Skunk Works

Finding qualified aerospace workers was almost impossible at any price. Usually we borrowed people from the main plant, but business was brisk there, too, building our own Tri-Star airliner and completing a big contract award for a Navy patrol aircraft, and they had no skilled workers to spare. We had to hire people off the street, and security clearances became a horror and a half. We’d find someone with good references as a welder only to have him flunk security because of drugs. Forty-four percent of the people who applied for jobs with us flunked the drug testing. I began to think that all of Southern California was zonked on coke, heroin, pot, and LSD. Those who flunked were mostly shop personnel, but some promising technical types were caught in the net as well.

We weren’t exactly home free with many of the new employees who did pass the drug hurdle; we had to start from scratch getting them cleared and it could take longer than having a baby. I got dispensations from security for workers we purposely put in “ice boxes”—that is, they worked in remote buildings far from the main action, assembling innocuous parts. We were purposely creating big problems in terms of efficiency and logistics in the name of security by allowing ourselves to become so fragmented. But I had no choice. I had to tuck away workers so they couldn’t see or guess what it was they were really working on. I had to make us inefficient by having them work on pieces of the airplane that would not reveal the nature of the airplane itself. I couldn’t tell them how many pieces they had to make, and we had to redo drawings to eliminate the airplane’s serial numbers. That alone required significant extraneous paperwork. The majority of the people we hired had no idea that we were building a fighter, or whether we were building ten or fifty. Through a complex procedure we reserialized their piecemeal work when it came into the main assembly.

I had to laugh thinking how Kelly would have reacted not only to the security headaches but to the exasperating management regulations that never existed in his day. I might be cleared for top secret, but I was also on a government contract and that meant conforming to all sorts of mandatory guidelines and stiff regulations. Kelly had operated in a paradise of innocence, long before EPA, OSHA, EEOC, or affirmative action and minority hiring policies became the laws of our land. I was forced by law to buy two percent of my materials from minority or disadvantaged businesses, but many of them couldn’t meet my security requirements. I also had to address EEOC requirements on equal employment opportunity and comply with other laws that required hiring a certain number of the disabled. Burbank was in a high-Latino community and I was challenged as to why I didn’t employ any Latino engineers. “Because they didn’t go to engineering school” was my only reply. If I didn’t comply I could lose my contract, its high priority notwithstanding. And it did no good to argue that I needed highly skilled people to do very specialized work, regardless of race, creed, or color. I tried to get a waiver on our stealth production, but it was almost impossible.

We had barely any experience working with new exotic materials being used for the airplane’s outer skin. The radar-absorbing ferrite sheeting and paints required special precautions for the workers. OSHA demanded sixty-five different masks and dozens of types of work shoes on stealth alone. I was told by OSHA that no worker with a beard was allowed to use a mask while spray coating. Imagine if I told a union rep that the Skunk Works would not hire bearded employees—they’d have hung me in effigy.

The Skunk Works facilities were old, many of them dating back to World War II, and even a myopic OSHA inspector would have had a field day finding inadequate ventilation or potentially unsafe asbestos insulation still in the walls. Our work areas were very skunky, ladders all over the place, lots of wiring to trip over, an oil slick or two. We had worked fast and loose from day one—with seldom an accident or a screwup. That was part of our charm, I thought. We were great innovators, rule benders, chance takers, and when appropriate, corner cutters. We did things like fuel airplanes inside an assembly area—a strictly forbidden act that risked fires or worse—to solve the problem of not having to move a very secret airplane into daylight to see if its fuel system leaked. Our people knew what they were doing, worked skillfully under intense pressure, and skirted hazards mostly by sheer expertise and experience. But as we grew, the skill level decreased and sloppiness suddenly became a serious problem.