Skunk Works

Around the time Kelly’s crew raised their circus tent, cartoonist Al Capp introduced Injun Joe and his backwoods still into his “L’il Abner” comic strip. Ol’ Joe tossed worn shoes and dead skunk into his smoldering vat to make “kickapoo joy juice.” Capp named the outdoor still “the skonk works.” The connection was apparent to those inside Kelly’s circus tent forced to suffer the plastic factory’s stink. One day, one of the engineers showed up for work wearing a civil defense gas mask as a gag, and a designer named Irv Culver picked up a ringing phone and announced, “Skonk Works.” Kelly overheard him and chewed out Irv for ridicule: “Culver, you’re fired,” Kelly roared. “Get your ass out of my tent.” Kelly fired guys all the time without meaning it. Irv Culver showed up for work the next day and Kelly never said a word.

Behind his back, all of Kelly’s workers began referring to the operation as “the skonk works,” and soon everyone at the main plant was calling it that too. When the wind was right, they could smell that “skonk.”[4]

And who knows—maybe it was that smell that spurred Kelly’s guys to build Lulu Belle, their nickname for the cigar-shaped prototype of the P-80 Shooting Star, in only 143 days—37 days ahead of schedule. The war ended in Europe before the P-80 could prove itself there. But Lockheed built nearly nine thousand over the next five years, and during the Korean War the P-80 won the first all-jet dogfight, shooting down a Soviet MiG-15 in the skies above North Korea.

That primitive Skunk Works operation set the standards for what followed. The project was highly secret, very high priority, and time was of the essence. The Air Corps had cooperated to meet all of Kelly’s needs and then got out of his way. Only two officers were authorized to peek inside Kelly’s tent flaps. Lockheed’s management agreed that Kelly could keep his tiny research and development operation running—the first in the aviation industry—as long as it was kept on a shoestring budget and didn’t distract the chief engineer from his principal duties. So Kelly and a handful of bright young designers he selected took over some empty space in Building 82; Kelly dropped by for an hour or two every day before going home. Those guys brainstormed what-if questions about the future needs of commercial and military aircraft, and if one of their ideas resulted in a contract to build an experimental prototype, Kelly would borrow the best people he could find in the main plant to get the job done. That way the overhead was kept low and the financial risks to the company stayed small.

Fortunately for Kelly, the risks stayed small because his first two development projects following the P-80 were absolute clunkers. He designed and built a prototype for a small, low-cost-per-mile transport airplane called the Saturn that was really a sixth toe on commercial aviation’s foot because the airlines were buying the cheap war-surplus C-47 cargo plane to haul their customers and were calling it the DC-3. Then Kelly and his little band of brainstormers designed the damnedest airplane ever seen—the XFV-1, a vertical riser to test the feasibility of vertical takeoff and landing from the deck of a ship. The big trouble, impossible to overcome, was that the pilot was forced to look straight up at the sky at the crucial moment when his airplane was landing on deck. Even Kelly had to concede the unsolvability of that one.

But the open secret in our company was that the chief engineer walked on water in the adoring eyes of CEO Robert Gross. Back in 1932, Gross had purchased Lockheed out of bankruptcy for forty grand and staked the company’s survival on the development of a twin-engine commercial transport. Models of the design were sent to the wind tunnel labs at the University of Michigan, where a young engineering student named Clarence Johnson contradicted the positive findings of his faculty advisers, who praised the design to Lockheed’s engineering team. Johnson, all of twenty-three, warned Lockheed’s chief engineer at the time that the design was inherently directionally unstable, especially with one engine out.

Lockheed was sufficiently impressed to hire the presumptuous young engineer, and learned quickly why this son of Swedish immigrants was nicknamed “Kelly” by his school chums years earlier. He might be stubborn as a Swede, but his temper was definitely Old Sod.