Skunk Works

The night of that first raid against Baghdad coincided with a farewell banquet Lockheed staged to mark my retirement as head of the Skunk Works. It was a very emotional and patriotic evening, interspersed with the latest bulletins and live coverage from CNN. Early the next morning my son Michael called me and read me a story from the New York Times reporting that the first F-117A to drop a bomb on Baghdad carried a small American flag in its cockpit that later would be presented to me. The story said that the pilots of the 37th Tactical Fighter Wing had dedicated that first air strike to me in honor of my retirement. Even more gratifying was that stealth lived up to all our expectations and claims. In spite of undertaking the most dangerous missions of that war, not one F-117A was hit by enemy fire. I know that Colonel Whitley had privately estimated losses of 5 to 10 percent in the first month of the air campaign. No one expected to escape without any losses at all. The stealth fighters composed only 2 percent of the total allied air assets in action and they flew 1,271 missions—only 1 percent of the total coalition air sorties—but accounted for 40 percent of all damaged targets attacked and compiled a 75 percent direct-hit rate. The direct-hit rate was almost as boggling as the no-casualty rate since laser-guided bombs are strictly line of sight, depending on good visibility, and the air war was conducted during some of the worst weather in the region in memory.

The airplane was used at first as a silver bullet against high-value targets. They dropped the first bombs and opened the door for everyone else by destroying the Iraqi communications network. Those attacks were shown to the American public on CNN, and the political impact was as great as the military. It showed we could go downtown at will and with the precision of threading the eye of a needle take out the enemy military command centers with terrific accuracy. Those bull’s-eye shots kept the public’s morale high and its backing secure. No shoot-downs; no prisoners; no hostages.

Gradually, stealth missions were broadened to include air bases and bridges. Bridges are the most difficult target to destroy unless hit in a precise spot with the right payload. To bring down some bridges in Vietnam, for example, took thousands of sorties. The F-117A knocked out thirty-nine of the forty-three bridges spanning the Tigris-Euphrates River—simply astounding.

Stealth opened a new frontier in air war, proving that night attacks were more effective and less dangerous than daylight raids, where aircraft can be seen by the eye as well as by electronics. But Operation Desert Storm also raised red-flag warnings about future air combat: one month seemed to be the logistical limit to air combat sorties. We didn’t design our airplanes to fly five hours a day, every day, for a month or more. Pilot fatigue and a shortage of spare parts became a growing concern. We almost ran out of bombs, too. But the overriding fact of Desert Storm was that the only way the enemy knew the F-117A was in the sky above was when everything around him began blowing up.

5 HOW WE SKUNKS GOT OUR NAME

I FIRST SHOWED UP at Kelly Johnson’s front door, in December 1954, as a twenty-nine-year-old thermodynamicist earning eighty-seven bucks a week. I had never before set foot inside the so-called Skunk Works, in Building 82, a barnlike airplane assembly facility next to the Burbank Airport’s main runway, where Kelly and his minions held forth in a warren of cramped offices, oblivious to the outside world. Everything about that operation was secret, even what building they were in. All I knew for sure was that Johnson had called over to the main plant, where I had been working for the past four years, and asked to borrow a thermodynamicist, preferably a smart one, to help him solve some unspecified problems. It was like a band leader calling over to the union hall to hire a xylophone player for a one-nighter.

My expertise was solving heat problems and designing inlet and exhaust ducts on airplane engines. In those years, Lockheed was booming, cranking out a new airplane every two years. I felt I was in on the ground floor of a golden age in aviation—the era of the jet airplane—and couldn’t believe my good luck. As young and green as I was, I had already earned my very own patent for designing a Nichrome wire to wrap around and electrically heat the urine-elimination tube used on Navy patrol planes. Crewmen complained that on freezing winter days their penises were sticking painfully to the metal funnel. My design solved their problem and I’m sure made me their unknown hero. Both my design and patent were classified “Secret.”