Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed

by Ben R Rich

  Murphy figured out a way. He rolled out the plane after dark to a nearby blast fence about three hundred yards from the Burbank Airport main runway. On either side he placed two tractor trailer vans and hung off one end a large sheet of canvas. It was a jerry-built open-ended hangar that shielded Have Blue from view; security approved provided we had the airplane in the hangar before dawn.

  Meanwhile an independent engineering review team, composed entirely of civil servants from Wright Field in Ohio, flew to Burbank to inspect and evaluate our entire program. They had nothing but praise for our effort and progress, but I was extremely put out by their visit. Never before in the entire history of the Skunk Works had we been so closely supervised and directed by the customer. “Why in hell do we have to prove to a government team that we knew what we were doing?” I argued in vain to Jack Twigg, our assigned Air Force program manager. This was an insult to our cherished way of doing things. But all of us sensed that the old Skunk Works valued independence was doomed to become a nostalgic memory of yesteryear, like a dime cup of coffee.

  We had lived and died by fourteen basic operating rules that Kelly had written forty years earlier, one night while half in the bag. They had worked for him and they worked for me:

  The Skunk Works program manager must be delegated practically complete control of his program in all aspects. He should have the authority to make quick decisions regarding technical, financial, or operational matters.

  Strong but small project offices must be provided both by the military and the industry.

  The number of people having any connection with the project must be restricted in an almost vicious manner. Use a small number of good people.

  Very simple drawing and drawing release system with great flexibility for making changes must be provided in order to make schedule recovery in the face of failures.

  There must be a minimum number of reports required, but important work must be recorded thoroughly.

  There must be a monthly cost review covering not only what has been spent and committed but also projected costs to the conclusion of the program. Don’t have the books ninety days late and don’t surprise the customer with sudden overruns.

  The contractor must be delegated and must assume more than normal responsibility to get good vendor bids for subcontract on the project. Commercial bid procedures are often better than military ones.

  The inspection system as currently used by the Skunk Works, which has been approved by both the Air Force and the Navy, meets the intent of existing military requirements and should be used on new projects. Push basic inspection responsibility back to the subcontractors and vendors. Don’t duplicate so much inspection.

  The contractor must be delegated the authority to test his final product in flight. He can and must test it in the initial stages.

  The specifications applying to the hardware must be agreed to in advance of contracting.

  Funding a program must be timely so that the contractor doesn’t have to keep running to the bank to support government projects.

  There must be absolute trust between the military project organization and the contractor with very close cooperation and liaison on a day-to-day basis. This cuts down misunderstanding and correspondence to an absolute minimum.

  Access by outsiders to the project and its personnel must be strictly controlled.

  Because only a few people will be used in engineering and most other areas, ways must be provided to reward good performance by pay not based on the number of personnel supervised.

  Although most of our cherished rules were now in tatters, my guys managed to finish their work on Have Blue in mid-November, nearly three weeks before the flight test target date of December 1, 1977. “Rich,” Bob Murphy teased, “you’d never have made your deadline by using regular workers. You had the cream of the crop in management delivering the goods for you.” The airplane was loaded onto a C-5 cargo plane at two in the morning and roared away to our remote test site, leaving behind several complaints to the FAA from irate citizens whose sleep was disturbed by this violation of late-night takeoffs from the Burbank Airport. Frankly, it was such a relief to get Have Blue out of assembly that I would have gladly paid a fine.

  The plane was now in the hands of our flight test crews, who would spend the next couple of weeks performing flight control, engine, and taxi tests. Even though the test site was in a remote location, our airplane was kept under wraps inside its hangar most of the time. Soviet satellites made regular passes, and every time our airplane was rolled out everyone on the base who wasn’t cleared for Have Blue had to go into the windowless mess hall and have a cup of coffee until we took off.

  Seventy-two hours before the first test flight, the airplane began to seriously overheat near the tail during engine test runs. The engine was removed, and Bob Murphy and a helper decided to improvise by building a heat shield. They noticed a six-foot steel shop tool cabinet. “Steel is steel,” Murphy said to his assistant. “We’ll send Ben Rich the bill for a new cabinet.” They began cutting up the cabinet to make the heat shield panels between Have Blue’s surface and its engine. And it worked perfectly. Only in the Skunk Works…

  It’s the first of December, 1977, just after sunup, the best time for test pilots to take off. Winds are usually calmest then, but this morning the wind chill blasts through my topcoat like it’s tissue paper. I’m wondering how I can be so damned cold while I’m sweating bullets over this test flight—probably the most critical test of my career. This flight will be every bit as important to the nation’s future and the future of the Skunk Works as the first test flight of the U-2 spy plane, which took place at this very same highly secret sand pile more than a quarter century ago.

  Back then, I was a Skunk Works rookie and this base, which we built for the CIA, was just a tiny outpost of windswept quonset huts and trailers, guarded by rookie CIA agents with tommy guns. Kelly had jokingly nicknamed this godforsaken place Paradise Ranch, hoping to lure young and innocent flight crews to work on a dry lake bed where quarter-inch rocks blew around most afternoons. It is now a sprawling facility, bigger than some municipal airports, a test range for sensitive aviation projects. No one nowadays gains access without special clearances that include a polygraph test. Such paranoia has kept our most guarded national defense secrets secret.

  I’ve been here many times over the years on many Skunk Works test flights, usually accompanying Kelly Johnson. Today, the Have Blue prototype that will soon be rolling down this runway is the first built under my regime after Johnson’s retirement three years earlier. But we really aren’t one hundred percent certain that this sucker can actually get off the ground. It is the most unstable and weirdest-looking airplane since Northrop’s Flying Wing, built on a whim back in the late 1940s.

  I watch nervously as Have Blue emerges from the guarded cavity inside its hangar and is rolled out. It is a flying black wedge, carved out of flat, two-dimensional angles. Head on, with its black paint and highly swept wings, it looks like a giant Darth Vader—the first airplane that has not one rounded surface.

  Bill Park, our chief test pilot, complained that it was the ugliest airplane he’d ever strapped himself into. Bill claimed that flying such a mess earned him the right to double hazard pay. I agreed. He’s getting a $25,000 bonus for this series of Have Blue test flights. To Bill, even the opaque triangular cockpit is ominous, especially if he has to punch out. But the specially coated glass will keep radar beams from picking up his helmeted head. The real beauty of Have Blue is that Bill’s head is a hundred times more observable on radar than the airplane he will be flying.

  The sharp edges and extreme angular shape of our small prototype create whirling tornadoes and make the airplane a flying vortex generator. To be able to fly at all, the airplane’s fly-by-wire system must operate perfectly, otherwise Have Blue will tumble out of control.

  I check my watch. Nearly 0700. I give the thumbs-up sign to Bill Park in the cockpit, who’s preoccupied wit
h last-minute preflight checks. Kelly Johnson is standing at my side, looking stoic. He’s still skeptical about whether or not this prototype will prove way too draggy to get off the ground. But Kelly brought along a case of champagne on the Jetstar from Burbank to celebrate after Park’s flight. Over the years at the Skunk Works we’ve never failed to celebrate a successful maiden test flight of anything we’ve ever built. We always polished off a hard-earned success with a boisterous party where Kelly challenged all comers to an arm-wrestling contest. He’s an old man now, ailing, but I still wouldn’t take him on.

  We’ve had our share of crashes during long weeks and months of test-flying new airplanes, but they didn’t really upset us too much as long as no one got hurt, because we always learned important lessons from mistakes. But we never had a mishap on a first test flight—a catastrophe that would send us back to the drawing board with our tails between our legs.

  Adding to the tensions of this day, the White House Situation Room is monitoring this flight. So is the Tactical Air Command at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia. But my anxieties are closer to home: I’ve got ten million bucks of Lockheed’s money riding on this flight and the success of this program. I’m the one who talked our board into going along with me. So I didn’t need any black coffee this morning. I am wired.

  Bill Park fires the twin engines. The airplane has a muffled sound because its engines are hidden behind special radar-absorbing grids. Bill has been practicing using these flight controls under all conditions in a simulator for five weeks and I know he’s ready for any emergency. He and I have been through tight spots on other test programs. Once he ejected from an SR-71 that began to flip over on takeoff. I was sure Park was about to become a grease spot on the tarmac, but his chute opened just as his feet hit the ground, yanking him upward as he was impacting. He left three-inch-deep heel imprints in the sand, but was unhurt. Bill is damned thorough and damned lucky, a great combination for someone in his line of work.

  Kelly Johnson is watching intently as the prototype taxis past us heading for the end of the runway, where it will turn and take off into the stiff wind. Suddenly, in a blast of loud noise, the medevac chopper, with two paramedics on board, takes off and heads down range to be in position if Park augers in. It is followed by a T-38 jet trainer carrying one of Bill’s test pilot colleagues, who will fly chase, visually monitoring his airplane and supplying any help or advice in an emergency.

  Bill pushes on the throttle, and Have Blue slowly begins to accelerate. To stay stealthy Have Blue has no afterburner, and it will need almost as much runway to get airborne as a 727 loaded with fuel, baggage, and passengers bound for Chicago.

  Bill goes full throttle. He’s chewing up a lot of runway as he sweeps past us. I’m thinking, Damn it, with all that wind he should be up by now. He’s far down the runway and I’m no longer breathing. Uh-oh. He’s damn near off the end of the goddam runway. Then I see him lift off. Slow as a jumbo jet a hundred times its weight, but he’s up. His nose is high. But just hanging there. Get up. Up, up, up. The little airplane hears me. It’s heading toward the snow-powdered mountains. Ken Perko of the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, who is among the half dozen outsiders cleared to witness this flight test, reaches out to shake my hand. “By God, Ben,” he says, “the Skunk Works has done it again.”

  Kelly slaps me on the back and shouts, “Well, Ben, you got your first airplane.”

  Not so fast. It’s standard procedure to leave the landing gear down on maiden test flights checking out airworthiness, but even so it seems to me the airplane is way too sluggish gaining altitude. There are some significant foothills looming in Bill’s flight path and I try to do some quick mental calculating to get him safely over the hump. I raise my binoculars and quickly try to adjust the focus. By the time the mountains come clear, our airplane is across the other side.

  Other Voices

  Bill Park

  Most people think of test-flying from old movies, where the girl and the pilot’s best friend are watching the skies as he adjusts his goggles and starts the fatal dive. If the movie was a romance, the pilot usually made it. One way or another the flight test of a new airplane was over after one hair-raising dive.

  It should only be that easy. We built two Have Blue prototypes in record time, only twenty months from the day the contract was awarded until I made the first flight. But the intensive flight testing of these two revolutionary airplanes took us two years. We needed a year or more to work out all the kinks—thoroughly evaluating the structural loads, performance characteristics, flight controls, avionics—and then make all the fixes. The next phase would be to test Have Blue against highly calibrated radar systems and precisely measure its stealthiness from every angle and altitude and be challenged by the most sophisticated radar systems in the world. That phase too would take more than a year. Then the Air Force would evaluate the results and determine whether or not to go ahead with full-scale production.

  The Skunk Works gave its flight test group unique responsibilities: we had our own engineers, who had worked side by side with fuel systems engineers, hydraulic specialists, the landing gear team, as the airplane was being assembled. We knew every nut and bolt long before first flight—a big edge when the time finally came to push that throttle.

  I was the principal pilot on Have Blue. My backup was a blue-suiter, Lt. Colonel Ken Dyson. We didn’t know very much about the airplane in the beginning. It was built on the cheap all the way. It was just a demonstrator that was to be junked, so the brakes were god-awful, the cockpit too small and too crammed. All the avionics were surplus store red tags. I remember this Air Force colonel came down to the test site and asked me how much we spent on this program. I told him $34 million. He said, “No, I don’t mean one airplane. I mean both airplanes—the entire program.” I repeated the figure. He couldn’t believe it.

  The airplane was officially called the XST—the experimental stealth technology testbed. It was a dynamic laboratory in a controlled environment. Everyone briefed on the program knew full well the potential implications of this prototype for the Air Force’s future. If this airplane lived up to its billing, we were making history. Air warfare and tactics would be changed forever. Stealth would rule the skies. So everyone involved in the testing was impatient to get test data, but it was my ass on the line if something went wrong. And I wasn’t about to risk it by cutting any corners or rushing into test flights prematurely.

  A helicopter with a paramedic on board was always airborne whenever I was doing test flights. And by May 1978, a year and a half into the program, with about forty flights under my belt, we were on the verge of graduating into the next phase and beginning actual testing against radar systems. On the morning of May 4, 1978, Colonel Larry McClain, the base commander, stopped me at breakfast to say he would be flying chase for me that day and wanted to scrub the paramedic from the test flight because he needed him at the base clinic. I shook my head. I told him, “I’d rather you didn’t do that, Colonel. We’re not entirely out of the woods yet with Have Blue, and I’d just feel better knowing that paramedic is standing by if I happen to need him.”

  As it turned out, I had just saved my own life.

  A couple of hours later I was completing a routine flight and coming in for a landing. I came in at 125 knots, but a little high. I was just about to flare and put the nose down when I immediately lost my angle of attack and the airplane plunged seven feet on one side, slamming onto the runway. I was afraid I’d skid off the runway and tear off the landing gear, so I decided to gun the engines and take off and go around again. I didn’t know that that hard landing had bent my landing gear on the right side. When I took off again, I automatically raised my landing gear and came around to land. Then I lowered the gear, and Colonel McClain, my chase, came on the horn and told me that only the left gear was down.

  I tried everything—all kinds of shakes, rattles, and rolls—to make the right gear come down. I had no way of knowing it
was hopelessly bent. I even came in on one wheel, just kissed down on the left side, hoping that jarring effect would spring the other gear loose—a hell of a maneuver if I have to say so—but it proved useless.

  By then I was starting to think serious thoughts. While I was climbing to about 10,000 feet, one of my engines quit. Out of fuel. I radioed, “I’m gonna bail out of here unless anyone has any better idea.” Nobody did.

  I would’ve preferred to go a little higher before punching out, but I knew I had to get out of there before the other engine flamed out too, because then I had all of two seconds before we’d spin out of control.

  Ejecting makes a big noise—like you’re right up against a speeding train. There was flame and smoke as I got propelled out. And then everything went black. I was knocked unconscious banging my head against the chair.

  Colonel McClain saw me dangling lifelessly in the chute and radioed back, “Well, the fat’s in the fire now.” I was still out cold when I hit the desert floor face down. It was a windy day and I was dragged on my face by my chute about fifty feet in the sand and scrub. But the chopper was right there. The paramedic jumped out and got to me as I was turning blue. My mouth and nose were filled with sand and I was asphyxiating. Another minute or two and my wife would’ve been a widow.

  I was flown to a hospital. When I came to, my wife and Ben Rich were standing over my bed. Ben had flown her in from Burbank on the company jet. I had been forced to bail out four times over fifteen years of flight testing for the Skunk Works, and I never suffered a scratch. This time I had an awful headache and a throbbing pain in my leg, which was in a cast. A broken leg was not fatal in the test flight business but my pounding headache was. I had suffered a moderate concussion and that was the end of the line for me. The rules were very strict about the consequences of head injuries to professional pilots. My test-flying days were over. Ben named me chief pilot, putting me in charge of administrating our corps of test pilots. Lt. Colonel Ken Dyson took over the Have Blue tests. He flew sixty-five sorties against the radar range with the one remaining prototype. On July 11, 1979, he got two hydraulic warning lights about thirty-five miles from base. Knowing he was flying a plane with no stability if the power went, he got out before it spun out of control. Ken parachuted safely to the desert floor. At the time of the crash, he had only one more scheduled flight and most of the test results were already in.