Ben R. Rich (1925–1995)

Skunk Works is one of those phrases which sets aviation fans' hearts a-flutter. The secretive engineering team from Burbank was responsible for some of the most incredible planes of all times. The SR-71 was built in the 1960s, and it remains the highest flying, fastest plane in aviation. It's a marvel of engineering built with slide rules.

Ben Rich, the second director of the Skunk Works, writes a fun account of his views on aviation, engineering, and procurement politics. The Skunk Works show more was an elite brotherhood devoted towards the best in aviation, with rules to minimize management bullshit and keep every engineer within a stone's throw of the production floor. Rich discusses in detail his work on the F-117 stealth fighter, the U-2, and the SR-71, with dips into Navy stealth boats ("never work for the Navy, they don't know what they want and they'll break your heart"), and the red tape of military bureaucracy.

Kelly Johnson stories are another major theme of the book. I've no doubt that Ben Rich is a great engineer, but Johnson, the founder of the Skunk Works, was a legend who won two Collier Trophies and could estimate an aviation problem to 95% accuracy that'd take hours of calculation to prove. Johnson was a genius, but his abrasive personality alienated Air Force generals, who hated a man who built the best planes for the CIA and castigated their procurement efforts as fuck-ups that'd kill pilots and lose wars. The book is lived up by 'other perspective sections', with pilots describing what flying these planes was like, and five or six Secretaries of Defense talking about how vital the planes were to US national security.

Rich also tries to get at the culture of engineering excellence that defined the Skunk Works. As someone with a sideline in organizational studies, this is really hard. How do you know your asshole leader is a real genius and not a cargo-culting lunatic (see Musk, Elon)? It's a difficult challenge, and one not quite clear aside from 'get good people, give them hard but specific goals, and get the hell out their way', but Rich tries. I just wonder what he'd think of Lockheed's latest stealth wonder-blunder, the F-35... show less

Summary: The story of Lockheed’s secret “Skunk Works” operation that produced innovative planes and other products for the military including the U-2, the SR-71 Blackbird, and the F-117 Stealth fighter.

The term “skunk works” has become common parlance in the business and technical worlds for a group within an organization given a high degree of autonomy and freedom from bureaucratic control to work on advanced or secret projects. The development of the original Apple Macintosh show more computer is an example of a “skunk works” project. This book is the story of the original Skunk Works, a top secret operation with Lockheed responsible for building some of the most cutting-edge and innovative military aircraft. Ben Rich was the second boss over the Skunk Works, mentored under the legendary (and formidable) Clarence “Kelly” Johnson.

The book opens with the first test flight of the F-117, the first real stealth fighter, and the first plane built under Rich’s leadership after he took over from Kelly Johnson in 1975. He describes the process of winning the contract to develop the plane, and the incredible engineering work to make the plane practically invisible to enemy radar through a combination of flat surfaces and absorptive materials. One of the biggest problems turned out to be designing a canopy that would deflect radar while being able to be seen out of. Otherwise, the pilot’s head actually had a bigger radar profile than the plane! The biggest test of the plane was the bombing mission the first night of Operation Desert Storm, against heavily defended Baghdad, in which key command and control facilities, and communication facilities were taken out under heavy anti-aircraft fire without a single plane being lost, not only that night but throughout the conflict.

This was just one in a long line of innovative planes designed by the Skunk Works. Rich tells the story of how Kelly Johnson formed this secret operation within Lockheed in 1943 to develop a jet fighter (the P-80) to counter German development of similar technology. Rich describes his own initiation into the Skunk Works as a thermodynamicist brought on to help with the inlet design on the F-104 Starfighter, the first supersonic jet fighter. He was unsure how long he would work there.

Rich made the grade and goes on in the book to narrate the histories of two of the most innovative planes designed under Kelly Johnson’s leadership, the U-2 and the SR-71, both involved in overflights over the Soviet Union and other countries. The U-2 was designed to fly at 70,000 feet, with wings two-thirds as long as the fuselage which entailed special design challenges. It was put into use on overflights over the Soviet Union in 1956, securing critical intelligence on nuclear and conventional military capabilities until Gary Powers was shot down in 1960 (they actually thought they would only get two years of overflights in before this happened). Later it was used over Cuba, and the remarkable fact is that this plane is still in use, having gone through its latest upgrade in 2012.

Rich and his fellow engineers faced a whole different set of engineering challenges in designing the SR-71 Blackbird, capable of sustained Mach 3.2 speeds and flight at over 80,000 feet while taking crystal clear pictures. The plane still holds sustained speed records that have not been surpassed. It was the first titanium-bodied plane, used a special inlet cone design to force air into the engine at high altitudes, and one of the first to use stealth technology to reduce radar cross-sections.

The book mixes Rich’s narrative with “testimonials” from pilots who flew the planes, defense secretaries like Bill Perry, and national security figures like Zbigniew Brzezinski. More than simply a narrative of building innovative aircraft (and even a stealth ship), it is a narrative of what it was like to work under Kelly Johnson and how he shaped the Skunk Works. One of the most significant contributions Johnson made, referenced by many texts on “skunk works” was Kelly’s 14 Rules, that articulated the requirements of a top secret, lean, innovative, cost-effective organization free of bureaucratic control that inflates costs, bogs down development and stifles creativity. One of the rules also established alternative compensation policies that compensated for performance rather than number of reports.

Kelly was a formidable leader. He did not suffer fools gladly, losing him some contracts. He would not build a plane he didn’t believe in. He had zero tolerance for pretense. He had an amazing knowledge of every aspect of aviation engineering. He insisted that engineers work in close proximity to the shop floor. Rich speculates that such a leader probably would not be possible in his own era.

Rich’s concluding chapter, “Drawing the Right Conclusions” outlines his own ideas for more sensible procurement policies throughout the defense industry. He anticipates the widespread use of drones. I don’t know enough to determine whether any of his idea have been adopted, but they make sense if one wants both to control costs, and maintain a technological edge in weaponry.

It is fascinating to me that most of the applications of “skunk works” ideas have been in the technology world. I’m curious about the application of these ideas to the non-profit world, coming up with innovative ways to deliver services that better people’s lives. Often the challenge here is money to fund something outside of line management or support services, and satisfying funding entities that such an operation is not frivolous. My hunch is that there is a need for clear mission and bench marks, leadership that can manage lightly yet effectively a talented group of people, and good bridges back into the rest of the organization to test and implement ideas.

All that said, Rich has given us a fascinating narrative of the original Skunk Works, fascinating both for anyone interested in military aviation, and instructive for those wanting to learn key principles for skunk works-type operations. show less

This is an excellent memoir. The narrative is structured extremely well, mostly but not entirely in chronological order. There are so many great anecdotes. Many other contributors have added short pieces, spread throughout the book, explaining their experiences with stealth technology. (A few of these pieces are fluffy, but most are good.)

A downside is that there is little self-criticism, and we don't learn much about other characters besides Rich's original boss.

It is fascinating to see show more how a military contractor works. However, Rich never wrestles with the fact that he is creating weapons to kill people, with occasional deadly accidents killing Americans. More importantly, I think, Rich never seriously considers his role in the military-industrial complex, and that today's big projects are so massively expensive that they are doing more damage to the US than they are helping its security. At the end he has some very, very modest suggestions for reducing costs. But none of these suggestions are very serious, and reducing costs clearly hasn't been a serious priority for him.

> Our model was mounted on a 12-foot-high pole, and the radar dish zeroed in from about 1,500 feet away. I was standing next to the radar operator in the control room. "Mr. Rich, please check on your model. It must’ve fallen off the pole," he said. I looked. "You're nuts," I replied. "The model is up there." Just then a black bird landed right on top of the Hopeless Diamond. The radar operator smiled and nodded. "Right, I’ve got it now." I wasn’t about to tell him he was zapping a crow.

> one of our aerodynamicists built a giant slingshot that looked like a rock-hurling catapult right out of an old Robin Hood movie, set it up on the third-floor ramp of a huge assembly building the length of two and a half football fields—and then fired off models of our new stealth shape and took slow-motion film of how they fell to the ground, receiving a painless preview of what would happen if the real airplane spun out of control. Security forced us to do this indoors rather than off a rooftop—but it worked perfectly.

> 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.

> 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."

> on the ramp so that Soviet satellites would think we were an A-7 base. But if their photo analysis experts were really on the ball, they would have picked up the double fencing around the perimeter, the powerful searchlights, television cameras, and sensing devices, all signs of unusually tight security. And I think they may have picked this up because satellite overpasses increased to as many as three or four a day for weeks on end. They were looking for something special, but we did all our real work well after sundown. We called ourselves "The Nighthawks," which became the official nickname of our 37th Tactical Fighter Wing.

> The raid was carried out using Navy fighter-bombers off carriers, and Kaddafi escaped with his life because Libyan defenses picked up the attackers coming in time to sound the alarm and several bombs aimed directly at Kaddafi's quarters missed their target because the attacking aircraft were forced to evade incoming missiles and flak. The F-117A would have attacked with surprise and placed that smart bomb right on the guy’s pillow.

> In the mornings we'd find bat corpses littered around our airplanes inside the open hangars. Bats used a form of sonar to "see" at night, and they were crashing blindly into our low-radar-cross-section tails. After all those years of training, we certainly believed in the product, but it was nice having that kind of visual confirmation, nevertheless.

> "L'il Abner" comic strip. Ol' Joe tossed worn shoes and dead skunk into his smoldering vat to make "kickapoo joy juice." Capp named the outdoor still "the skonk works." The connection was apparent to those inside Kelly's circus tent forced to suffer the plastic factory’s stink.

> Everything about this project was dark alley, cloak and dagger. Even the way they financed the operation was highly unconventional: using secret contingency funds, they back-doored payment to Lockheed by writing personal checks to Kelly for more than a million bucks as start-up costs.

> it was very similar in chemistry to a popular insecticide and bug spray of that era known as Flit. Once our airplane became operational, Shell diverted tens of thousands of gallons of Flit to make LF-1A in the summer of 1955, triggering a nationwide shortage of bug spray.

> Pilots were also apprehensive when hitting clear air turbulence and watching those long thin wings flapping like a bird's, worrying that the next big gust would snap them off entirely. And, by the way, there were no ejection seats in the early models of the airplane. Ejection seats would add thirty pounds above a regular seat, so to save precious weight, the CIA decided to dispense with them altogether. … At altitude the pilot flew nose high and wings level, so for him to be able to see down we installed a cockpit device known as a drift sight—basically an upside-down periscope that had four levels of magnification and could be swiveled in a 360-degree arc.

> From my college days I remembered that a good heat absorber was also a good heat emitter and would actually radiate away more heat than it would absorb through friction. I calculated that black paint would lower the wing temperatures 35 degrees by radiation.

> Our supplier, Titanium Metals Corporation, had only limited reserves of the precious alloy, so the CIA conducted a worldwide search and, using third parties and dummy companies, managed to unobtrusively purchase the base metal from one of the world's leading exporters—the Soviet Union. … When machining standard aluminum, a hundred holes could be drilled without resharpening the bit. With titanium, we had to resharpen every few minutes and were forced to develop special drills using special cutting angles and special lubricants, until we finally were able to drill more than 120 holes before having to resharpen … We were stunned when spot welds on panels began to fail within six or seven weeks. Some intensive sleuthing revealed that the panels had been welded during July and August, when the Burbank water system was heavily chlorinated to prevent algae growth

> After President Johnson's public announcement about the airplane in the fall of 1964, Kelly began receiving all kinds of complaints and threats of lawsuits from communities claiming the Blackbird had shattered windows for miles around. A few times we announced a bogus flight plan and then sat back and watched the phony complaints pour in.

> The largest was McDonnell Douglas, which specialized in fighters, building hundreds of F-15 interceptors for the Air Force and the Navy's top fighter, the F-18. Next came General Dynamics, builder of the F-16, a cheap, lightweight fighter sold by the hundreds to our NATO allies, as well as submarines, tanks, and missiles. Lockheed was a solid third, specializing in Polaris missiles, satellites, military cargo aircraft, and spy planes. And finally, Northrop and Rockwell … Four or five aerospace companies now claim to have a Skunk Works. McDonnell Douglas calls its group Phantom Works, and it apparently emulates what we tried to do at Lockheed. Overseas, the Russians and the French have evolved the most sophisticated Skunk Works operations modeled on Kelly Johnson’s original principles. The French aerospace company Dassault-Breguet probably has the best operation in Europe.

> In the early 1970s, Kelly Johnson and I had dinner in Los Angeles with the great Soviet aerodynamicist Alexander Tupolev, designer of their backfire Bear bomber. "You Americans build airplanes like a Rolex watch," he told us. "Knock it off the night table and it stops ticking. We build airplanes like a cheap alarm clock. But knock it off the table and still it wakes you up."

> two Air Force SR-71 Blackbirds based in England throughout the 1970s used Skunk Works maintenance. We had on hand a thirty-five-man crew. By contrast, two Air Force Blackbirds based at Kadena on Okinawa relied on only blue-suiter ground crews, which totaled six hundred personnel … Currently, two U-2s are stationed in Cyprus with twelve Lockheed maintenance persons, while two other U-2s stationed at Taif, in Saudi Arabia, in support of the UN mission in Iraq, have more than two hundred Air Force personnel. And when the U-2s at Taif need periodic overhauls, they are flown to Cyprus, where our crews do the job.

> President Johnson first announced in 1964 the existence of the RS-71, the Air Force two-seater Blackbird. That’s right, RS-71 was its official designation, but Johnson accidentally turned it around and called it the "SR-71." Instead of putting out a brief correction, the Air Force decided not to call attention to a very minor mistake by the commander in chief and ordered us to change about twenty-nine thousand blueprints and drawings at a cost of thousands of dollars so that they would read "SR-71" and not "RS-71."

> the stubborn insistence of the Air Force to have its insignia painted on the wings and fuselage of the SR-71 Blackbird, even though no one would ever see it at eighty-five thousand feet; finding a way to keep the enamel from burning off under the enormous surface temperatures and maintain its true red, white, and blue colors took our chief chemist, Mel George, weeks of experimentation and cost the government thousands of unnecessary dollars

> One of the problems with our stealth fighter was that because it was hidden for years behind a wall of tight security, most Air Force tactical planners didn't even know it existed and thus had no way of integrating the airplane into overall combat planning and strategy. By the time the F-117A arrived on station for duty in Operation Desert Storm, the airplane was largely a cipher to the high command in terms of its performance capabilities. show less

This book has been on my TBR for a little over a year and I happened upon it in a little free library on my street. A first edition complete with dust jacket and clippings of obits for Louis W. Schalk (handwritten: WP [Washington Post] 8/21/02; Schalk was a test pilot, the first to fly the Blackbird. He died in Northern Virginia.) and Ben Rich, author of this book and former head of Lockheed’s Skunk Works.

The book is pretty good, if you’re interested in the U-2, SR-71, Stealth Fighter, show more or management of an operation like Skunk Works. The voice in which it is written is casual and approachable. Rich (and his co-author, Leo Janos) puts dialogue to historical conversations that are sometimes as many as 40 years in the past. Sometimes this dialogue is a little suspect to my ear, but I don’t think it’s meant to be taken as if it were printed in the New York Times. It’s typically expository and that’s fine. There is plenty in the writing that clearly encapsulates sort of 60’s-80’s business ‘sense’ that I had to skim over, because it is not very interesting or compelling.

The trials and tribulations of the various major projects that Rich describes, however, are. They’re especially interesting when Rich & Janos talk about the engineering problems present, and they’re talked about in understandable ways.

There are little sections of the book with commentaries from other folks - typically industry, government, and military veterans. Think generals and such. Some of these are patently political and flat out disinteresting. Some of the worst offenders may as well be writing press releases straight to the WSJ in 1994. Fine. Some of them (typically by engineers or pilots) are super interesting, and put is in the drafting room or cockpit.

This is probably the most Dad-energy book I’ve ever read. I could see a 50 year old Dad eating this thing right up in the airport lounge. I liked it, but would also be interested in a much more technical and detailed discussion of the projects (especially the SR-71) from a Richard Rhodes type. show less