Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed

by Leo Janos

And we were supposedly an elite group doing momentous work.

Abandoning this kind of adversarial posturing

We could trace each part back to the original mill pour,

Kelly’s rule was never put an engineer more than fifty feet from the assembly area.

Another weird thing was that after a flight the windshields often were pitted with tiny black dots, like burn specks. We couldn’t figure out what in hell it was. We had the specks lab tested, and they turned out to be organic material—insects that had been injected into the stratosphere and were circling in orbit around the earth with dust and debris at seventy-five thousand feet in the jet stream. How in hell did they get lifted up there? We finally figured it out: they were hoisted aloft from the atomic test explosions in Russia and China.

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.

you’ll never make the grade unless you are decisive: even a timely wrong decision is better than no decision.

So we bit the bullet and just took the heat.