Kelly Johnson and Lockheed Story

We knew that by flying over Russia for four years they were making significant advances in radars and missiles, so in 1958, two years before Gary Powers was shot down, we decided we would try to make a follow-on plane that eventually became the Mr. -71 to fly higher and four times faster, so that's the connection between the grandpa type and the sr-71, everyone called him Kelly and as he reminisced that day about the genesis of his masterpiece Mach 3, he might have reflected with the same ease. A time when aircraft designers were striving to reach 200 miles per hour A time when he got his first job at the fledgling Lockheed aircraft company In 1932, a group of lawyers led by Robert E Grosse had purchased Lockheed to out of bankruptcy for $40,000 and had staked the company's future on the development.

All-metal twin-engine transport models of the design were sent to the University of Michigan, where a young graduate student named Clarence L Johnson conducted tests in the tunnel. of wind, although his academic advisors gave the design a passing grade, he was not very impressed. had been hired as a tooling designer at Lockheed in August 1933, he informed chief design engineer Hall Hobart, among other things, that it would be directionally unstable, especially with an engine off a rather presumptuous and certainly unconventional wave around twenty-three . years to begin his career at the new company, but it was just a hint of what was to follow for the son of Swedish immigrants, whom his classmates had nicknamed Kelly because of his quick temper, stubborn tenacity and unwillingness to give in.

Back in a fight even against overwhelming odds Instead of reminding the young outspoken man of his place, Hibbert suggested he return to the window and see if he could improve the design. After 72 test wounds, he came up with the solution, an unconventional twin-tail arrangement that would soon become a Lockheed trademark and the Model 10 Electra became the cornerstone of EADS's future growth, as it Several aircraft models helped revolutionize commercial air travel in the 1930s with their design work. Kelly Johnson became the sixth member of an engineering department in an industry that then could not afford to hire specialists.

He often working simultaneously as aerodynamic stress analysts expect Windtunnel and flight test engineer. He also spent long hours in the shop gaining hands-on production experience, learning firsthand the importance of designing production capacity into an aircraft. It was a real world education on everyone. design and development phases that could not be duplicated in a decade and the lessons learned became guides for the rest of his career. For example, he flew as a flight test engineer on all models of the Electra and worked for some of the world's most notable figures. Aviation like Amelia Earhart From this experience emerged his lifelong conviction that the designer had to be able to test his own airplane, as he later commented.

I decided early on that unless I had been scared once a year, I wouldn't do it. I don't have the right balance to really design new airplanes of any type. Kelly Johnson was able to log over 2,300 hours as a flight test engineer. The versatile Electra spawned two important developments: one was the XC 35, a modified Model 10 that in 1937 first demonstrated its practical viability. Johnson was Lockheed's flight test engineer on this project, gaining first-hand experience with pressurization issues and, more importantly, with Meanwhile, Hall Hibbard began to seriously consider the Model 14 Electron incorporating a number of Johnson's innovations, such as the first practical application of Fowler's flaps, which They increased the lifting surface of the wings and served to allow slower landings at shorter distances, an achievement which earned him the 1937 Lawrence Sperry Award in 1938.

The high speed and innovative features of the Model 14 attracted British interest in its potential. as an anti-submarine patrol aircraft, but the requirements required a major redesign. Johnson worked tirelessly for three days and transformed the Model 14 into the Hudson Bomber. The British ordered an initial batch of 250 aircraft, at the time the largest production order ever received by an American company, but there would be many more mm just for the RAF with a total production of almost 3,000 aircraft. In the big time, but even as production was gearing up, Kelley Johnson and his colleagues were into other, much more ambitious designs, the success of the pressurized XC 35, and the recognition that the next generation of air transport would be much larger oceangoing aircraft. and greater speed inspired Johnson. he sputtered and a small design team to lay out the now-classic lines of the Model 49 Constellation in 1939, using his future legendary powers of persuasion, convinced Lockheed to build its own winning team, a decision that paid for itself many times over during the development of this design as all aerodynamic problems will be overcome from the beginning and not a single external change was necessary to be made to the real aircraft.

Hibbard was so impressed with Johnson's green wizard that he swore he could see that commercial aerial development of the legendary Connie would be delayed. by the war and initially flown as the Army Air Forces C69, this however gave time to refine the aircraft so that by the end of the war Lockheed would be in a position to capture the lion's share of the commercial market. Various models of the elegant Connie would continue to grace World's Airways until the late 1950s, when it established the basic design of the constellation. Johnson was already on another innovative project in early 1937, responding to an Air Corps requirement for a high-altitude interceptor capable of 360 miles per hour. and Hobart hastily conceived some possible configurations shown here in one of Kelly's sketches, as Johnson observed many times that in design one is forced to develop unusual solutions to unusual problems.

His decision to opt for an unconventional double-arm configuration was dictated by another axiom of design characteristics. they are the creatures of necessity, the twin arms evolve it is a logical development of the engine, the cells that had to be expanded, liquid cooled engines, turbochargers, radiators, main landing gear, it seemed logical that they would simply be extended in the cells in tests that could transport the empennage. His novel approach produced winning designs when the former P38 was finally launched in January 1939. Its elegant lines expressed speed and when Lieutenant Ben Kelsey took it for its maiden flight, it reached an impressive 403 miles per hour, far exceeding the requirements. .

The P-38 Lightning Saga, the first American aircraft capable of flying at such speeds, offered dazzling performance and a series of new problems that attracted us to high-altitude dives that could reach speeds close to 500 miles per hour in this region. The planes began to shake violently and bank at increasingly steep angles and the control forces became so heavy that the pilots could not retreat, tragically some never recovered. Kelly Johnson was not taken by surprise, although many insisted that he was a tail flapper, he immediately recognized him as the then poorly understood phenomenon of compressibility at 500 miles per hour.

The localized airflow over certain parts of the plane was reaching supersonic speed, which produced shock waves. Serious problems. The p38 was the first aircraft to find this and so little was known about it that Johnson began extensive wind tunnel studies. and an accelerated test program led by Chief Test Pilot Milo Burke, after more than two years, finally identified the wing shock stall problem that was reducing lift and increasing drag, thus inducing the nose down. Usually he was quick to come up with an ingeniously simple system. remedy a dive flap mounted on the main wing spar, the deployed wing generated a positive pressure field that immediately restored lift and a moment of pitch flown at each battle bottom, the p38 stood out in combat baptizing the fourth devil of Tailed by the Germans, the versatile fighter combining speed and cargo-carrying capabilities proved adaptable to a wide range of combat roles and its long legs made it ideal for the vast reaches of the Pacific.

Destroyed more enemy aircraft than any other Allied fight. Impressive, no, it was. Kelly Johnson was never satisfied with that. He longed to see the inherent limitations of propeller-driven aircraft and, although he was unaware of developments in Germany and England, where turbojets had already been successfully developed, he decided that the police had to go, as he and Hobart became the first in this country to seriously explore the possibilities. of turbojet propulsion when Nathan Price asked him in 1939 to design an experimental turbojet power plant. The L 1000 design was launched in 1940 and by 1942 Price had presented a truly advanced design: a high compression ratio twin-spool axial flow power plant that promised.

Meanwhile, Johnson and the young engineer named Willis Hawkins They achieved an extraordinary 50 to 100 pounds of thrust and created a design team that came up with the L 133, a truly radical twin-engine stainless steel airplane with thin wings and canard surfaces and projected to reach 625 miles per hour at 50,000 feet but astonishing. and Johnson submitted a proposal for engine and airframe development in March 1942, the Army Air Forces showed little interest, although they launched well after his effort. Top-secret development of an American turbojet fighter powered by a British Whittle engine was already underway by then. Underway, the Bell XP 59 first flew at Muroc Army Air Force Base in the California high desert in October 1942, but proved to be underpowered, overweight, and barely optimized for jet flight, and From the beginning the Army Air Forces decided that it would not comply.

Although Bell was not notified and testing continued on June 10, 1943, a Bell engineer in Iraq reported that Johnson had been allowed to examine the still top-secret XP 59a and wondered what it was doing without Bell knowing. The Army Air Force had already asked Lockheed to submit a proposal for a simpler single-engine jet fighter with a 3,000-pound-thrust Halford H1 engine that would be capable of front-line service. Johnson received a lot that day, but he had already been wrestling with jet propulsion for three years and already had a suitable design in his hands when he made the proposal for it at Wright Field on June 18.

He made the astonishing promise that he would deliver a plane in just one hundred and eighty days, receiving immediate approval, he was warned that utmost secrecy was required. Lockheed was already overwhelmed in terms of manpower, tools, and facilities with war contracts, but this was a blessing in disguise, an opportunity to implement an idea that had been bothering Robert Gross for about three years. Gather a small group of talented people, designers, engineers and operators, put them under one roof where they could all work closely together and give you complete authority over everything from procurement to flight testing, with no other options.

Rose said: Go ahead, stealing people from all over the world. Only 28 engineers participated in the plant, including himself and 105 workers. He also built a small installation out of discarded shipping boxes using a circus tent as a roof on June 19. He laid out the principles under which the project would operate in a page and a half that now survives. and old photographs informed the basis of how we will try to operate for the next 30 years. He would be responsible for all decisions. Paperwork and bureaucracy would be reduced to a minimum. Each engineer would be a designer, shop contact, parts hunter and mechanic, and each would remain. a stone's throw from the store at all times there would be only one goal to get a good plane until in time the diary indicates that two days later he presented the horizontal structure of the organization without pyramidal levels of management each project engineer and The shop foreman would report directly to him and, in effect, would be looking over everyone's shoulders.

He wanted direct information from the man doing the work, and if they had questions, they would make decisions immediately at the time he had promised them. plane in 180 days what would yourcustom gave his men 150 the clock began ticking on June 23 he forcefully reminded that simplicity is the keynote of good design the designers threw themselves into their work but this was a new type of operation and instead of moving from stage at stage, the schedule demanded an extraordinary degree of simultaneity with the final detailed design still many weeks away. Mockup began on June 30 and was completed on July 17 followed by milling and fabrication of parts and Jake's construction to assemble a prototype.

It was already underway and by 31 July the bulkheads were on the templates and section by section the airframe began to be assembled during this period; However, the design process continued as simultaneous wind tunnel testing revealed that problems in the wing and engineering inputs were the biggest headaches it had. He had gone for the laminar flow airfoil that had never before been tested on an airplane and, of course, no one had any experience with it, unless Johnson was willing to accept mistakes in such a fast-paced and risky undertaking, as long as will be informed promptly. Usually, he never asked.

Why, but what are you going to do to fix it? The project was so secret that his group didn't even have a name. The whole setup reminded one of his design engineers, Irv Culver, of the mysterious place where Joel, one of Al Capp's cartoon characters, was. In the lab, he raises ground-up skunks, old shoes, and other unpleasant ingredients to make a potent concoction called Kickapoo Joy Juice, so inspired that he answered the phone one day. The skunk works inside Carver's, although Johnson was not amused that his organization of suddenly had a name that stuck. Remarkably, the completed aircraft arrived at Muroc on November 14, just one hundred and forty-three days after its stardom, but when the engine was started three days later, there was a fantastic role when the intake ducts collapsed sending debris into the engine and breaking the impeller.

It took six weeks to get a new engine, but on January 3, 1944, while a burcham successfully completed the taxi tests and five days later, the cold morning of January 8. Johnson, in a white jumpsuit, coat and cap, worked intensely with his crew preparing for the first flight while more than a hundred skunkworks employees stood on top of a hill watching for a long time: he loved everyone who had worked. in the plane that they now call Louisville is available he practically told the flyer alone Milo find out if she is a lady or a witch 9:15 took off but only five minutes later he is returning to taxi report that the landing gear had retracted and that the Solo The Dale drive felt overly sensitive while the ride issue was being sorted out.

Johnson assured him that the control sensitivity was normal and at 10 o'clock he took off again and this time but in a dazzling 20 minute display reaching a top speed of 490 miles per hour reporting a rolling speed of 360 degrees for seconds. When he was already on the ground, he was able to report that Lulubelle was in fact a lady. The XP-80 eventually became the first American aircraft to exceed 500 miles per hour, but this was just the beginning. For months Johnson had been working on a larger, more advanced version with a 4,000-pound General Electric I 40 engine. of thrust that promised much greater speed.

He promised the XP up to date in just one hundred and fifty days and delivered it in one hundred and thirty-two, but like Tony LeVier it rolled after the first flight on June 10. He had had some surprises, cetera, gravity miscalculations had caused a porpoise. A faulty pressurization valve had funneled 325-degree engine bleed air into the cabin. His skills allowed him to recover it and Johnson was so grateful that he doubled the lever bonus, a gesture that signals the special relationship between the men and, indeed, between Kelly Johnson and all of his test pilots, unlike many of his peers, Johnson understood and appreciated what his pilots. he flew with them whenever possible, shared his concerns, always listened and then acted on recommendations.

The former PADA's problems were quickly resolved and it became the prototype of the United States' first operational fighter aircraft, although it would not see combat in the World War. Two, the p80 shooting star would deliver impressive performance in January 1946, for example, Colonel William Counsell completed the first non-stop transcontinental airplane flight covering twenty-four hundred and fifty miles in a record four hours and 13 minutes at an average speed of 580 miles per hour in June. In 1947, flying a specially modified patr, Colonel Albert Boyd completed four races over the course of a year with an average speed of 623 miles per hour and regained the world speed record for the United States for the first time in 24 years. and in Korea November 1952 ting star but with a MIG 15 in the first combat aircraft in hi

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and broadly confirming Johnson's methods and his insistence on simplicity, the p80 would give rise to a series of descendants.

The astute Lee, sensing the need for a training aircraft, Johnson gambled $1 million from Lockheed on the development of an F-80C airframe with a two-seat configuration that after its first flight in March 1948 was transformed into The classic T-33, an aircraft affectionately called the T-Bird that will serve as the standard training aircraft for legions and student pilots around the world. the world over the next three decades in response to an urgent Air Force requirement for an interim all-weather interceptor, the T-33 in turn served as the basis for three different models of the F-94 Starfire that filled a critical gap while that newer designs designed specifically for that role remained in development into the early 1950s not yet completed the now old design would realize its final incarnation as the t2 v1 c star an advanced naval eye version of the t-33 all iterations The p8 e design was still to come, however, as in 1946 design work began to meet the Air Force's requirement for a new penetration escort fighter.

From the beginning he explored the possibility of applying new concepts, a delta wing, even in variable wing sweep flight and then discarded some of the more than 60 concepts that he would examine and reject when the xf-90 was finally launched three years later, it was victim of ever-changing and contradictory requirements, from a climb time of 35,000 feet in 10 minutes to 50,000 at a range of 5,900 miles. to 1500 and then back to 600 and finally ground attack capability and a high speed, high altitude design, this prompted him to build a muscular fuselage weighing over 30,000 pounds fully loaded and stressed 13 G when Tony Levere took off in his first official flight we had. use rocket assist because the pair of small, three thousand pound thrust inadequate engines than its main rival.

The McDonnell XF-88 and half again is heavy because the 88 had not been reinforced for ground attack. Johnson's plane was destined to suffer in terms of performance, it was overweight and underpowered, and even when after burning it was finally added boosting the combined thrust to more than eight. thousand pounds its maximum speed and level flight was only six hundred and sixty-eight miles per hour slower than existing operations in the '86s could achieve a distinction, however, when in April 1950 Levira pushed into a steep drop and crashed. became the first Lockheed aircraft to exceed the speed of sound but the performance is no better than the job unless the requirements were well defined and firm, even if it failed, the he endured only twenty hours of repair work while Johnson completed work on a much larger one.

A more unconventional aircraft designed to meet the Navy's requirements for a vertical takeoff and landing or VTOL fighter. The xf v1 was supposed to power its way up by massive control coughs powered by a twin-turbine power plant that provided more power than the weight of the plane. However, engine development was delayed and after test pilot Herman Fish Salmon first took off from the lake bed and what was now called Edwards Air Force Base in December 1953, the v1 low power continued to rely on its improvised landing gear for all takeoffs and landings, once a loft, however, the salmon.

He was able to demonstrate that he could make satisfactory transitions from horizontal to vertical flight and that he could hover in the vertical attitude, but he lacked the promised power explained in his words and it is very difficult to fly an airplane while looking over your shoulder. The salmon was not eager. to try vertical takeoff or touch tablets, Johnson also did not believe that designers should not be afraid to fly their own aircraft with integrity, he recommended canceling the entire project at that time, however, he already had a much more promising design in the pipeline. Edwards ramp when Tony LaVere first saw it and asked in disbelief where the wings were, but those tiny skinny wings and everything else about the F-104 X were actually the product of years of careful effort and Johnson's determination. , this time employing his skunkworks methods in 1947.

He had modified a p80 with ramjets mounted on the wingtips and salmon fish on the controls. It became the first piloted aircraft to fly solely on ramjet pollen. and guidance system technologies were still in their infancy Johnson's team had to design a pilotless Mach 3 testbed to further explore ramjet technology the x7 was the product of their efforts and its tiny, thin, and slightly tapered Johnson's solution to the problems of high Mach flight had been Thoroughly tested on rockets and with scale models, the x7 first flew in April 1951 and went on to have a notable career, from a powered B-29 to powerful high-speed rockets and then flying several Ram Jets under test, eventually surpassing Mach 4 and climbing well above 100,000 feet, so those thin little wings were already more than just a theory when Johnson visited the front Korean battle fighter in 1951, still bitter about the XF-90, had gone there to talk to the end customers' fighter pilots about what they wanted. hitting a fighter at a man was higher speed, higher altitude, and less complexity intended to give them only that he made an unsolicited proposal to build a fighter for which no requirements yet existed when he promised Mach at 60,000 feet in a simple light fighter Colonel Bruce Holloway He entered the next room and within two hours returned with a short one-and-a-half page list of requirements, this time the firm and simple requirement.

Johnson returned to his favorite skunkworks mode of operation and less than a year later, in February 1954, when we were Vir lifted the xf 104 off the lake bed for its first flight, it was not configured with a much lower thrust engine and the powerful j79 slated for the production model, the had created a small group of engineers to find the cheapest and most efficient way to produce each part of the production air, forming an innovation that resulted. in savings of around $12,000 per plane and millions for their customers When the press finally got to see the F-104 they called it the missile with a management and were not far off the mark, the world's first operational Mach 2 aircraft. would go on to break every major record in the books at ninety-one thousand feet fourteen hundred miles per hour in May 1958, making it the first aircraft to simultaneously hold world altitude and speed records three times to climb records later. that year and in 1959 it became the first airplane that took off under its own power to rise above one hundred thousand feet when Captain George Jordan rose to more than 103 thousand feet.

This type of performance earned Johnson the 1958 Collier Trophy as the Starfighter captured headlines with a record. -Another, much more exotic Johnson design was unknown to all but a few who cruised almost daily in level flight at altitudes far beyond any official record. It was born from the massive accumulation of weapons in the early 1950s, whenAmerican intelligence agencies urgently needed it. Confirmation of reports of major Soviet advances and intercontinental-range bombers and ballistic missiles The decision to proceed with flyovers led to a design competition for a 70,000-foot-capable reconnaissance aircraft Lockheed had not been invited to participate Johnson had learned that a proposal had been hastily submitted to essentially build CL 282 a modified F-104 with a wide-span I aspect ratio wing that would last up to the 16x gun Kelly Johnson was not willing to give up what Over the years he had gotten to know many people. in high places and developed consummate lobbying skills with a revised design and promising an airplane with which in just eight months he obtained the go-ahead to produce 20 airplanes for twenty-two million dollars.

The project codenamed aqua tone was led by Richard Bissell of the CIA, who found that the skunk works a simplified informal method of doing things his way with secret access limited to a mere handful of CIA personnel and the Force. Air which was good for Johnson because it freed him from a lot of unnecessary paperwork and interference the urgency of the project. It also freed him from what he considered the tyranny of technical specifications: his customers simply wanted an airplane that could do the job and all he had to do was deliver it on time, while the item, as it was called, was a relatively conventional design, the extreme altitudes at which it was supposed to operate imposed severe demands, he was forced to ruthlessly reduce weight, reduced He kept structural components to a minimum and designed delicate glider-like wings that spanned 80 feet and weighed less than four pounds per square foot.

Altitude version of the J57 engine virtually hand-built to extremely high tolerances and originally producing ten thousand five hundred pounds of thrust when the dismantled aircraft was unloaded from a C-124 at a remote desert test site in July 1955. Johnson had still gathered. another seemingly impossible deadline after the reassembly was launched into daylight for the first time and painstakingly prepared for its test runs on August 1, as he had done so many times in the past, Tony Levere climbed into the cockpit for his third run that day and suddenly noticed that he was over 30 feet off the ground falling hard, the tires exploded and the brakes failed, caught fire and then explained that at 70 knots I realized he was in the air, which which left me in complete amazement since I had no intention of blowing up those fragile ones.

The wings had more than enough lift. He completed the first actual flight four days later and on the next flight he reported that the plane ascended into the heavens like a nostalgic angel to hide its true purpose. The angel has given you the misleading official designation you tuned into and a cover. The

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was released that it was being developed as a high-altitude research vehicle for the National Aeronautics Advisory Committee while it would perform this function admirably. The tests focused on preparing a YouTube for its real mission. It carries 700 pounds of high-resolution camera. equipment to altitudes then exceeding any air defense capability and in July 1956, just 11 months after the first flight, it began its clandestine operational career climbing to well above 70,000 feet for fuel.

It led to successfully completed flights over prohibited areas and brought the first concrete data on the state of Soviet military preparedness and the true scope of its intercontinental ballistic missile program, called by its pilots the Lady of the Dragon because it reminded them of the beautiful, mysterious and sometimes treacherous character in the strip Terry and the Pirates comic flew with virtual impunity for years until that day in May 1960 when Gary Powers was shot down by a surface-to-air missile while the deep penetration of Soviet airspace was halted, u2 continued to fly over hot spots in around the world, as in 1962, and to confirm the existence of missile launch sites in Cuba, it would also continue to conduct an incredibly wide range of research missions at extremely high altitudes.

Hey, Johnson had reason to be proud of his angel, Scott Works. They had finally been formally established as Lockheed Advanced Development Projects and in this their first production program had repaid two million dollars on the original twenty-two million dollar contract and built six additional aircraft with spare parts, surely one of the best bargains and defending. acquisition story that rekindled pride in 1981 with a larger, more sophisticated TR1 that launched years after YouTube production in Indy. It was the first time the Air Force put an aircraft back into production and remains the highest-flying single-engine aircraft to this day. in the world back in December 1956, the remarkable performance of the Skunk Works on the u2 had convinced Lockheed to give Johnson the job of designing and developing prototypes for a small military transport jet.

Dollars were tight and competition was keen and he would only have eight months to get the job done on time had always been one of his cardinal rules and in just 241 days he delivered the Jet Star. In fact, he had been working on designs for a large aircraft. transport since 1944. This small and elegant ship was actually a reduced version. of the l1 93, the innovative 1953 design that the airline had feared was too risky to support. Johnson, who continued to put in long hours as a flight test engineer on this project, wanted to prove them wrong and was more than pleased with the results at full speed.

With a speed of over 600 miles per hour, a maximum altitude of 52,000 feet, and a side tank range of over 3,000 miles, the Jet Star easily won the competition and, although only a limited number entered military service, it already that the C1 40 were finally produced more than 200 and a large number. many of them remained on duty that day. The Jets pilot was a nice diversion while he worked on another, much more difficult project even while u2 development was still underway. He projected that air defenses would catch up within two years and had begun a notable series of design studies for a liquid hydrogen-fueled supersonic successor capable of soaring above 90,000 feet, performance ranging from Mach 2.5 to a range of 2,200 miles up to Mach 4 and 9,000 miles due to the extremely low volumetric density of liquid hydrogen;

However, a final speed and range capability could only be achieved by building a fuselage twice the size of the B-52, which was too expensive and a much smaller design at the lower end of the performance spectrum that was developed. like the CL 400 in 1956, although the CL. 400 demonstrated the technical feasibility of an aircraft powered by liquid hydrogen. Johnson was dissatisfied with its short range and convinced that the problems of fuel production and transportation around the world were insurmountable, he refused to build an aircraft in which he did not believe and recommended canceling the project. in 1957, but he had an ace up his sleeve, as simultaneously with the studies on liquid hydrogen, he had also examined the potential of another advanced design using jet fuel, which had some loss of altitude, promised crews Mach 3 and a range of 4,000 miles;

It was the genesis of his most spectacular creation and received approval to proceed in April 1958. Johnson began a series of design studies that were first publicly released here for what he initially called the U3 and then the Archangel because it would rise so high. higher than u2. He explored various mediums. by which the vehicle could be taken to altitudes of up to one hundred and fifty thousand feet employing a variety or even a combination of ram rocket and turbojet power plants. At one point, he observed the use of balloons to lift him to what rocket. boost phase and then using a modified view to tow a ramjet vehicle to sixty thousand feet to start the engine, he even considered a multi-stage vehicle and one with inflatable wings and M trim and at every turn was challenged by the urgent need to reduce radar crossing. -section the first time stealth was designed into the aircraft, the intense design gestation process was completed in just 16 months when he presented his twelfth concept to the CIA and Air Force in August 1959, he was able to move forward when it finally appeared the incredibly beautiful a 12. launched for its initial tests in April 1962, it was not a fantastical multi-stage aberration, it was not an honest aircraft, but nothing like it had ever been built before, ironically codenamed oxcart and designed for sustained Mach 3.2 crews at altitudes between 75 and 95 thousand feet, it posed by far the biggest challenge of Johnson's career: Everything from structural materials to hydraulic fluids and fuels had to be invented from scratch.

For example, because of the intense heat sustaining speeds of Mach 3 averaging more than 550 degrees on the surface, Johnson used a titanium alloy for more than 90 percent of the airframe, but no one had previously attempted to process such quantities of extremely hard and brittle metal to the required levels of purity and strength, so new forging and milling processes had to be invented. It was perfected when the thin titanium skin, not a single wing panel, wrinkled during heating tests. Johnson separated the wing spar panels with extrusions and placed the now famous corrugations into the skin when heated, thereafter the corrugations simply deepened a few thousandths of an inch and then cooled back to their original shape There were literally thousands of such problems to overcome, and as always, Johnson stayed on top of them all, looking over people's shoulders and asking lots of questions, always in the best possible way.

His goal was to get people to solve problems and he continued to surprise everyone with, for example, on-the-spot predictions of skin temperature that after hours of calculation were found to be within one or two degrees of the exact figure. . The entire effort completed in absolute secrecy with an incredibly small group of people was all the more remarkable because it was done without the benefit of computers, as Johnson later recalled, but when you think back to 1958, when the basic design ran on prototypes of This plane, it was designed and built, we had to make use of the Michigan computer, which is a 12-inch slide rule and it did its job quite well;

All of this prodigious effort was about to become a reality, but on April 25, 1962, preparations for a high-speed taxi and a brief initial takeoff were completed, but As Lou's shock absorbers accelerated down the runway, he encountered problems with the nose wheel steering and had to push hard on the right rudder; then as

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wrote in his log the plane took off from the ground and there was an immediate change in the rudder angle which caused lateral oscillations which were horrible sea chuck was lucky to get the plane to land again the problem It was quickly sorted out and the next day he completed the first unofficial gear-down flight on 30 April.

Johnson returned with an entourage of VIPs for the first official flight looking As if he didn't have a care in the world, he offered a few last words of encouragement and advice before falling into shock and from there everything went perfectly. 59 minutes later, Jacques was back on the ground, greeted by an elated Kelly Johnson in the small amazement. The assembly has just witnessed something very special limited by the provisional J75 engines. The Hol did not begin to realize its full potential until the Pratt Whitney J58 for which it was designed finally arrived in January 1963. 30 2,500 pounds of thrust.

The J58 ramjet turbo was perfect. As exotic as the aircraft itself, in combination with an extremely complex intake and exhaust ejector system, it operated like a normal afterburning turbojet up to speeds of approximately 1,600 miles per hour and then changed the thrill greatly by passing the supercharger and essentially becoming in a ramjet with the interior. it actually provided most of the thrust at Mach 3 cruise when a two-seat trainer became available in early 1963. Johnson, true to his convictions about flying his own aircraft, jumped into the rear cockpit and took control after climbing, would fly supersonic the first time.

In his lifetime, during the course of the test program, a couple of fuselages were modified for a very unconventional mission. 1964, Skunk Works builds a small 42-foot-long fuselage from the same materials used in the A12, designed to heat flying areas considered too hotrisky. aircrews, the d-21 drone would ride piggyback and a 12-4 lock, three launches at 80,000 feet and powered by a ramjet originally developed for the x7 program, it would be even faster than the a12, the finished article was mounted on its mothership now designated. On December 12, 1964 and December 20, 1964, a pair of unusual taxis took off for the first time on flight tests.

After takeoff of the launch missions, the m12 boarded a rendezvous point on the kc-135 to refuel and then view it at the predetermined launch points. where the backseat monitors the system launch procedures while there were several successful tests, which is always a very risky business at the best of times. Carrie Johnson personally canceled this program after a fatal mid-air collision in 1966, however, she already had two other very successful oxcarts. The first was the YF-12A prototype for a proposed high-speed interceptor. It was this aircraft that was put on public display when in 1964 President Lyndon Johnson announced the existence of the A11 and subsequently put on a dazzling spectacle as May 1965 claimed no less than nine world records, including a top speed of more than 2,000 miles per hour and a sustained altitude of over 80,000 feet without in any way testing its full potential.

The YF-12 was equipped with an advanced ASG 18 Doppler radar system and configured to internally carry three 47 guided missiles, the missiles had never before been launched within the speed and altitude regime of the YF-12, the aircraft and its systems obtained With a 90 percent kill rate even against drones flying head-on over the deck at ranges of 120 miles too far, the Air Force was impressed enough to order the production of 93 large fighters for the air defense command, but Budget constraints eventually resulted in its cancellation and soon after the A12 was also withdrawn from service, leaving only the Air Force SR-71, which took over its reconnaissance mission, although everything related to it and its activities would remain hidden and Under a heavy cloak of secrecy, this was the plane that everyone came to know as the Blackbird, with a solid coat of black paint that looked drab: it's an attraction and the mystery actually had a very For practical purpose, we raise the skin temperature at approximately 75 degrees.

Its clean, elegant lines and the smooth contours of the combined wing body shape give the impression that an artist had sculpted it into a rare work of art in aircraft design, however, more so than in any other field. Form follows function and here again, every line, every detail of the airplane exists only to serve some practical purpose. The Chinese, for example, which extend from the wing to the nose and float gracefully towards the fuselage, actually met a number of requirements so dynamically that they reduce drag. and greater lift while improving the stability of the aircraft. The mission of the SR-71 was long-range reconnaissance and its fuselage was essentially a large fuel tank, so the spines also served to house sophisticated cameras and sensors, finally , the sloping contours that extended upward from the The Chinese improved the plane's survivability by reducing the cross-section of its radar, so that while an artist might envy its stunning beauty, an engineer would only marvel at the logical genius of his design.

That genius was recognized when Kelly Johnson became the first person to receive an award in 1964. second Collier Trophy, the SR-71 would claim every speed and altitude record in the books and then repeatedly extend its own records and to the public it had always been the Blackbird of Kelly Johnson's story, the crews that flew it never had another name. Because he brought his long operational career, he remained invincible and incredibly effective and for Cruz, who was a dark-skinned viper with a deadly bite and, although he eventually retired from Air Force service in 1990, the masterpiece of the three Kelly Johnson's Locked Out is still charting the future.

Crews still staring into the blue-black void of space were flying exotic research missions for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, retired in 1975. Kelly Johnson had been at the forefront. those he had been involved in. the design of 44 different aircraft, many of them among the classics in the history of aviation and at that time he was still looking a lot towards the future, he had involved skunkworks in a project that would bear fruit to the f-117, the first of the world. true legacy of stealth aircraft that would leave its mark in the future is something of a career and a humble creature known mainly for its odorous emanations had become by the time it retired had become a universal symbol of excellence what was its secret , well, he had a remarkable ability to take a complex problem, reduce it to its simplest components and then adopt the most direct and sensible approach to its solution, he was always a maverick, he was smart and tough enough not to follow the committee rule wisely. conventional this gave him a remarkable freedom with that freedom came a tremendous burden of responsibility finally and most importantly he understood.

He feels good enough to realize that with a few good people you can do remarkable things. Kelly Johnson's most important legacy was not what he did, but the REA, he did it.