited one of the nation’s most respected radar experts to Burbank to personally test and evaluate our stealth data. MIT’s Lindsay Anderson accepted my invitation in the late summer of 1976 and arrived at my doorstep carrying a bag of ball bearings in his briefcase. The ball bearings ranged in size from a golf ball to an eighth of an inch in diameter. Profes...

Have Blue flew against the most sophisticated radars on earth, I think, and broke every record for low radar cross section. At one point we had flown right next to a big Boeing E-3 AWACS, with all its powerful electronics beaming full blast in all directions. Those guys liked to brag that they could actually find a needle in a haystack. Well, maybe needles were easier to find than airplanes.

“Ben,” he exclaimed, “we’ve lost our stealth.” He explained that Ken Dyson had flown that morning in Have Blue against the radar range and was lit like a goddam Christmas tree. “They saw him coming from fifty miles.” Actually, Keith and I both figured out what the problem was. Those stealth airplanes demanded absolutely smooth surfaces to remain invisible. That meant intensive preflight preparations in which special radar-absorbent materials were filled in around all the access panels and doors. This material came in sheets like linoleum and had to be perfectly cut to fit. About an hour after the first phone call, Keith phoned again. Problem solved. The heads of three screws were not quite tight and extended above the surface by less than an eighth of an inch. On radar they appeared as big as a barn door!

Bats. Bats were the first visual proof I had that stealth really worked. We had deployed thirty-seven F-117As to the King Khalid Air Base, in a remote corner of Saudi Arabia, out of the range of Saddam’s Scuds, about 900 miles from downtown Baghdad. The Saudis provided us with a first-class fighter base with reinforced hangars, and at night the bats would come out and feed off insects. In the mornings we’d find bat corpses littered around our airplanes inside the open hangars. Bats used a form of sonar to “see” at night, and they were crashing blindly into our low-radar-cross-section tails. After all those years of training, we certainly believed in the product, but it was nice having that kind of visual confirmation, nevertheless. On the night of D-day in Desert Storm, it fell on us to hit first. Most of us felt like firefighters about to test a flame-retardant shield by walking into a wall of fire. The so-called experts assured us that the suit worked, but we really wouldn’t know for sure until we made that fateful walk. As we suited up to fly into combat for the first time, one of the other pilots whispered to me, “Well, I sure hope to God that stealth shit really works.” He spoke for us all. H-hour for Desert Storm was three a.m. Baghdad time, January 17, 1991. I climbed into my airplane shortly after midnight. Frankly, I don’t think you could have driven a needle up my sphincter using a sledgehammer. From all our briefings we knew that we would be running up against t...

In spite of undertaking the most dangerous missions of that war, not one F-117A was hit by enemy fire. I know that Colonel Whitley had privately estimated losses of 5 to 10 percent in the first month of the air campaign. No one expected to escape without any losses at all. The stealth fighters composed only 2 percent of the total allied air assets in action and they flew 1,271 missions—only 1 percent of the total coalition air sorties—but accounted for 40 percent of all damaged targets attacked and compiled a 75 percent direct-hit rate. The direct-hit rate was almost as boggling as the no-casualty rate since laser-guided bombs are strictly line of sight, depending on good visibility, and the air war was conducted during some of the worst weather in the region in memory.

But the overriding fact of Desert Storm was that the only way the enemy knew the F-117A was in the sky above was when everything around him began blowing up.

Our crown of thorns was designing and building the powerful engine’s inlets—the key to the engine’s thrust and its ability to reach blistering speeds. This became the single most complex and vexing engineering problem of the entire project. Our engines needed tremendous volumes of air at very high pressures to be efficient, so Dave Campbell and I invented movable cones that controlled the velocity and pressure of the air as it entered the engines. These spike-shaped cones acted as an air throttle and actually produced 70 percent of the airplane’s total thrust. Getting those cones to function properly took about twenty of the best years off my life.

Ben, take a look at that,” he said, pointing to a deep dent near the crown. As Bill described it, he was cruising at sixty-five thousand feet on a clear, crisp morning above New Mexico, when suddenly, with his airplane blistering at 2.7 Mach, he was deafened by a loud bang and violently flung forward in his harness, smashing his head against the cockpit glass and almost knocked unconscious. “It felt like a couple of the L.A. Rams shaking me as hard as they could,” Bill said. The problem was called an “unstart.” It occurred when air entering one of the two engines was impeded by the angle of the airplane’s pitch or yaw and in only milliseconds decreased its efficiency from 80 percent to 20 percent. The movable-spike inlet control could correct the problem in about ten seconds, but meanwhile the pilot was flung around helplessly, battered all over the cockpit. Bill Park and Lou Schalk and several of our other pilots were experiencing these awful “unstarts” as much as twenty times in ten minutes. The damndest part was that the pilot often couldn’t tell which engine was affected and sometimes he turned off the wrong one to get a relight and was left with no power at all. This happened to a Blackbird over West Virginia. The pilot struggled to relight both engines as the airplane plunged toward earth. Finally at thirty thousand feet, the two engines came alive with a tremendous sonic boom that shattered windows for miles and toppled a factory’s tall chimney, crushing two workers...

The result stunned the blue-suiters, who thought it was impossible to successfully fire a missile from an airplane speeding at three times the speed of sound. Most air-to-air missiles traveled five, ten, fifteen miles to targets locked on at the same altitude or slightly below or above. We locked onto targets more than a hundred miles away and tens of thousands of feet below. From 80,000 feet, we knocked out drones flying on the deck at 1,500 feet. From 87,000 feet, we hit a drone flying at 40,000 feet. To keep the missile from hitting our own airplane, we added a trapeze device to the missile launch system and used ejection cartridges to drop the missile nose down before it fired and sped off to the target at Mach 6. Our first test of the new system occurred in March 1965. We hit a drone from 36 miles away at a closing rate of 2,000 mph. A few weeks later, we fired the missile from 75,000 feet, while traveling at Mach 3.2, and hit a drone flying at 40,000 feet, 38 miles away. But a few months later we really rocked the Air Force. From 75,000 feet, we hit a low-altitude remote-controlled B-47 flying over the Gulf of Mexico at 1,200 feet from 80 miles off.

On one operational flight in 1976, a Blackbird actually reached 85,068 feet while flying at 2,092 mph.

Time and again, the airplane and its counter-measure equipment proved their worth over North Vietnam, Cuba, and northern Russia. But mostly we could just outspeed any homing missile that would have to be led at least thirty miles ahead of its target to reach the Blackbird’s altitude of sixteen miles high and at 2,000 mph–plus speeds. Most missiles exploded harmlessly two to five miles behind the streaking SR-71. Often the crew was not even aware they had been fired upon.

We completed our pass over Beirut and turned toward Malta, when I got a warning low-oil-pressure light on my right engine. Even though the engine was running fine I slowed down and lowered our altitude and made a direct line for England. 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.

The tests began an hour after sunset and lasted until an hour before sunrise. Then Sea Shadow was docked inside the barge and tugged back to Long Beach. But the long, strenuous months of testing confirmed most of our original stealth predictions. One of the biggest problems we had to overcome was our own extreme invisibility! The ocean waves showed up on radar like a string of tracer bullets. And if the ship was totally invisible, it looked like a blank spot—like a hole in the doughnut—that was a dead giveaway. In the stealth business, you tried like the devil not to be quieter than the background

He backed me even though he insisted that it would be a complete waste of my time. “I’ll teach you all you need to know about running a company in one afternoon, and we’ll both go home early to boot. You don’t need Harvard to teach you that it’s more important to listen than to talk. You can get straight A’s from all your Harvard profs, but you’ll never make the grade unless you are decisive: even a timely wrong decision is better than no decision. The final thing you’ll need to know is don’t half-heartedly wound problems—kill them dead. That’s all there is to it. Now you can run this goddam place. Now, go on home and pour yourself a drink.”