Skunk Works - Notes
Skunk Works was not the official name. The official name was Lockheed’s Advanced Development Projects. US intel could easily intercept Soviet references to “Skunk Works” because there was no Soviet translation.
Lockheed had mandatory retirement age of 65. What a concept.
Lockheed paid millions in bribes to Dutch, Japanese, West Germans, Italians, etc. to get them to buy planes. Almost sank the company.
SR-71 flew faster than Mach 3 and higher than 80,000 feet. Coated with iron ferrites to absorb radar energy rather than send it back. 65% of radar cross section comes from the shape of a plane; 35% from radar-absorbent coatings.
At one point in the 70s, Boeing was using 30% of all US aluminum to build its airliners. Most of the rest was used for the soft drink and beer industry. It was hard to build military planes.
The F-117A stealth fighter was the first to employ a completely automated mission, from takeoff to attack and return. It was so effective that it could hit a simulated strke on a boathouse on a remote Wisconsin lake and return safely.
The US could have used the F-117A on the Muammar Kaddafi raid in 1986, but SECDEF Weinberger did not want to unveil the technology yet. Libyan defenses were able to pick up the Navy fighters they used instead, and Kaddafi escaped with his life.
Bats would crash into the F-117A at night. Bats use sonar to “see,” and sonar, like radar, would get absorbed.
During Desert Storm, the US ran low on bombs and had to use lighter GBU-10s. These smaller bombs bounced off the roof of some hardened hangers at an Iraqi base. The Iraqis felt they had finally defeated the Americans at something and crammed a bunch of their jet fighters into these hangars. Then the USAF went in with heavier GBU-27s and blew up the hangars completely.
The name Skunk Works comes from a pretty racist comic strip in which “Injun Joe” tosses worn shoes and a dead skunk into his moonshine still, which he calls “the skonk works.” The factory smelled bad, so one day a designer picked up a ringing phone and accounced, “Skunk Works,” and the name stuck. The head of Skunk Works fired him on the spot, but the designer came back the next day, and the boss never said a word.
The original U-2 pilots were picked from the Air Force, by the CIA, and paid by Lockheed.
Standard military kerosene fuel would freeze at the altitudes that the U-2 would fly. So Shell developed a low-vapor kerosene that could work. It was similar in chemistry to a popular insecticide known as Flit. Shell diverted tens of thousands of gallons of Flit to make the fuel, triggering a nationwide shortage of bugspray in 1955.
U-2 pilots were trained to fly 9 hour and 40 minute missions. Seated. In a cramped cockpit. One pilot complained, “I ran out of ass before I ran out of gas.”
Strategic Air Command (SAC) used to have its own fighter wings that were used to escort the bomber force. Bombers used to be cooler than fighters.
The first time in history that a ground-to-air missile shot down an airplane was in 1960, when Francis Gary Powers was shot down during a U-2 overflight of the Soviet Union. This forced President Eisenhower to acknowledge the existence of the U-2. Francis Powers came home in 1962 and was greeted like a traitor. He later went to work as a helicopter traffic reporter and died in a helicopter crash in 1977.
Soviet aircraft could never reach the heights of the U-2, so one strategy they used was to fly entire squadrons of their fleet 15,000 feet below the U-2 to block its cameras. “Aluminum clouds.”
The U-2 played a major role in the Cuban missile crisis. Pictures taken from 72,000 feet showed everything. President Kennedy was impressed to see a worker defecating in an outdoor latrine. The picture was so clear you could see the guy reading a newspaper.
During Vietnam War, the US launched gliders from U-2s as decoys. The gliders carried tiny transmitters that made them appear like B-52s or fighter-bombers. This forced the North Vietnamese to launch very expensive missiles to take out $500 decoys. Asymmetric warfare.
The DEA asked the CIA to use its U-2 fleet to take pictures of a government-sanctioned poppy field in Arizona to see what poppy looks like as it gets closer to harvesting. The DEA used fugitive Mexican planters to monitor the crops. The CIA ordered one final overflight of the crop before destroying it. The U-2 flew over the field, as scheduled, only to see the field had been swept clean: the workers had harvested the crop the night before and slipped back into Mexico. The first government-subsidized heroin was probably on the streets a few weeks later.
The CIA used shell companies to purchase titanium used for the Blackbird (SR-71) from the Soviet Union.
The SR-71, using afterburners, could use 8,000 gallons of fuel an hour. It could fly two-thirds of a mile a second. San Diego to Savannah, GA in 59 minutes. NYC to London in 1 hour and 57 minutes.
The SR-71 was retired in 1990 after 24 years of service. Never shot down or lost a single crewman to enemy fire.
SR-71 pilots trained at Beale AFB, CA. Of the first 10 pilots, 9 went on to become generals.
The US used the SR-71 to repeatedly hit sonic booms over the Hanoi Hilton to send a message to the POWs.
Lockheed hates working with the Navy.
Kelly Johnson was the head of Skunk Works before the author (Ben Rich). Kelly’s wife died in 1970 after a struggle with cancer. Before she died, his wife told him to remarry quickly and even suggested he marry his much younger secretary MaryEllen. 25 years younger. They did get married. Then in 1972, MaryEllen got sick. She advised Kelly to marry her best friend, Nancy, which he did, soon after MaryEllen’s funeral.
Lockheed lost the bid for the F-16 because they made what they thought the USAF actually wanted, rather than build a prototype to the specifications. General Dynamics followed the specs. By the time the F-16 became operational, it weighed exactly as much as the Lockheed prototype did originally, had the exact same size wing, and carried almost exactly the same amount of fuel.
The open secret in our business was that the gov’t practiced a very obvious form of paternalistic socialism to make certain that its principal weapons suppliers stayed solvent and maintained a skilled workforce.
Author: the USAF has too many commissioned officers with no mission to perform so they stand around production lines with clipboards, second-guessing and interfering. Too many auditors.
Things cost more for the USAF because we don’t accept manufacturers’ warranties and instead require a bunch of inspectors to work on the production lines. The same engine costs less for commercial airliners.
The USAF could also save money by hiring maintainers from Lockheed (or other contractors) rather than training and employing them in-house.
The SR-71 was actually called the RS-71, but President Johnson accidentally mixed it up. Rather than correct the commander-in-chief, Lockheed had to change 29,000 blueprints and drawings to read SR-71 at a cost of thousands of dollars.