Skunk Works

The success of the stealth fighter did more than just bail me out. I had emerged unscathed even though we lost slightly more than $6 million on the first five production models. But the Air Staff was so pleased with the airplane that they decided to go for twenty-nine, then fifty-nine. I almost had them convinced to go for eighty-nine. After the first two batches of deliveries we achieved phenomenal efficiency. So much so that we made about $80 million on the deal. At one point I offered to give the government some of its money back because even in the Reagan years I was scared of being accused of making excessive profits. That was a federal offense, punishable with heavy fines. The Air Force told me it had no bookkeeping methods for taking back money, so I gave them $30 million worth of free engineering improvements on the airplane. We were able to make so much because we had perfected every aspect of our manufacturing techniques.

Stealth was our great good fortune and our earnings sky-rocketed. The stealth fighter brought in more than $6 billion. Refurbishing the U-2 and the Blackbird brought in $100 million. By my fifth year I was heading a small, secret R & D outfit whose annual earnings placed it among the Fortune 500. Not bad. Not bad at all.

4 SWATTING AT MOSQUITOES

THE MAJOR’S name was Al Whitley. He was a top F-100 fighter pilot from the Tactical Air Command and only months away from being promoted to lieutenant colonel. He had about a thousand hours of flying logged in, including combat in Vietnam, and was the first blue-suiter recruited for the new, secret squadron of stealth tactical fighters. Whitley arrived at the Skunk Works in February 1982, accompanied by two crew chiefs, to watch us building his airplane—our first production model. The official Air Force designation for the airplane was the F-117A. Like everything else concerning the stealth fighter, even its designation was classified.

By the time the airplane rolled off the line three months later, Al and his crew would know every wire, gauge, and bolt. They would be followed by all the other pilots and crew in that first squadron, who enjoyed the unique opportunity of actually being in on the production of the airplane they would soon be responsible for flying safely and effectively. Our purpose was to help them overcome fears of the unknown and achieve a level of confidence bred of expert knowledge of what their new airplane was all about. No other aerospace manufacturer came close to establishing such an intimate working relationship between builder and user.

Major Whitley had been selected by “Burner” Bob Jackson, a two-fisted Tactical Air Command colonel, who rounded up the most mature and experienced fighter jocks on active duty and gave each of them a two-minute briefing on what they might be doing if they said yes. All he told them was that they would be able to fly their butts off. There would be considerable family separation in the process and the work would be extremely classified. They had exactly five minutes to make up their minds.

Whitley needed only ten seconds. Now he sat in my office impatient to get his first look at a stealth fighter. I told him, “Keep in mind that to achieve stealthiness we had to commit a planeload of aerodynamic sins. What we came up with suffers just about every kind of unstable flight dynamics.” Then I escorted him and his two crew chiefs onto the production floor to see the airplane for the first time. I watched those three Air Force guys exchange anxious looks, like just before a first attempt at the high diving board. “Boy, it sure is an angular son of a bitch, isn’t it?” Whitley muttered, seeing that top secret diamond shape for the first time.

I smiled reassuringly. “Major,” I said, “I guarantee you that by the time you are ready to strap in that cockpit, you’ll enjoy one of the sweetest rides of your life.” And I wasn’t just blowing smoke. We were determined to make the F-117A the most responsive and pilot-friendly airplane in the inventory. My feeling was that any airplane that looked so alien had better be easy to handle.

We had already built five. But because the Air Force was in such a rush to form a squadron, the F-117A was very much a work in progress, forcing us to leapfrog the prototype testing phase, which was only then getting off the ground. We used these first five airplanes as guinea pigs to test aerodynamics and propulsion, knowing that changes would come with experience. We kept detailed records of every part in every stealth fighter so that when we made fixes we could facilitate these changes on the earlier airplanes.