Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed

by Leo Janos

The stealth fighter became operational one year later. By then, the Air Force had decided to expand its deployment on a global scale, for a total of fifty-nine stealth fighters, to comprise three squadrons of a special and secret wing. One squadron would be deployed to England, for coverage of Western Europe, the Middle East, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe. A second squadron would be sent to South Korea, to provide standby attack capabilities throughout Asia. The third squadron would be in training stateside. We delivered thirty-three airplanes by 1986 and the remaining twenty-six by the middle of 1990. We built eight a year at a fly-away cost of $43 million each. Stealth did not come cheap, but considering the revolutionary nature of the product and the enormous strategic advantages it afforded, the F-117A was the most cost-effective new weapons system in the inventory. The first stealth fighter squadron, composed of eighteen airplanes and a few spares, was ready to go to battle only five years after the initial Air Force go-ahead, suffering only one, nonfatal, crash in the process.

Our supplier, Titanium Metals Corporation, had only limited reserves of the precious alloy, so the CIA conducted a worldwide search and, using third parties and dummy companies, managed to unobtrusively purchase the base metal from one of the world’s leading exporters—the Soviet Union. The Russians never had an inkling of how they were actually contributing to the creation of the airplane being rushed into construction to spy on their homeland.

I logged hundreds of hours testing inlet shapes and cone models at NASA’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field in Northern California, a giant complex of high-speed wind tunnels. That became my second home, where I spent weeks at a time using their largest, most-powerful supersonic wind tunnel, a twenty-foot-long, ten-foot by ten-foot rectangular chamber powered by a gigantic compressor capable of driving an ocean liner, and a three-story cooling tower holding tens of thousands of gallons of water. Running Mach 3 pressures for several hours at a time drained so much electricity needed by local industry that we were forced to test only late at night, working usually until dawn. Wind tunnel tests cost us $10,000 to $15,000 an hour and we ran up a stupendous bill because our models were tested from every angle and on more than 250,000 separate measuring points, across a broad range of Mach numbers and pressures.

“This goddam titanium is causing premature aging. I’m not talking about on parts. I’m talking about on me.”

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 to death.

I had 600 hours piloting Blackbird, and my last flight was just as big a thrill as my first. At 85,000 feet and Mach 3, it was almost a religious experience. My first flight out of Beale in ’67, I took off late on a winter afternoon, heading east where it was already dark, and it was one of the most amazing and frightening moments going from daylight into a dark curtain of night that seemed to be hung across half of the continent. There was nothing in between—you streaked from bright day and flew into utter black, like being swallowed up into an abyss. My God, even now, I get goosebumps remembering. We flew to the east coast then turned around and headed back to California and saw the sun rising in the west as we reentered daylight. We were actually outspeeding the earth’s rotation!

The blue-suiters decided to invest $300 million in updating the airplane’s electronics with digital flight controls and a new weather-penetrating synthetic-aperture radar system, as well as refurbishing its power systems. But General Larry Welch, the Air Force chief of staff, staged a one-man campaign on Capitol Hill to kill the program entirely. General Welch thought sophisticated spy satellites made the SR-71 a disposable luxury.

The bid contained specific design and performance requirements for a fighter that weighed 17,000 pounds, carried 5,000 pounds of fuel, had a 275-square-foot wing, and a specific excess power rate. I was ready to put my design team on it and give the Air Force exactly what they asked for, but Kelly had other ideas. “Goddam it, Ben, this airplane isn’t carrying enough fuel. A fighter on afterburner uses a thousand pounds a minute, and every fighter that carried only five thousand pounds in Vietnam combat ran out in tough spots and the pilot wound up as a guest at the Hanoi Hilton. This is unacceptable. I won’t submit a proposal for something this wrong.” I pleaded with Kelly to go along. I said, “Give the Air Force what they ask for initially, and as the procurement process unfolds all kinds of changes and modifications will follow. That always happens; you know that. But if you cut us off before we even get up to the plate, there’s no way we can score.” He got sore. “Ben, if I teach you anything, it’s this: don’t build an airplane you don’t believe in. Don’t prostitute yourself for bucks.” In the end, he allowed us to submit his version of what he thought the Air Force should be requesting: a fighter weighing 19,000 pounds and carrying 9,000 pounds of fuel and a 310-square-foot wing. General Dynamics won the competition by sticking to exactly what the Air Force wanted. By the time their airplane, the F-16, became operational, it weighed 19,000 pounds, carried 7,400 pounds o...

The open secret in our business was that the government practiced a very obvious form of paternalistic socialism to make certain that its principal weapons suppliers stayed solvent and maintained a skilled workforce. Aerospace especially demanded the most trained workers, a labor pool totaling about a quarter million, in the employ of the four or five biggest manufacturers and their host of subcontractors. Each of the major players enjoyed its own special niche, which kept contract awards relatively equitable. The largest was McDonnell Douglas, which specialized in fighters, building hundreds of F-15 interceptors for the Air Force and the Navy’s top fighter, the F-18. Next came General Dynamics, builder of the F-16, a cheap, lightweight fighter sold by the hundreds to our NATO allies, as well as submarines, tanks, and missiles. Lockheed was a solid third, specializing in Polaris missiles, satellites, military cargo aircraft, and spy planes. And finally, Northrop and Rockwell.

New advanced-technology airplanes are budget breakers. The B-2 bomber, at more than $2 billion a copy, proves that point. But we need stealthy long-range bombers like B-2s, which can fly anywhere in the world in twelve hours and drop a payload of forty conventional bombs. Still, unless we manage to get wildly inflated production costs down, aeronautics could well become an arcane art practiced by one or two manufacturers who somehow manage to survive. (Grumman, the Navy’s principal supplier of fighters for nearly sixty years, recently abandoned the sluggish fighter business entirely, while several other big manufacturers are also rumored to be planning to quit increasingly high-risk and unprofitable military aircraft production.)

Even at the Skunk Works I’ve seen my share of money wasted, at times in the most ridiculous ways imaginable. One that particularly sticks in my craw occurred when President Johnson first announced in 1964 the existence of the RS-71, the Air Force two-seater Blackbird. That’s right, RS-71 was its official designation, but Johnson accidentally turned it around and called it the “SR-71.” Instead of putting out a brief correction, the Air Force decided not to call attention to a very minor mistake by the commander in chief and ordered us to change about twenty-nine thousand blueprints and drawings at a cost of thousands of dollars so that they would read “SR-71” and not “RS-71.”

One of the problems with our stealth fighter was that because it was hidden for years behind a wall of tight security, most Air Force tactical planners didn’t even know it existed and thus had no way of integrating the airplane into overall combat planning and strategy. By the time the F-117A arrived on station for duty in Operation Desert Storm, the airplane was largely a cipher to the high command in terms of its performance capabilities. After the war ended, Lt. General Charles Horner, in charge of Air Force operations, stated frankly that before the F-117A’s first combat mission, he was apprehensive about the effectiveness of stealth in combat. “We had a lot of technical data, but I had no way of knowing that we would not lose the entire fleet that first night of the war. We were betting everything on the data proving the technology—but we had no real experience with the airplane to know for certain how well it performed under fire. We sent those boys in naked and all alone.

Another sound management practice that is gospel at the Skunk Works is to stick with reliable suppliers. Japanese auto manufacturers discovered long ago that periodically switching suppliers and selecting new ones on the basis of lowest bidders proved a costly blunder. New suppliers frequently underbid just to gain a foothold in an industry, then meet their expenses by providing inferior parts and quality that can seriously impair overall performance standards.

Sunset laws on security are an important first step toward real dollar saving. But government has a long list of needed reforms in the area of imposing sunset provisions on dozens of unnecessary regulations. Companies with solid track records should be rewarded with less supervision and outside interference, while companies that fail to meet performance requirements should be penalized severely.

Increasingly, we will be facing small hostile countries armed to the teeth with the latest weapons technologies purchased from irresponsible outlets in Western Europe or from Russian, Chinese, or North Korean sources. A small country firing high-tech weaponry can do as much damage on the battlefield as a major power. Just remind the Russian high command of the tremendous losses of Hind helicopters they sustained in Afghanistan to a bunch of ragtag peasants firing shoulder-held Stinger missiles, supplied to them by our CIA.