Skunk Works

Bill goes full throttle. He’s chewing up a lot of runway as he sweeps past us. I’m thinking, Damn it, with all that wind he should be up by now. He’s far down the runway and I’m no longer breathing. Uh-oh. He’s damn near off the end of the goddam runway. Then I see him lift off. Slow as a jumbo jet a hundred times its weight, but he’s up. His nose is high. But just hanging there. Get up. Up, up, up. The little airplane hears me. It’s heading toward the snow-powdered mountains. Ken Perko of the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, who is among the half dozen outsiders cleared to witness this flight test, reaches out to shake my hand. “By God, Ben,” he says, “the Skunk Works has done it again.”

Kelly slaps me on the back and shouts, “Well, Ben, you got your first airplane.”

Not so fast. It’s standard procedure to leave the landing gear down on maiden test flights checking out airworthiness, but even so it seems to me the airplane is way too sluggish gaining altitude. There are some significant foothills looming in Bill’s flight path and I try to do some quick mental calculating to get him safely over the hump. I raise my binoculars and quickly try to adjust the focus. By the time the mountains come clear, our airplane is across the other side.