Skunk Works

Our technicians would work on flight lines and in the hangars for as long as the airplane remained in the inventory, solving problems for the Air Force mechanics. The airplane’s special need to have absolutely smooth surfaces in order to maintain maximum stealthiness caused unusual stress for ground crews. After each flight the radar-absorbing materials had to be removed to gain entry to doors and service panels, then had to be meticulously replaced in time for the next mission. If the crew screwed up, they’d lose a plane and a pilot, because one neglected indentation exposed to enemy radar acted like a neon pointer. The process was called “buttering,” using a special radar-absorbing putty we developed to coat uneven surfaces.

The Air Force initially ordered twenty-nine fighters. We built the first one in May 1981 and airlifted it out to our base for flight tests. The first flight confirmed a nagging doubt I had that we had made the twin V-shaped tails too damned small. Midway through that test program, one of the tails fluttered off. The test pilot was able to land after flying for several minutes while actually unaware of what happened. “I thought the airplane acted a little sloppy,” he told me later. His chase plane pilot had warned him, “Hey, I see one of your tails in free fall.”

We had to redesign the tail, which turned out to be 15 percent too small and too flexible for directional stability and control. Otherwise the airplane handled well.

Looking back, I am frankly amazed we didn’t have many more major problems to fix than that one because, in truth, we were operating under chaotic conditions. Not only did we suffer all kinds of inefficiencies because of the tight security regulations, but most of the thousand production and shop workers building this airplane were starting from scratch at the Skunk Works. The best tribute to our homegrown training program was the astounding learning curve we achieved in the first couple of years. Building only two airplanes every three months, we enjoyed a better learning curve—78 percent—than other manufacturers had reported while building twenty-five airplanes a month. The rule of thumb in the aerospace business was the more you build, the better you get at it. Our view was that efficiency was mostly the result of quality training, careful inspection, supervision, and high worker motivation. And we achieved these efficiencies in the face of a glaring shortage of trained workers as the Reagan defense spending program began to accelerate in the 1981–1984 time period. The shortage became so severe that we borrowed tooling people from as far away as Lockheed’s Georgia plant; by 1985, our workforce totaled a record seventy-five hundred workers on a variety of stealth and nonstealth secret projects. During this same period, the aerospace industry in Southern California, including Hughes, Rockwell, McDonnell Douglas, Northrop, and Lockheed, had added about forty-five thousand workers to its payroll as military aircraft revenues peaked at $33 billion in sales by 1986. The era of big defense-related profits was at hand.

But there was always a price to pay when too many inexperienced workers were doing vital work on an airplane. On April 20, 1982, Major Whitley’s stealth fighter was ready to take its Air Force acceptance flight out at the secret base. Whitley himself wanted to take the flight, but that was strictly against our rules. Our veteran test pilot Bob Riedenauer got the assignment. The airplane had performed perfectly during predelivery testing, but the night before the test flight we relocated a servomechanism from one equipment bay to another and rewired it. Riedenauer had barely lifted off the runway when he found to his horror that the wiring had accidentally reversed his crucial pitch and yaw controls. The airplane was only thirty feet off the deck when he flipped over backward and crashed on the side of the lake bed in a billowing cloud of dust. Bob was trapped in the cockpit and had to be cut free, sustaining serious leg injuries that kept him hospitalized seven long and painful months.