Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed

by Ben R Rich

  “Ben,” Kelly warned me, “the security they’re sticking onto this thing will kill you. It will increase your costs twenty-five percent and lower your efficiency to the point where you won’t get any work done. The restrictions will eat you alive. Make them reclassify this thing or drop it.” On matters like that, Kelly was seldom wrong.

  Other Voices

  General Larry D. Welch

  (Air Force Chief of Staff from 1986 to 1990)

  In 1976, I was a brigadier general in charge of planning at the Tactical Air Command at Langley, Virginia, when my boss, General Bob Dixon, called me one afternoon and told me to drop whatever I was doing to attend an extremely classified briefing. He said, “The only people I’ve cleared for this briefing are you and one other general officer.” I went over to headquarters and discovered that Ben Rich of Lockheed’s Skunk Works was making a presentation about producing an operational stealth aircraft. Bill Perry, who ran R & D at the Pentagon, had sent him over to us because Dr. Perry was very interested in the stealth concept and wanted our input. Ben spoke only about twenty minutes. After he left, we went into General Dixon’s office and he asked, “Well, what do you two think?” I said, “Well, sir, from a purely technical standpoint I don’t have a clue about whether this concept is really achievable. Frankly, I’m not even sure the goddam thing will fly. But if Ben Rich and the Skunk Works say that they can deliver the goods, I think we’d be idiots not to go along with them.” General Dixon wholeheartedly agreed with me. And so we started the stealth program on the basis of Ben’s twenty-minute presentation and a hell of a lot of faith in Ben Rich & Company. And that faith was based on long personal experience.

  Way back when I was a young colonel working in the fighter division—this would be the early seventies—I was tasked to come up with a realistic cost estimate for a revolutionary tactical fighter with movable wings called the FX, which later became the F-15. Inside the Air Force there was a lot of controversy about costs that ranged from $3.5 million to $8.5 million. Before we could ask Congress for money, we had to reach some sort of consensus, so I persuaded my boss to let me go out to the Skunk Works in Burbank and get their analysis because they were the best in the business. So I flew out and sat down with Kelly Johnson and Ben Rich. After drinking exactly one ounce of whisky from one of Kelly’s titanium shot glasses, we got down to business. Ben and Kelly worked out the figures on a piece of paper—Okay, here’s what the avionics will cost, and the airframe, and so on. The overall cost they predicted per airplane would be $7 million. And so we went to Congress and told them that the FX would cost between $5 million and $7 million. The day we delivered that airplane the cost came out to $6.8 million per airplane in 1971 dollars.

  So I had supreme confidence that Ben and his people would deliver superbly on stealth. There were only five of us at headquarters cleared for the stealth program, and I became the head logistician, the chief operations officer, and the civil engineer for the Air Force side. The management approach we evolved was unique and marvelous. Once a month, I’d meet with Dr. Perry at the Pentagon and inform him about decisions we required from him as Under Secretary of Defense. Sometimes he agreed, sometimes not, but we never had delays or time wasted with goddam useless meetings. Because we were so highly classified, the bureaucracy was cut out and that made a tremendous difference. Frankly, that was a damned gutsy way to operate inside the Pentagon, but the reason we could afford to be so gutsy was our abiding faith in the Skunk Works.

  Before the government would sign a contract with me I had to submit for approval a security plan, detailing how we would tighten all the hatches of what was already one of the most secure operations in the defense industry. Hell, we already operated without windows and behind thick, eavesdrop-proof walls. We had special bank-vault conference rooms, lined with lead and steel, for very sensitive discussions about very secret matters. Still, the Air Force required me to change our entire security system, imposing the kinds of strictures and regulations that would drive us all nuts in either the short or long run. Every piece of paper dealing with the project had to be stamped top secret, indexed in a special security filing system, and locked away. Full field investigations were demanded of every worker having access to the airplane. They imposed a strictly enforced two-man rule: no engineer or shop worker could be left alone in a room with a blueprint. If one machinist had to go to the toilet, the co-worker had to lock up the blueprint until his colleague returned.

  Only five of us were cleared for top secret and above, and over the years we had worked on tremendously sensitive projects without ever suffering a leak or any known losses to espionage. In fact, Kelly evolved his own unorthodox security methods, which worked beautifully in the early days of the 1950s. We never stamped a security classification on any paperwork. That way, nobody was curious to read it. We just made damned sure that all sensitive papers stayed inside the Skunk Works.

  My biggest worry was clearing our workers for this project. They needed Special Access clearances, and I had to make the case for their Need to Know on an individual basis. But the government, not the employer, was the final arbiter of who was granted or denied access. The Air Force security people made the decision and offered no explanation about why certain of my employees were denied access to the program. No one in Washington conferred with me or asked my opinion or sought my advice. I knew my people very well. Some were horse players, several were skirt chasers, a few were not always prompt about paying their bills. For all I knew some of my best people might be part-time transvestites. I had no doubt that some of the younger ones may have indulged in “recreational drugs,” like toking marijuana at rock shows. Any of these “sins” could sink a valuable worker. I did win a couple of important concessions: the Air Force agreed that only those few technicians with a need to know the airplane’s radar cross section would require the complete full field investigation, which took around nine months, and I was granted temporary clearances for twenty specialists working on particular sensitive aspects of Have Blue. Most important, I raised so much cain that Air Force security finally granted me a “grandfather clause” for many of our old-timers who had been working on all our secret projects since the days of the U-2. They were granted waivers to work on Have Blue.

  But security’s dragnet poked and prodded into every nook and cranny of our operation. Keith Beswick, head of our flight test operations, designed a coffee mug for his crew with a clever logo showing the nose of Have Blue peeking from one end of a big cloud with a skunk’s tail sticking out the back end. Because of the picture of the airplane’s nose, security classified the mugs as top secret. Beswick and his people had to lock them away in a safe between coffee breaks. The airplane itself had to be stamped SECRET on the inside cockpit door. I was named its official custodian and had to sign for it whenever it left its hangar area and was test-flown. If it crashed, I was personally responsible for collecting every single piece of it and turning all of it over to the proper authorities.

  These draconian measures hobbled us severely at times, tested my patience beyond endurance, and gave Kelly every right to scold, “Goddam it, Rich, I told you so.” At one point I had to memorize the combinations to three different security safes just to get work done on a daily basis. A few guys with lousy memories tried to cheat and carried the combination numbers in their wallets. If security caught them, they could be fired. Security would snoop in our desks at night to search for classified documents not locked away. It was like working at KGB headquarters in Moscow.

  The Air Force wanted the two test planes in only fourteen months. Over the years we had developed the concept of using existing hardware developed and paid for by other programs to save time and money and reduce the risks of failures in prototype projects. I worked an agreement with the Air Force to supply me with the airplane engines. They assigned an expediter named Jack Twigg, a major in the Tactical Air Command, who was cunning and smart. Jack requisitioned six engines from the Navy. He went to General Electric�
�s jet engine division, did some fast talking to the president and plant manager, got some key people to look the other way while he carted away the six J-85 engines we needed right off their assembly line, and had them shipped in roundabout ways, so that nobody knew the Skunk Works was the final destination. We put two engines in each experimental airplane and had a couple of spares. Jack was a natural at playing James Bond: he ordered parts in different batches and had them shipped using false return addresses and drop boxes.

  We begged and borrowed whatever parts we could get our hands on. Since this was just an experimental stealth test vehicle destined to be junked at the end, it was put together with avionics right off the aviation version of the Kmart shelf: we took our flight control actuators from the F-111 tactical bomber, our flight control computer from the F-16 fighter, and the inertial navigation system from the B-52 bomber. We took the servomechanisms from the F-15 and F-111 and modified them, and the pilot’s seat from the F-16. The heads-up display was designed for the F-18 fighter and adapted for our airplane. In all we got about $3 million worth of equipment from the Air Force. That was how we could build two airplanes and test them for two years at a cost of only $30 million. Normally, a prototype for an advanced technology airplane would cost the government three or four times as much.

  Only the flight control system was specially designed for Have Blue, since our biggest sweat was aerodynamics. We decided to use the onboard computer system of General Dynamics’s small-wing lightweight fighter, the F-16, which was designed unstable in pitch; our airplane would be unstable in all three axes—a dubious first that brought us plenty of sleepless nights. But we had our very own Bob Loschke, acknowledged as one of the very best onboard computer experts in aerospace, to adapt the F-16’s computer program to our needs. We flew the airplane avionically on the simulator flight control system and kept modifying the system to increase stability. It was amazing what Loschke could accomplish artificially by preempting the airplane’s unstable responses and correcting them through high-powered computers.

  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.

  In July 1976, we began building the first of two Have Blue prototypes in Building 82, one of our big assembly hangars, the size of three football fields. We had our ownunique method for building an airplane. Our organizational chart consisted of an engineering branch, a manufacturing branch, an inspection and quality assurance branch, and a flight testing branch. Engineering designed and developed the Have Blue aircraft and turned it over to the shop to build. Our engineers were expected on the shop floor the moment their blueprints were approved. Designers lived with their designs through fabrication, assembly, and testing. Engineers couldn’t just throw their drawings at the shop people on a take-it-or-leave-it basis and walk away.

  Our senior shop people were tough, experienced SOBs and not shy about confronting a designer on a particular drawing and letting him know why it wouldn’t work. Our designers spent at least a third of their day right on the shop floor; at the same time, there were usually two or three shop workers up in the design room conferring on a particular problem. That was how we kept everybody involved and integrated on a project. My weights man talked to my structures man, and my structures man talked to my designer, and my designer conferred with my flight test guy, and they all sat two feet apart, conferring and kibitzing every step of the way. We trusted our people and gave them the kind of authority that was unique in aerospace manufacturing. Above all, I didn’t second-guess them.

  Our manufacturing group consisted of the machine shop people, sheet metal fabrication and assemblers, planners, tool designers, and builders. Each airplane required its own special tools and parts, and in projects like Have Blue, where only two prototypes were involved, we designed and used wooden tools to save time and money. When the project ended, we just threw them away.

  The shop manufactured and assembled the airplane, and the inspection and quality assurance branch checked the product at all stages of development. That was also unique with us, I think. In most companies quality control reported to the head of the shop. At the Skunk Works quality control reported directly to me. They were a check and balance on the work of the shop. Our inspectors stayed right on the floor with the machinists and fabricators, and quality control inspections occurred almost daily, instead of once, at the end of a procedure. Constant inspection forced our workers to be supercritical of their work before passing it on. Self-checking was a Skunk Works concept now in wide use in Japanese industry and called by them Total Quality Management.

  Our workers were all specialists in specific sections of the airplane: fuselage, tail, wings, control surfaces, and power plant. Each section was built separately then brought together and assembled like a giant Tinkertoy. We used about eighty shop people on this project, and because we were in a rush and the airplane was small, we stood it on its tail and assembled it vertically. That way, the assemblers could work on the flat, plated structural frame, front and back, asses to elbows, simultaneously. I kept Alan Brown, our stealth engineer, on the floor all the time to answer workers’ questions.

  Flat plates, we discovered, were much harder to tool than the usual rounded surfaces. The plates had to be absolutely perfect to fit precisely. We also had nagging technical headaches applying the special radar-absorbing coatings to the surfaces. Each workday the problems piled higher and I sat behind Kelly’s old desk reaching for my industrial-size bottle of headache tablets. Meanwhile, the Navy came to us to test the feasibility for a stealthy weapons system and set up their own top secret security system that was twice as stringent as the Air Force’s. We had to install special alarm systems that cost us a fortune in the section of our headquarters building devoted to the naval work. And we were also doing some prototype work for the Army on stealthy munitions.

  In the midst of all this interservice rivalry, security, and hustle and bustle, Major General Bobby Bond, who was in charge of tactical air warfare, came thundering into the Skunk Works with blood in his eye on a boiling September morning. The Santa Ana winds were howling and half of L.A. was under a thick pall of smoke from giant brush fires, mostly started by maniacs with matches. My asthma was acting up and I had a lousy headache and I was in no mood for a visit from the good general, even though I had a special regard for the guy. But General Bond was a brooder and a worrier, who drove me and everyone else absolutely bonkers at times. He always thought he was being shortchanged or victimized in some way. He pounded on my desk and accused me of taking some of my best workers off his Have Blue airplane to work on some rumored secret Navy project. I did my best to look hurt and appeased Bobby by even raising my right hand in a solemn oath. I told myself, So, it’s a little white lie. What else can I do? The Navy project is top secret and Bond has no need to know. We could both go to jail if I told him what was really up.

  Unfortunately, on the way out to lunch, the general spotted a special lock and alarm system above an unmarked door which he knew from prowling the rings of the Pentagon was used only by the Navy on its top secret projects. Bond squeezed my arm. “What’s going on inside that door?” he demanded to know. Before I could think up another lie, he commanded me to open up that door. I told him I couldn’t; he wasn’t cleared to peek inside. “Rich, you devious bastard, I’m giving you a direct order, open up that goddam door this instant or I’ll smash it down myself with a goddam fire ax.” The guy meant every word. He began pounding on the door until it finally opened a crack, and he forced his way in. There sat a few startled Navy commanders.

  “Bobby, it isn’t what you think,” I lied in vain.

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bsp; “The hell it isn’t you lying SOB,” he fumed.

  I surrendered, but not gracefully. I said, “Okay, you got me. But before we go to lunch you’re going to have to sign an inadvertent disclosure form or security will have both our asses.” The Navy, of course, was outraged at both of us. An Air Force general seeing their secret project was as bad as giving a blueprint to the Russians.

  Bobby* didn’t worry about the Navy very long, because we gave him far bigger worries than that: four months before we were supposed to test-fly Have Blue our shop mechanics went out on strike.

  The International Association of Machinists’ negotiations with the Lockheed corporation on a new two-year contract failed in late August 1977. Our workers hit the bricks just as Have Blue was going into final assembly, perched on its jig with no hydraulic system, no fuel system, no electronics or landing gear. There seemed to be no way we would be ready to fly by December 1, our target date, and our bean counters wanted to inform the Air Force brass that we would be delayed one day for each day of the strike. But Bob Murphy, our veteran shop superintendent, insisted that he could get the job done on time and meet our commitment for first flight. To Murphy, it was a matter of stubborn Skunk Works pride.

  Bob put together a shop crew of thirty-five managers and engineers who worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week, over the next two months. Fortunately, most of our designers were all great tinkerers, which is probably why they were drawn to engineering in the first place. Murphy had Beswick, our flight test head, working with a shop supervisor named Dick Madison assembling the landing gear. Murphy himself put in the ejection seat and flight controls; another shop supervisor named John Stanley worked alone on the fuel system. Gradually, the airplane began coming together, so that by early November Have Blue underwent strain gauge calibrations and fuel system checkout. Because Have Blue was about the most classified project in the free world, it couldn’t be rolled outdoors, so the guys defied rules and regulations and ran fuel lines underneath the hangar doors to tank up the airplane and test for leaks. But how could we run engine tests?