Skunk Works

The F-22 is a performing miracle. It can fly supersonic without afterburners, and using a revolutionary Thrust Vector Control System, can fly at extreme angles of attack while changing directions at high speeds, thereby outperforming any other airplane in the world—all this with the stealth invisibility achieved by the F-117A. To perform its incredible feats, the F-22’s avionics is as powerful as seven Cray computers! When we bid on this airplane we did so with the understanding that we would build seven hundred of them. That number would justify the enormous development costs that we shared with the government. Uncle Sam gave us $690 million and we put up a similar amount. The development phase was so expensive that we partnered with General Dynamics and Boeing. Northrop, our competitor, also put up $690 million in partnership with McDonnell Douglas. We won the competition, but all five companies involved in the F-22 contest have lost. We, the winners, will never make back our original investment because in the current budget crunch the government has cut back sharply on the number of F-22s it now plans to purchase. Currently, the Air Force has budgeted for four hundred new F-22s, but that number could decrease even further. The fewer the new airplanes produced, the more expensive the unit cost. The F-22 currently costs around $60 million each—the most expensive fighter ever. Meanwhile we and our partners are carrying huge production overheads in tooling and personnel. The sad truth is that our stockholders would have done better financially if they had invested that $690 million in CDs.

New advanced-technology airplanes are budget breakers. The B-2 bomber, at more than $2 billion a copy, proves that point. But we need stealthy long-range bombers like B-2s, which can fly anywhere in the world in twelve hours and drop a payload of forty conventional bombs. Still, unless we manage to get wildly inflated production costs down, aeronautics could well become an arcane art practiced by one or two manufacturers who somehow manage to survive. (Grumman, the Navy’s principal supplier of fighters for nearly sixty years, recently abandoned the sluggish fighter business entirely, while several other big manufacturers are also rumored to be planning to quit increasingly high-risk and unprofitable military aircraft production.)

So an urgent question to pose is how can an airplane as revolutionary and advanced as the F-22 be made for considerably less money? One way, which I have been promoting in vain for several years, would be to make it even more revolutionary than it already is. That is, much of the horrendously expensive avionics on board allows the F-22 to perform incredible aerodynamic maneuvers, from climbing straight up to pulling enormous g-loaded turns. But what if we invent onboard weapons systems that perform all the maneuvering while the airplane itself flies straight and level? In other words, missiles that could electronically lock onto a dogfighting target and swivel and turn at twelve gs while the airplane flies at only two gs. Such a reversal would drastically reduce the huge avionics costs.

Like true Skunk Workers, the aerospace industry as a whole must start thinking in new directions. Why build each new airplane with the care and precision of a Rolls-Royce? 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.” He was absolutely right. The Soviets, he explained, built brute-force machines that could withstand awful weather and primitive landing fields. Everything was ruthlessly sacrificed to cut costs, including pilot safety.