Skunk Works | A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed by Ben R. Rich and Leo Janos

I. Brief Summary

If you are a fan of aviation and aerospace, the cold war, and how the US military and goverment run secret operations then this book is for you. Sometimes I wonder why I didn't come across these types of book earlier. It would've totally changed my professional trajectory. This book is a brain candy for people who enjoy complex systems and hardware engineering. It is an incredible story of the design process behind some of the most amazing military aircrafts like the U-2, SR-71, and F-117 built by Lockheed making some of the greatest technology breakthroughs in the industry. The last part of book along with Chapter 14 has amazing lessons. Those lessons are still relevant today as they were back then. Ben Rich navigated the technical and political waters with ease. All managers should sit up and take notice of Skunk Works approach.

II. Big Ideas

• This book shows how small teams of very smart and very driven people can produce incredible results. Skunk Works should be taken as an example of a modus operandi for technical challenging and highly complex projects.
• Without the Skunk Works the world most likely would look differently today—we would have seen a nuclear war, Russia “winning” the cold war or the US would never have gotten the power it became.
• The Blackbird is still one of the most amazing technical achievements in aerospace that there ever was and to this day is one of the crown jewels of American aviation.
  • The Blackbird could fly consistently Mach 3.1 (3'800 KM/h) while taking high resolution pictures from the height of >20KM. That still sounds like an incredible technical feat but having done that in 1964 is just beyond belief. Now think where the current secret technology must be.
  • For proper navigation the Blackbird locked onto stars because satellite based navigation systems were nowhere near ready.
• Certain military government agencies are far separated from each other because they each wanted their own aircraft to carry out their tactical operation in particular the Navy, the Air Force and the CIA.
• Prototype cheaply and quickly.
  • To convince people of how good their stealth design could be, they built and tested a model. That silenced the people saying it was only a theoretical idea.
  • One time some Skunk Works engineers needed steel to add a piece to the heat shield of the stealth fighter as they were testing it. The only steel available was a toolbox, so they cut it up and welded it on.
• New ideas need to be fought for and defended.
  • Ben Rich backed stealth against the advice of his most senior advisors. He understood the tech and the opportunity better than they did, and he believed in himself and his team.
  • A key breakthrough for stealth technology was buried in a ‘long, dense’ paper published nine years earlier, which had otherwise been ignored.
  • They got the radar profile for the stealth fighter down to the size of a ball bearing, and to sell the idea Ben Rich would roll ball bearings across the desks of the people he was trying to convince.
• Bureaucracy is the enemy of speed and innovation.
  • They were able to move very quickly on the stealth plane project because the project was highly classified, and thus had very little bureaucracy to deal with.
  • Once they expanded outside the original Skunk Works teams, the reduced skill of the new people required an increase in bureaucracy to compensate.
• Breakthroughs come from teams working closely together. All the engineering, PM and design groups involved in a new plane sat in the same place and worked together directly as far as possible.
• New ideas need protection from the existing corporation. For a Skunk Works to be successful it must be genuinely independent from management interference and bureaucracy, and that is rare. Other companies found it very difficult to replicate.
• A successful project often arises from the ashes of a failed one. It was possible to build the U-2 spy plane so quickly because they used much of the same tooling as for the XF-104 fighter. One project built on another and enabled them to move fast.
• Kelly's 14 Rules and Practices at Skunk Works:
  • The Skunk Works manager must be delegated practically complete control of his program in all aspects. He should report to a division president or higher.
  • Strong but small project offices must be provided both by the military and 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 (10% to 25% compared to the so-called normal systems).
  • A very simple drawing and drawing release system with great flexibility for making changes must be provided.
  • 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.
  • 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 very 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 Navy, meets the intent of existing military requirements and should be used on new projects. Push more basic inspection responsibility back to 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. If he doesn’t, he rapidly loses his competency to design other vehicles.
  • The specifications applying to the hardware must be agreed to well in advance of contracting. The Skunk Works practice of having a specification section stating clearly which important military specification items will not knowingly be complied with and reasons therefore is highly recommended.
  • 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 mutual trust between the military project organization and the contractor the 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 by appropriate security measures.
  • 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 supervise

III. Quotes

• My years inside the Skunk Works, for example, convinced me of the tremendous value of building prototypes. I am a true believer. The beauty of a prototype is that it can be evaluated and its uses clarified before costly investments for large numbers are made.
• First, it’s more important to listen than to talk; second, even a timely wrong decision is better than no decision; and third, don’t halfheartedly wound problems–kill them dead.
• I enjoyed the goodwill of my colleagues because most of us had worked together intimately under tremendous pressures for more than a quarter century. Working isolated, under rules of tight security, instilled a camaraderie probably unique in the American workplace.
• We created a practical and open work environment for engineers and shop workers, forcing the guys behind the drawing boards onto the shop floor to see how their ideas were being translated into actual parts and to make any necessary changes on the spot. We made every shop worker who designed or handled a part responsible for quality control. Any worker—not just a supervisor or a manager—could send back a part that didn’t meet his or her standards. That way we reduced rework and scrap waste. We encouraged our people to work imaginatively, to improvise and try unconventional approaches to problem solving, and then got out of their way.
• Clarence “Kelly” Johnson was an authentic American genius. He was the kind of enthusiastic visionary that bulled his way past vast odds to achieve great successes, in much the same way as Edison, Ford, and other immortal tinkerers of the past. When Kelly rolled up his sleeves, he became unstoppable, and the nay-sayers and doubters were simply ignored or bowled over. He declared his intention, then pushed through while his subordinates followed in his wake. He was so powerful that simply by going along on his plans and schemes, the rest of us helped to produce miracles too. Honest to God, there will never be another like him.
• 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.
• Kelly’s motto was “Be quick, be quiet, be on time.”
• Inside the Skunk Works, we were a small, intensely cohesive group consisting of about fifty veteran engineers and designers and a hundred or so expert machinists and shop workers.
• Another weird thing was that after a flight the windshields often were pitted with tiny black dots, like burn specks. We couldn’t figure out what in hell it was. We had the specks lab tested, and they turned out to be organic material—insects that had been injected into the stratosphere and were circling in orbit around the earth with dust and debris at seventy-five thousand feet in the jet stream. How in hell did they get lifted up there? We finally figured it out: they were hoisted aloft from the atomic test explosions in Russia and China.
• The CIA had been covering Cuba with U-2 flights for years. And then, in August 1962, they hit pay dirt and came up with the pictures that showed the Russians were planting ballistic missiles right next door, SS-4s and SS-5s. When Kennedy was shown the site constructions, he asked, “How do we know these sites are being manned?” They showed Kennedy a picture taken from 72,000 feet, showing a worker taking a dump in an outdoor latrine. The picture was so clear you could see that guy reading a newspaper.
• One of the biggest problems we had to overcome was our own extreme invisibility! The ocean waves showed up on radar like a string of tracer bullets. And if the ship was totally invisible, it looked like a blank spot—like a hole in the doughnut—that was a dead giveaway.
• That primitive Skunk Works operation set the standards for what followed. The project was highly secret, very high priority, and time was of the essence.
• The proof of our success was that the airplanes we built operated under tight secrecy for eight to ten years before the government even acknowledged their existence.
• Frankly, I don't think you could have driven a needle up my sphincter using a sledgehammer.
• Control is the name of the game and if a Skunk Works really operates right, control is exactly what they won’t get.
• Bats were the first visual proof I had that stealth really worked....At night the bats would come out and feed off insects. In the mornings we'd find bat corpses 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.
• When Congress approved the decision to retire the SR-71, the Smithsonian Institution requested that a Blackbird be delivered for eventual display in the Air and Space Museum in Washington and that we set a new transcontinental speed record delivering it from California to Dulles. I had the honor of piloting that final flight on March 6, 1990, for its final 2,300-mile flight between L.A. and D.C. I took off with my backseat navigator, Lt. Col. Joe Vida, at 4:30 in the morning from Palmdale, just outside L.A., and despite the early hour, a huge crowd cheered us off. We hit a tanker over the Pacific then turned and dashed east, accelerating to 2.6 Mach and about sixty thousand feet. Below stretched hundreds of miles of California coastline in the early morning light. In the east and above, the hint of a red sunrise and the bright twinkling lights from Venus, Mars, and Saturn. A moment later we were directly over central California, with the Blackbird’s continual sonic boom serving as an early wake-up call to the millions sleeping below on this special day. I pushed out to Mach 3.3.
• We completed our pass over Beirut and turned toward Malta, when I got a warning low-oil-pressure light on my right engine. Even though the engine was running fine I slowed down and lowered our altitude and made a direct line for England. We decided to cross France without clearance instead of going the roundabout way. We made it almost across, when I looked out the left window and saw a French Mirage III sitting ten feet off my left wing. He came up on our frequency and asked us for our Diplomatic Clearance Number. I had no idea what he was talking about, so I told him to stand by. I asked my backseater, who said, “Don’t worry about it. I just gave it to him.” What he had given him was “the bird” with his middle finger. I lit the afterburners and left that Mirage standing still. Two minutes later, we were crossing the Channel.
• He told me later that he was surprised to learn that with flat surfaces the amount of radar energy returning to the sender is independent of the target’s size. A small airplane, a bomber, an aircraft carrier, all with the same shape, will have identical radar cross sections.
• Overnight, however, he apparently had second thoughts, or did some textbook reading on his own, and at the next meeting he turned to me as the first order of business. “On the black paint,” he said, “you were right about the advantages and I was wrong.” He handed me a quarter. It was a rare win. So Kelly approved my idea of painting the airplane black, and by the time our first prototype rolled out the airplane became known as the Blackbird. 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. The Russians never had an inkling of how they were actually contributing to the creation of the airplane being rushed into construction to spy on their homeland.
• We became the most successful advanced projects company in the world by hiring talented people, paying them top dollar, and motivating them into believing that they could produce a Mach 3 airplane like the Blackbird a generation or two ahead of anybody else. Our design engineers had the keen experience to conceive the whole airplane in their mind’s-eye, doing the trade-offs in their heads between aerodynamic needs and weapons requirements. We created a practical and open work environment for engineers and shop workers, forcing the guys behind the drawing boards onto the shop floor to see how their ideas were being translated into actual parts and to make any necessary changes on the spot. We made every shop worker who designed or handled a part responsible for quality control. Any worker—not just a supervisor or a manager—could send back a part that didn’t meet his or her standards. That way we reduced rework and scrap waste. We encouraged our people to work imaginatively, to improvise and try unconventional approaches to problem solving, and then got out of their way. By applying the most commonsense methods to develop new technologies, we saved tremendous amounts of time and money, while operating in an atmosphere of trust and cooperation both with our government customers and between our white-collar and blue-collar employees. In the end, Lockheed’s Skunk Works demonstrated the awesome capabilities of American inventiveness when free to operate under near ideal working conditions. That may be our most enduring legacy as well as our source of lasting pride.
• To buck smothering bureaucratic controls inside or outside government takes unusual pluck and courage. Smallness, modest budgets, and limiting objectives to modest numbers of prototypes are not very rewarding goals in an era of huge multinational conglomerates with billion-dollar cash flows. There are very few strong-willed individualists in the top echelons of big business—executives willing or able to decree the start of a new product line by sheer force of personal conviction, or willing to risk investment in unproven technologies. As salaries climb into the realm of eight-figure annual paychecks for CEOs, and company presidents enjoy stock options worth tens of millions, there is simply too much at stake for any executive turtle to stick his neck out of the shell. Very, very few in aerospace or any other industry are concerned about the future beyond the next quarterly stockholders’ report.
• Ben, why don’t we make the stealth fighter automated from takeoff to attack and return? We can plan the entire mission on computers, transfer it onto a cassette that the pilot loads into his onboard computers, that will route him to the target and back and leave all the driving to us.” To my amazement they actually developed this automated program in only 120 days and at a cost of only $2.5 million. It was so advanced over any other program that the Air Force bought it for use in all their attack airplanes.