Skunk Works

That long narrow wing was two-thirds as long as the length of the fuselage and crucial to sustained high-altitude flight. But wings that long created structural problems, including a bending instability in flight known as aeroelastic divergence, a fancy way of describing wings flapping like a seagull’s and possibly tearing off. We worked on the problem around the clock. Kelly, meanwhile, was a blur of activity, juggling five or six production problems simultaneously. As our airplane neared completion, he was also sweating out the construction of our remote facility. Fronting for the CIA under the phony C & J Engineering logo, he hired a construction company to put in wells, two hangars, an airstrip, and a mess hall in the middle of a desert in blistering 130-degree summer heat. At one point, the guy Kelly used as his contractor put out a subcontracting bid. One subcontractor warned him: “Look out for this C & J outfit. We looked them up in Dun & Bradstreet, and they don’t even have a credit rating.” This base was built for only $800,000. “I’ll bet this is one of the best deals the government will ever get,” Kelly remarked to several of us. And he was right.

By early July both the airplane and the test site were nearing completion when Kelly suffered a nearly fatal car wreck, after a driver ran a red light in Encino and clobbered him. He was hospitalized with four broken ribs but hobbled back to work in less than two weeks, just in time for what he referred to in his log as “a terrific final drive to finish the airplane.”

The first U-2 was completed on July 15, 1955. I remember the sense of shock I experienced the first time I stood next to it on the assembly floor. The airplane was so low slung that although I was slightly less than six feet tall, my own nose was higher than the airplane’s. Over the next few days, the airplane was subjected to all kinds of flutter and vibration and control tests, culminating in the most severe test of them all—Kelly’s personal final check and inspection. “I found thirty items to improve,” he told Dick Boehme with a grimace.

On July 23, the airplane was disassembled and loaded into special shipping containers. At four in the morning, the containers were loaded in a remote section of the Burbank Airport onto a C-124 cargo plane and roared off before sunrise, headed for the desert base. Kelly followed in a C-47. We unloaded the bird on schedule into the semi-completed hangars and assembled it. We were ready to fly.