Skunk Works

Kelly argued with Washington that our tremendous height and speed advantages were the most potent factors in making us difficult to detect, but the White House and the CIA were not mollified. So we decided to apply radar-absorbing ferrites and plastics to all the airplane’s leading edges—a first in military aviation. We kept the twin tails as small as possible and decided to try to construct them entirely with radar-absorbing composites—a significant technological breakthrough if we could actually do it. But “hiding” this airplane seemed impossible. The tremendous heat generated in supersonic flight made infrared detection inevitable. How do you hide a meteor? Our Mach 3 airplane would streak across the sky like a flaming arrow.

About six months into the design phase I could see discouragement clouding Kelly’s big round face. Our design was now numbered A-10 and we still were not achieving lower radar-cross-section results than Convair, according to Dick Bissell. So, in late March 1959, we began a series of almost around-the-clock brainstorming sessions to review all our previous work and to somehow find a design that would elude Soviet radar. But it seemed fruitless, and Kelly invited Bissell and a couple of agency radar experts to Burbank for what was to be a showdown “where we stand” meeting. He asked me and two others from the design team to sit in and lend him moral support.

The meeting was tense and somber; Kelly was typically candid. “We’ve put in six months of intensive design and study, and by God, we know what we’re doing, but we will never get to the point where the president will be happy with the results. I’m convinced that current improvements in Russian radar will allow them to detect any airplane built in the next three to five years. Radar technology is far ahead of antiradar technology, and we’re just going to have to live with that fact. We’ll never achieve the zero degree of visibility the president seems so stuck on. That technology is way beyond what we know how to do at this point. Maybe Convair can deliver it for you. But we can’t.”

Not much more was said. And when the CIA officials left, Kelly said to us, “Well, boys, I think we’re out. Ike wants an airplane from Mandrake the Magician.”

But later he took me aside. “Keep after this, Ben. Maybe Land or someone else will get Ike to see the light.”

We kept working mostly because it was an unusually slack period at the Skunk Works, without too many other competing distractions. By design A-11, in May 1959, we felt we had scored a breakthrough in dramatically lowering the radar cross section of the aircraft. One of the structural designers presented the idea of modifying the bullet-shaped fuselage by adding a chine, a lateral downward sloped surface that gave the fuselage an almost cobralike appearance. Now the underbelly of the airplane was flat, and the radar cross section had magically decreased by an incredible 90 percent.

By July, we decided to lay out a final revised drawing of the entire airplane making full use of the new chine configuration. In those days I shared an office with four others working on the new airplane—aerodynamicist Dick Fuller, two others who did performance and stability control, and my own sidekick in propulsion, a brilliant twenty-four-year-old Caltech grad named David Campbell, an aerothermodynamicist. (Dave was destined for true greatness, but only two years later, during his daily two-mile jog, he dropped dead from a massive coronary; he was only twenty-six years old.)

I was separated by a connecting doorway from the office of four structures guys, who configured the strength, loads, and weight of the airplane from preliminary design sketches. They put skin and muscle onto the original design concept.

After lunch one blazing summer afternoon, the aerodynamics group in my office began talking through the open door to the structures bunch about calculations on the center of pressures on the fuselage, when suddenly I got the idea of unhinging the door between us, laying the door between a couple of desks, tacking onto it a long sheet of paper, and having all of us join in designing the optimum final design to make full use of the chines. My object was simple. I said, “We’re never going to get this design a hundred percent right. We could play around forever. But I think we now know enough to nail it down at eighty percent. And that’s plenty good enough.”