Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed

by Ben R Rich

  Other Voices

  Alan Brown

  I was Ben’s program manager. Building the stealth fighter, we had to tightrope walk between extreme care and Swiss-watch perfection to match the low radar observability claims of our original computerized shape. We didn’t have the time, money, or personnel to build a flying Mercedes. But we couldn’t allow even the tiniest imperfection in the fit of the landing gear door, for example, that could triple the airplane’s radar cross section if it wasn’t precisely flush with the body. So we took extra steps to hold in those doors and put on an extra coating of radar-absorbing materials.

  We were well aware that what we were doing was outside the scope of normal engineering experience. We were dealing with radar cross sections lower by thousands not hundreds of orders of magnitude.

  Many of the airplane’s details required breakthrough engineering, particularly in the engine intakes and engine exhaust system. The exhaust especially gave us fits. It was complex, using baffles and quartz tiles to resist telltale heat signatures. To keep us as stealthy as possible, we used only infrared systems to get us to the target and aim our bombs. These systems emitted no electromagnetic signals but were vulnerable in stormy weather because water absorbs infrared energy. We gave up 20 percent in aerodynamic performance because of the flat plate design, which meant we would have to refuel in flight more often to get to our target and back. The F-117’s range was twelve hundred miles.

  I had anticipated propulsion problems, which we didn’t have, but two of our biggest problems were how to keep the tailpipe from cracking and the data measurement systems from icing. The tailpipe set us back months. The problem was that a flat tailpipe, which we had to use, was not structurally sound under high pressure and easily cracked. We just couldn’t find a solution and finally got General Electric’s engine division to deal with it; they were expert in high temperatures and we adopted their design. The air data measurement system, called pitot probes, could have sunk the entire project if we couldn’t perfect it. Doing so took us the entire two and a half years. These probes, which extended out the nose in stiletto shapes, recorded for the onboard computer static pressure, dynamic pressure, airspeed, angle of attack, and angle of sideslip so that the computer could make its microsecond flight adjustments. If those pitot probes iced up, the airplane would go out of control in two seconds flat. So ours had to be foolproof and, while jutting out from the airplane’s nose, stealthy as well. How to heat these probes to keep them from icing without having them become conductive and act like antennas to radar or infrared devices was a problem that ate us alive. We finally developed a nonconductive heating wire the thickness of a human hair.

  Another big problem was canopy glass. The pilot must be able to see out with no radar energy seeing in. The pilot’s head would be hundreds of times larger on radar than his airplane. We had to develop coating materials that would pass out one without allowing in the other.

  Occasionally we ran up against a problem that just didn’t make any sense. For example, suddenly a special ferrite paint we used to coat the fighter’s leading edges lost its radar-absorbing potency. We couldn’t figure out what went wrong until one of our people decided to confer with DuPont, our supplier, and discovered that they had changed the way they made the paint without informing us.

  Ben kept a close eye on all our problems, but he was never a second-guesser. The most striking thing about his leadership—especially in comparison to Kelly Johnson, who was totally hands-on with technical people—was that Ben let us do our jobs with a minimum of interference. His style wasn’t to redesign our design of our engine the way that Kelly absolutely would have done, but to let us do our thing and smooth our way with the Air Force and Lockheed management. Yet the F-117A tactical fighter was every inch Ben Rich’s airplane. If he hadn’t pushed for it right from the outset, we would never have got into the stealth competition. He was the perfect manager—he was there for tough calls and emergencies. He would defend and protect us if we screwed up and keep us viable by getting new projects and more money from the Congress, convincing them and senior government officials about the value of stealth. He had a hunch and a vision—and it paid off handsomely.

  By the summer of 1980, we were supposed to have flown the first of the five test airplanes but found ourselves way behind schedule. Too many unsolved problems kept my bean counters frazzled and worried. The first airplane’s serial number was 780—July 1980—the date of our scheduled test flight that now seemed far over the horizon.

  But I took heart from the fact that our learning curve improved almost daily, that we were solving technical problems that would make future stealth projects far easier to manage. But between the Air Force brass pressuring me on one side and the concerns expressed by Lockheed management on the other, the pressures were almost at the critical mass before a blowout.

  Missing that July 1980 deadline for the first flight test of the F-117 wasn’t the end of the world, but it made me apprehensive because I could not honestly report to anyone that the worst delays and problems were all behind us. Each day brought a fresh challenge or crisis, and I was doing a lot of tossing and turning instead of sleeping.

  That summer of 1980 was for me the low point of my life, professionally and personally. I was working myself into a frazzle, juggling projects and problems like some lunatic circus acrobat. My meetings began not long after sunrise and my workday ended well after dark. Some days brought great news about solving a particularly tough problem. Other days, the airplane project seemed hopelessly mired in a swarm of complications. The problem-solving line forming outside my office door grew longer by the day. And I had good people who didn’t come to me for help unless they felt they had no other choice.

  My wife, Faye, married to a workaholic for more than thirty years, was used to my late hours. But one night in early June she greeted me at the door looking pale and shaken, and all my problems and pressures at the Skunk Works became insignificant. She had just turned fifty and had gone in for a routine medical checkup. An ominous spot was discovered on her right lung. Faye had a long history of asthma, so bad at times that we kept a small oxygen tank at home, and I prayed that somehow that spot had something to do with her chronic asthma. No such luck. Faye was biopsied and immediately operated on for cancer. Her lung was removed. The doctor told me that he was sure he got all the cancer and that she should recover completely. She came home on August 1, and I took a week off to nurse her. Her recovery seemed slow but steady.

  On Monday, August 18, I got home early. We had dinner. Afterward, we watched the news on television and Faye complained of weakness. I decided to call her doctor, but before I could get to the phone, she began struggling to breathe and started turning blue. I ran to get the oxygen. Then I gave her an injection of adrenalin, which we had kept on hand for her severe asthma attacks. She failed to respond and I ran to the phone and dialed 911.

  The paramedics arrived in only minutes, but they were too late. Faye died in my arms from a massive heart attack.

  I’ve blotted out the next days and weeks. I vaguely remember sobbing with my married son and daughter and receiving an emotional hug at the cemetery from Kelly Johnson, whose own wife, MaryEllen, was desperately ill from diabetes. MaryEllen and Faye were close friends, and MaryEllen was devastated by Faye’s passing.

  I decided my only hope for keeping sane was to plunge immediately into my work. My younger brother, who had recently divorced, moved in with me. And on the morning I returned to work I found a piece of paper on my desk. It was from Alan Brown, who was managing the program, and written on it was the date of my next birthday—June 18, 1981. “What’s this?” I asked. “That’s the date we test-fly the airplane,” Alan replied. “The date is firm. In granite. Count on it.” I gave him a wan smile, because right then the tailpipe problem was still throwing us for a loop and flight testing seemed over the hills and far away.

  But on Thursday morning, June 18, 1981, our first production-model stealth fighte
r took off from our base on its maiden test flight. She flew like a dream.

  Postscript on a Big Hit

  The success of the stealth fighter did more than just bail me out. I had emerged unscathed even though we lost slightly more than $6 million on the first five production models. But the Air Staff was so pleased with the airplane that they decided to go for twenty-nine, then fifty-nine. I almost had them convinced to go for eighty-nine. After the first two batches of deliveries we achieved phenomenal efficiency. So much so that we made about $80 million on the deal. At one point I offered to give the government some of its money back because even in the Reagan years I was scared of being accused of making excessive profits. That was a federal offense, punishable with heavy fines. The Air Force told me it had no bookkeeping methods for taking back money, so I gave them $30 million worth of free engineering improvements on the airplane. We were able to make so much because we had perfected every aspect of our manufacturing techniques.

  Stealth was our great good fortune and our earnings sky-rocketed. The stealth fighter brought in more than $6 billion. Refurbishing the U-2 and the Blackbird brought in $100 million. By my fifth year I was heading a small, secret R & D outfit whose annual earnings placed it among the Fortune 500. Not bad. Not bad at all.

  4

  SWATTING AT MOSQUITOES

  THE MAJOR’S name was Al Whitley. He was a top F-100 fighter pilot from the Tactical Air Command and only months away from being promoted to lieutenant colonel. He had about a thousand hours of flying logged in, including combat in Vietnam, and was the first blue-suiter recruited for the new, secret squadron of stealth tactical fighters. Whitley arrived at the Skunk Works in February 1982, accompanied by two crew chiefs, to watch us building his airplane—our first production model. The official Air Force designation for the airplane was the F-117A. Like everything else concerning the stealth fighter, even its designation was classified.

  By the time the airplane rolled off the line three months later, Al and his crew would know every wire, gauge, and bolt. They would be followed by all the other pilots and crew in that first squadron, who enjoyed the unique opportunity of actually being in on the production of the airplane they would soon be responsible for flying safely and effectively. Our purpose was to help them overcome fears of the unknown and achieve a level of confidence bred of expert knowledge of what their new airplane was all about. No other aerospace manufacturer came close to establishing such an intimate working relationship between builder and user.

  Major Whitley had been selected by “Burner” Bob Jackson, a two-fisted Tactical Air Command colonel, who rounded up the most mature and experienced fighter jocks on active duty and gave each of them a two-minute briefing on what they might be doing if they said yes. All he told them was that they would be able to fly their butts off. There would be considerable family separation in the process and the work would be extremely classified. They had exactly five minutes to make up their minds.

  Whitley needed only ten seconds. Now he sat in my office impatient to get his first look at a stealth fighter. I told him, “Keep in mind that to achieve stealthiness we had to commit a planeload of aerodynamic sins. What we came up with suffers just about every kind of unstable flight dynamics.” Then I escorted him and his two crew chiefs onto the production floor to see the airplane for the first time. I watched those three Air Force guys exchange anxious looks, like just before a first attempt at the high diving board. “Boy, it sure is an angular son of a bitch, isn’t it?” Whitley muttered, seeing that top secret diamond shape for the first time.

  I smiled reassuringly. “Major,” I said, “I guarantee you that by the time you are ready to strap in that cockpit, you’ll enjoy one of the sweetest rides of your life.” And I wasn’t just blowing smoke. We were determined to make the F-117A the most responsive and pilot-friendly airplane in the inventory. My feeling was that any airplane that looked so alien had better be easy to handle.

  We had already built five. But because the Air Force was in such a rush to form a squadron, the F-117A was very much a work in progress, forcing us to leapfrog the prototype testing phase, which was only then getting off the ground. We used these first five airplanes as guinea pigs to test aerodynamics and propulsion, knowing that changes would come with experience. We kept detailed records of every part in every stealth fighter so that when we made fixes we could facilitate these changes on the earlier airplanes.

  Our technicians would work on flight lines and in the hangars for as long as the airplane remained in the inventory, solving problems for the Air Force mechanics. The airplane’s special need to have absolutely smooth surfaces in order to maintain maximum stealthiness caused unusual stress for ground crews. After each flight the radar-absorbing materials had to be removed to gain entry to doors and service panels, then had to be meticulously replaced in time for the next mission. If the crew screwed up, they’d lose a plane and a pilot, because one neglected indentation exposed to enemy radar acted like a neon pointer. The process was called “buttering,” using a special radar-absorbing putty we developed to coat uneven surfaces.

  The Air Force initially ordered twenty-nine fighters. We built the first one in May 1981 and airlifted it out to our base for flight tests. The first flight confirmed a nagging doubt I had that we had made the twin V-shaped tails too damned small. Midway through that test program, one of the tails fluttered off. The test pilot was able to land after flying for several minutes while actually unaware of what happened. “I thought the airplane acted a little sloppy,” he told me later. His chase plane pilot had warned him, “Hey, I see one of your tails in free fall.”

  We had to redesign the tail, which turned out to be 15 percent too small and too flexible for directional stability and control. Otherwise the airplane handled well.

  Looking back, I am frankly amazed we didn’t have many more major problems to fix than that one because, in truth, we were operating under chaotic conditions. Not only did we suffer all kinds of inefficiencies because of the tight security regulations, but most of the thousand production and shop workers building this airplane were starting from scratch at the Skunk Works. The best tribute to our homegrown training program was the astounding learning curve we achieved in the first couple of years. Building only two airplanes every three months, we enjoyed a better learning curve—78 percent—than other manufacturers had reported while building twenty-five airplanes a month. The rule of thumb in the aerospace business was the more you build, the better you get at it. Our view was that efficiency was mostly the result of quality training, careful inspection, supervision, and high worker motivation. And we achieved these efficiencies in the face of a glaring shortage of trained workers as the Reagan defense spending program began to accelerate in the 1981–1984 time period. The shortage became so severe that we borrowed tooling people from as far away as Lockheed’s Georgia plant; by 1985, our workforce totaled a record seventy-five hundred workers on a variety of stealth and nonstealth secret projects. During this same period, the aerospace industry in Southern California, including Hughes, Rockwell, McDonnell Douglas, Northrop, and Lockheed, had added about forty-five thousand workers to its payroll as military aircraft revenues peaked at $33 billion in sales by 1986. The era of big defense-related profits was at hand.

  But there was always a price to pay when too many inexperienced workers were doing vital work on an airplane. On April 20, 1982, Major Whitley’s stealth fighter was ready to take its Air Force acceptance flight out at the secret base. Whitley himself wanted to take the flight, but that was strictly against our rules. Our veteran test pilot Bob Riedenauer got the assignment. The airplane had performed perfectly during predelivery testing, but the night before the test flight we relocated a servomechanism from one equipment bay to another and rewired it. Riedenauer had barely lifted off the runway when he found to his horror that the wiring had accidentally reversed his crucial pitch and yaw controls. The airplane was only thirty feet off the deck when he flipped over backward an
d crashed on the side of the lake bed in a billowing cloud of dust. Bob was trapped in the cockpit and had to be cut free, sustaining serious leg injuries that kept him hospitalized seven long and painful months.

  “Holy shit,” Major Whitley exclaimed, “that could have been me.” We were both extremely shaken, but I was also hopping mad. That nearly fatal mistake should have been caught in the inspection process. Clearly, such an oversight compounded the original rewiring error. The Air Force convened an accident review board and noted that we had instituted new safeguards and inspection procedures within forty-eight hours of the accident. But the Air Force remained confident of the product, and Major Whitley finally took off for the first time in October 1982, flying the second production model. In honor of his maiden voyage, I presented him with a cryptically worded plaque that had to get by our security censors: “In recognition of a significant event, October 15, 1982.” Al laughed, but it would be six long years before he could finally explain to his wife and kids what in hell that plaque’s inscription really meant.

  “You kept your promise,” Whitley said to me. “I had a slight anxiety attack rolling down that runway, but as soon as I was airborne and those wheels were sucked up, the ride was pure exhilaration.”

  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.