Skunk Works

Spreading the profits among the key manufacturers was the usual military-industrial game, but it really seemed that the era of the Blackbird was at hand: Blackbird spy planes, Blackbird interceptors, and Blackbird bombers. The Blackbird so outmatched any other airplane in the world with its speed and altitude, it would dominate air warfare for at least a decade or more.

Before 1962 ended, Kelly had obtained approval from Lockheed management to construct a million-dollar engineering building on the strength of the proposed expansion of the Blackbird programs. Our in-house study, meanwhile, indicated we would need $22 million in additional funds to increase production facilities to meet the large production quotas of Mach 3 Blackbird fighters and bombers the Air Force expected to order.

All of us began counting our big bonuses long before the check was in the mail. And all of us were in for one big let-down. I remember my producer brother telling me once about a young filmmaker who had been courted by a big studio, actually being kissed on both cheeks by the reigning mogul and declared a genius, and his script given the top priority for quick production. But a month later, that same young genius could not even get his calls returned. He had gone from hot to cold with no apparent explanation. That typical Hollywood story became the metaphor for the Blackbird scenario as played out by the Kennedy administration. Suddenly, Kelly could not get calls returned from key administration players making decisions about Blackbird bombers and interceptors. A few top generals began ducking him, too, and the word drifting back to us from the Pentagon was that McNamara’s young Turks advising him on cost-effectiveness refused to believe that the Russians were actually developing a supersonic Backfire bomber. Without that threat, the Blackbird was not a necessary deterrent. McNamara’s Turks insisted we could get by using the old standby fighter, the Convair F-106. This was the updated version of the F-102 delta-wing fighter that was the backbone of the Air Defense Command. Both of these airplanes had only supersonic dash (Mach 1.8) capability, their fuel capacity limited to a scant five minutes of supersonic flight.

Kelly thought Mac the Knife had taken leave of his senses. But he was not in the loop about planning for possible U.S. military intervention in Vietnam and the secret preparations for air and ground action by our forces. As a first step, McNamara approved a new classified prototype for the first swing-wing tactical fighter, called the TFX (Tactical Fighter Experimental), that would specialize in ground attack. Built by General Dynamics, it was destined to be one of the most controversial airplanes of the era, involving tens of millions in cost overruns, as its designers struggled to solve the horrendous problems of a movable wing—parallel on takeoff and becoming swept-back as the airplane gained Mach 2 speed. The Air Force wanted the F-111, as it was officially designated, to come in on the deck, evading radar by hiding in the ground clutter, to support local troop action in hostile ground action. But the first F-111s used in Vietnam took tremendous losses because their terrain-following radar, which allowed them to skim over treetops in the dead of night, acted like a powerful beacon for enemy radar to home in on. Even worse, most of us in the Skunk Works thought that the minute look-down, shoot-down radar fire control systems were perfected, airplanes like the F-111 would become obsolete. A higher-flying MiG pilot looking down on a squadron of F-111s could become a combat ace in seconds.

To prove the Blackbird’s tremendous performance capabilities to McNamara, we launched a flight in May 1962, from Edwards Air Force Base outside Los Angeles to Orlando, Florida, that blazed across the country in one hour and twenty-eight minutes. And if he wasn’t paying attention, we sent another Blackbird winging east from San Diego, which arrived over Savannah Beach, Georgia, only fifty-nine minutes later. We also started development of a weapons system for the Blackbird that would demonstrate how easily an airplane like the F-111 could be shot down while flying at the treetops.