Kelly

by Clarence L. Johnson

  The unusual “flying” tail configuration also was tested initially on these rocket “wind tunnels.”

  With the first F-104, we faced again the problem of starting work on an airplane before there was an engine for it. So, like the F-80, the F-104 flew with one engine in the first two prototypes before acquiring the engine for which it really was designed—the General Electric J-79.

  The first airplane was built and flown in a year and a day. Tony LeVier took off from Edwards AFB on February 28, 1954. I like to schedule first flights on my birthday when I can, but I missed this one by a day.

  That new GE engine gave us trouble early in the flight program. The problem was in the control to the afterburner—which injects extra fuel into the hot exhaust gas, burning it to raise temperatures and speed flow out the tailpipe. It can double the thrust when an extra burst of power is needed for takeoff or in flight.

  On this engine the afterburner eyelids had a nasty habit of opening unexpectedly under certain conditions, resulting in an almost total loss of thrust. We built our own engine test tunnel specifically to run tests ourselves and try to speed redesign of the engine.

  Before it was corrected in engine design, the problem cost seven planes and seven pilots. That still sticks in my craw. The fix was very slow in coming.

  The gun caused problems, too, in early firing tests. The flights required all the expertise of veteran pilots LeVier and Herman “Fish” Salmon—who flew the first production model of the F-104—as distinguished from the first experimental model flown by LeVier.

  Lockheed test pilot “Fish” Salmon with F-104 Starfighter.

  For LeVier it meant making the first dead-stick landing in the airplane. He was airborne on the first cannon-firing test at supersonic speed when the cannon exploded and blew a hole in the fuel cell. With a cockpit full of smoke, Tony’s first thought was to bail out. But 50 miles from home and at high altitude, he looked down and thought better of it.

  “Oh, my God, I’ll freeze to death before I get to the ground,” he decided.

  “I stayed in,” he recalls, “and headed back to base. As I neared the base, the engine quit. And at the very last, just before my flare for landing, I discovered that my wing flaps wouldn’t work properly. Again I wanted to bail out. It would have been down over the jetstream, though, and I knew I didn’t have a chance. So I made my flare fully expecting the airplane to snap and do everything it’s not supposed to do. Lo and behold, it flared out like a Piper Cub.”

  We found out what was wrong. The cannon had exploded, and the wing flaps had failed because they lost electrical power. The dead-stick landing with an F-104 is quite an adventure, because as heavy as it is, with that small wing and no power, the pilot must be precise in putting the airplane down. LeVier had studied the figures for such a landing in advance, knew exactly what he should do, did just that, and made a perfect dead-stick landing.

  In his case, Herman had no choice but to leave his airplane. He was wearing a pressure suit for gun-firing tests at supersonic speed above 50,000 feet when he felt a rush of air and his faceplate froze over. He couldn’t see any instruments but knew he did not want to disconnect the pressure suit from the aircraft at that high altitude. So he started counting to himself, waiting as long as he felt he could before raising the faceplate.

  “The only thing I was really interested in was the altimeter,” he explained. “I didn’t care where anything else was.”

  Herman wanted to help us get all the anwers we could to the cause of that accident so he volunteered to take sodium pentothal administered by Lockheed medical director Dr. Charles I. Barron. From his descriptions we found out exactly what happened.

  An explosion from accumulated gun gas had blown open one of the landing wheel well doors, admitting a rush of upper atmospheric cold. Having been an exhibition parachute jumper in his early career allowed “Fish” to take this bailout in stride. And the gun-firing problem soon was solved.

  The F-104 had been designed as an interceptor-fighter, an assignment for which the plane was very, very good. But when the NATO countries decided they wanted to build and use them, they wanted additional performance—low-level ground attack as well. We were able to double the airplane weight from the original 16,500 to 33,000 pounds without any change in wing area—which is less than 200 square feet. To do this, takeoff speed had to go way up. The airplane became a hotrod of the first order. And it was being flown in some of the world’s worst weather and terrain. Some countries—Norway, Canada, and Taiwan, for example—set safety records for fighter aircraft with it.

  For special reasons, West Germany had problems with the airplane. The Germans had a very sophisticated version—very high performance combining interceptor, bomber, and reconnaissance capability in the aircraft. Later models added infrared gunsight and inertial navigation.

  The trouble was that for ten years after World War II, German pilots had not had modern jet experience, especially supersonic. Nor were conditions conducive to keeping trained pilots and mechanics in the air force. While there was a great deal of press attention to the initial high accident rate with the F-104s, it went virtually unnoticed that the West Germans earlier had bought a number of F-84s and lost about 40 percent of that fleet in a very short time.

  It wasn’t the equipment but the nature of the operation that was the basic problem. Finally, West Germany arranged to train their pilots at Luke Air Force Base in Arizona, where weather permitted year-round flying. Properly trained in an air force that offered a stable career, the West German pilots achieved an excellent in-service record with the airplane.

  In its first year of service with the U.S. Air Force, the F-104 set some significant official records. In 1958, it recaptured the world altitude record for this country at 91,243 feet. That same year it set a new speed mark of 1,404.19 miles an hour. It established seven records for time-to-climb to altitude. In 1959, it set a new altitude record of 103,395.5 feet. The F-104 won for the Air Force, GE, and Lockheed the Collier Trophy in 1959, for the previous year’s “greatest achievement in aviation.”

  The F-104 later became also an aerospace trainer for the USAF, simulating re-entry and zero gravity conditions for astronauts at the Aerospace Research Pilot School at Edwards AFB.

  When the MiG-21—a high-performance Russian jet—began to appear in increasing numbers with Soviet bloc air forces, replacing the earlier MiG-17 and -19, Western Europe began to look toward a new air-superiority fighter. Their principal air defense weapons were Starfighters, Phantoms, and Lightnings. Intelligence reports and news items indicated that advanced fighter aircraft in East European countries outnumbered NATO air forces by as much as six to one.

  As a follow-on airplane to the F-104 for our European allies, Lockheed developed a very practical and productive proposal. Use the expensive, proven components and systems from the F-104 but add a larger wing and new tail and increase the power for an all-around fighter. The new design promised to outmaneuver all other aircraft known to be flying including the MiG-21. We called the airplane the “Lancer.”

  It was proposed with a choice of engines, the familiar GE model or a new advanced-technology design from Pratt & Whitney with a Mach 2.5 speed. We proposed to conduct development and initial flight tests at the Skunk Works in cooperation with the European engineers, and that production of the plane be programmed entirely in Europe. It could have meant millions of dollars saved in production costs as well as jobs for many thousands of people in the plants where they had turned out the F-104.

  The international competition among manufacturers for sale of a new airplane to the NATO countries was intense. France’s Dassault proposed an advanced version of its Mirage F-1.

  Two other U.S. manufacturers were after the business. McDonnell-Douglas offered a modification of its twin-engine Phantom, to be designated F-4F. Northrop proposed a totally new design, P-530 (F-5), which would not have been available until 1976. Lockheed promised the Lancer for service in 1973. By that year, no de
cision had yet been reached, and we still were trying to sell the Lancer overseas. The airplane was not proposed to the USAF, which was interested in developing a new aircraft.

  As a sidelight on international sales of aircraft, on the very day that we started touring Europe with our proposals for the Lancer, one of our competitors set out on the same circuit to sell theirs. Months later we discovered that both of us had retained the same overseas marketing consultant. He was being paid by both sides.

  The Air Force in this country was considering development of two new fighters, the F-14 and F-15.

  Back in 1969, I questioned publicly whether these aircraft actually would be competitive with the best Russian fighters. Specifically, I said that I thought the cost of the proposed F-15 would be more expensive than necessary, that a smaller, less-expensive airplane could do the job, just as well.

  Stuart Symington, former Secretary of the Air Force, then Senator from Missouri, very much wanted that F-15 contract for his state. He called in Dan Haughton, then Lockheed board chairman, and me and announced that whether we liked it or not that contract for the F-15 would be awarded to McDonnell. Kelly Johnson was not to give any more argument. Haughton was under the gun and promised that he’d see that I didn’t. I did not promise in my own right.

  We, Lockheed, had made an unsolicited proposal to the USAF for an advanced, highly-maneuverable lightweight fighter that we could have had flying within a year at absolute minimum cost. We had lined up a dozen of our vendors with whom we were then working on another project, including Pratt & Whitney for the jet engines, other suppliers for armament, gunsights, wheels, tires—the whole package. It was a darn good airplane. The X-27, later designated X-29, was basically a new airplane, but it utilized the nose design of the F-104 which by that time had fired millions of rounds of ammunition. We even proposed firing tests on the first flight to prove we had a fighting airplane.

  David Packard, then Deputy Defense Secretary, was very much impressed with the proposal. But Robert Seamans, Jr., Air Force Secretary, did not like the idea of buying a fighter in that manner. He preferred the conventional method—an experimental model first, production plans later.

  I disagreed with the USAF on procurement policy.

  “This airplane is not so advanced that you cannot develop the ‘X,’ the experimental airplane, into a production prototype,” I argued. “I don’t want to draw a line on paper that does not consider production. Why go to double prototyping?”

  We came close to receiving a contract for that airplane, but what eventually killed any prospect for our producing the lightweight fighter were the financial problems that Lockheed encountered in 1971—first, losses from several fixed-price contracts for the U.S. military, then the threatened loss of the company’s new L-1011 commercial transport program with the unexpected bankruptcy of Great Britain’s Rolls-Royce, manufacturer of the engine. The very future of Lockheed was in question, and the Air Force reasoned understandably that they should not risk awarding the contract to the company.

  Our proposal did, I believe, result in the USAF’s eventual design competition for a lightweight fighter. The plane they got at least ten years later, after double prototyping by General Dynamics and at nearly three times the cost, was comparable in performance. That was the F-16.

  If the military would spend one or two percent of the cost of developing an experimental airplane in planning production at the same time, it would come back in savings many, many times over.

  The Skunk Works method of developing the F-104, for example, could save a considerable amount of money if applied to procurement of new aircraft.

  On that airplane, every time we released an engineering drawing to our manufacturing director, Art Viereck, to build a part for the experimental airplane, we also released it to a group of production engineers with these instructions: “Find every alternative way of making this, ruling out adverse effect on drag, maintenance, or cost. You can affect them all favorably.”

  When we finished building the prototype, we had a thick report on how to build a production model. We sat down for three days with that book to choose the best way to build the airplane from every point of view. It saved from $10,000 to $20,000 for every airplane built, by my estimate. Total production worldwide was about 2,500.

  Kelly with the first JetStar, which critics declared would never attain commercial success.

  Costs must be considered. Aircraft are getting to be so expensive they hardly are worth it for what they can do. With the price of fighter aircraft now running more than $30 million per plane with all the equipment, not including pilot costs, I can foresee the day when the fighter pilot will be on the ground, flying an unmanned fighter with a missile in it. With the latest electronic advances, I think this can be done remotely at a great saving in aircraft costs—and, of course, great saving in manpower, to say nothing of the greater safety for the pilot. It’s worth considering.

  13

  Working with “Spooks”

  WHATEVER ELSE IT HAS DONE AND EVER WILL DO, the U-2 is indelibly identified in the public mind as the “Spy Plane” in which Francis Gary Powers was shot down over Russia on May Day of 1960 while on a photo reconnaissance mission for the CIA.

  The plane has been used for high-altitude weather research, earth resources survey, communications satellite, and aerial mapping—as well as reconnaissance.

  It came into being for that purpose—reconnaissance—though this was disguised in first public announcements of its existence.

  In a press release for Monday, May 7, 1956, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) announced “Start of a new research program” and a “new airplane, the Lockheed U-2 … expected to reach 10-mile-high altitudes as a matter of routine.”

  “Tomorrow’s jet transports will be flying air routes girdling the earth … at altitudes far higher than presently used except by a few military aircraft,” NACA Director Dr. Hugh L. Dry den explained. “The availability of a new type of airplane … helps to obtain the needed data … about gust-meteorological conditions to be found at high altitude … in an economical and expeditious manner.”

  The NACA release identified the plane with specific high-altitude research work in clear air turbulence, convective clouds, wind sheer, and jet stream. Also to be studied were cosmic rays and concentration of certain elements in the atmosphere including ozone and water vapor.

  “As a result of information so to be gained, tomorrow’s air travelers might expect a degree of speed, safety and comfort beyond present hope of the air transport operators,” the announcement continued.

  “A few of the Lockheed airplanes are being made available for the expanded NACA program by the USAF.

  “The first data, covering conditions in the Rocky Mountain area, are being obtained from flights from Watertown Strip, Nevada.”

  All true—in time.

  An internal Lockheed memo issued at the same time to corporate executives from Courtlandt Gross described the plane as “of conventional, straight-wing design … with light wing loading to enable routine flight in the 50,000- to 55,000-foot altitude range … powered with a single Pratt & Whitney J-57 engine.

  “We built a prototype with our own funds, and its high-altitude capabilities quickly attracted sufficient military interest to earn us an Air Force contract for a limited number.…

  “Its development has been … under the direction of C. L. Johnson, who last month assumed the new positions of vice president research and development, and director of special projects for the California division.…

  “The Air Force found the U-2 to be a good, economical flight platform for use in a joint test program with the Atomic Energy Commission. For this reason, and because of the experimental nature of the aircraft and its test equipment, further details are classified.”

  On July 9, another NACA press release covered the U-2’s assignment overseas.

  “High Altitude Research Program Proves Valuable,” was the headline.


  “Initial data about gust-meterological conditions to be found at 10-mile-high altitudes which have been obtained to date by the relatively few flights of Lockheed U-2 airplanes have already proved the value of the aircraft for this purpose.…

  “… Within recent weeks, preliminary data-gathering flights have been made from an Air Force base at Lakenheath, England, where the Air Weather Service of the USAF is providing logistical and technical support. As the program continues, flights will be made in other parts of the world.”

  The six-page news release went on to list and describe the atmospheric data-gathering instrumentation carried in the airplane.

  Design of the U-2 had begun several years earlier. In 1953, we at Lockheed had been made aware of this country’s desperate need for reconnaissance of Soviet missile and other military capabilities. A requirement existed for an airplane that could safely overfly the USSR and return with useful data. The plane was needed “now.”

  My first thought was to explore the proven F-104 design for possible application to this mission. Phil Colman and Gene Frost of our preliminary design department were assigned this task. It soon became obvious that the only equipment we might retain from the F-104 might be the rudder pedals. We initiated an entirely new design.

  These were the requirements. The airplane would have to fly at an altitude above 70,000 feet so vapor trails would not give away its presence, have a range better than 4,000 miles, have exceptionally fine flight characteristics, and provide a steady platform for photography with great accuracy from this high altitude.

  It would have to be able to carry the best and latest cameras as well as all kinds of electronic gear for its own navigation, communication, and safety.

  Our first presentation was to the Air Force, where it was turned down as too optimistic. They questioned that any engine even would operate at the altitude we were proposing. They were correct in that there was not proof at that time that this was possible. And the Air Force already had an airplane in development with the Martin company—an airplane with two engines which was preferred to our single-engine design.