The Original Skunk Works – Nickolas Means | The Lead Developer UK 2017

Well, thank you for the introduction Marian, as always, it is a great privilege and pleasure to be on this stage. I tweeted this morning that this is one of my favorite events of the year and it's because I'm with my tribe here we all do the same thing. things day after day we fall, we all struggle with the same problems, so it's a real privilege to be able to come back and be invited back, so thank you for that, as Mary mentioned last year, I gave a talk specifically about a plane crash. this United flight 232 plane that crashed outside of Sioux City Iowa and in the introduction to that talk I said that I was a student of air accidents and it is true that I am, but it is not the whole truth.

I've been obsessed with aviation for so long. I remember and my obsession with aviation started when I was eight or nine years old and my parents took me to Dyess Air Force Base in Abilene Texas, there we go to see this group, the United States Air Force Thunderbirds. , now if you've heard of the Blue Angels or the RAF Red Arrows it's the same sort of thing, they're a demonstration team, they fly in tight formations, blowing smoke out of their hind legs, several feet away from the wings of each other and they don't hit each other, it's incredible to see, but As incredible as it was, that wasn't really what captured my imagination that day, but rather it was that I was face to face with this incredible machine, the SR-71 Blackbird.

Now just by looking at this thing you can tell how fast it wants to go, it's got those very sharp

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ing edges, you can't tell from this angle, but the engines are almost as big as the fuselage and there are two on this plane . Looking at it, looking at the beauty that this machine represented, began a lifelong obsession with aviation for me. I went back to my elementary school librarian and asked her to check out all the books she could find in the school library in the sr- 71 and I spent weeks devouring that information. Well, my career has taken a decidedly non-aviation path, as Mary mentioned.

I'm VP of Engineering at Move Health and I work with an incredible team to change the way we care for total joint replacement patients, which is an amazing and fun job, but I'm still fascinated by airplanes and stories from the world of aviation, sometimes even Find wisdom in these stories about how we practice our craft and how I

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my teams. The story of United 232 is definitely one of those stories for me and this story today is another in a series of amazing airplanes built by an even more amazing organization now. If you look at the tail of an SR-71 on display and I checked that there is one in the UK, it's the Imperial War Museum and Duxford.

If you look at the tail of this plane, every once in a while you'll see this cute little guy.

skunk

logo and the reason

skunk

is there is that the sr-71 was built by Lockheed Martin's advanced development programs division, better known as skunk

works

. Now companies use the phrase skunk

works

all the time, usually used to refer to a small, cordoned-off group. break away from the bureaucracy of the rest of the organization to do something really disruptive quickly, but Lockheed Martin was the first, the reason we call Skunk Works Skunk Works is because of Lockheed Martin and today I want to tell you the story of some of their most iconic aircraft and the engineers who built them and I will tell you that story.

I have to start with this guy, Clarence Kelly Johnson, without him there would be no skunk jobs now. Kelley, as he liked to be called, graduated from the University of Michigan. in 1932 with a bachelor's degree in aeronautical engineering, if you think about the history of manned aviation, we hadn't been flying for very long in 1932, this was a brand new program at the University of Michigan at that time until we graduated in 1932 and We applied for his dream job at Lockheed, which at the time was a company of about 12 people and they said to Kelly thanks, but no thanks, we really don't have room for a junior engineer on staff right now, so Kelly returned to Mission University to earn her master's degree in aeronautical engineering now because the pioneering nature of their program also had one of the first wind tunnels in the United States and it just so happened that while Kelly was there working on her master's degree, They had a contract with Lockheed. to test the Electra model 10 aircraft now Kelly's professor had finished reading and directed this research, but Kelly helped with it.

Kelly's teacher thought the plane was cool. He thought it was ready for production. Kelly disagreed. He presented a strong case to his professor that the plane. In other words, he would wobble up and down if he was in the right flying conditions, but he couldn't convince this professor of that case, so the investigation went back to Lockheed, everything was fine and shortly after, Kelly. The graduate applied for a job at Lockheed again, this time he was hired, but not as an aeronautical engineer. They hired him as a tool designer and he made $83 a month, but he got his foot in the door of his dream organization, so we did it.

He had spent a lot of time there when he found the opportunity to speak with Hall Hibbert, Lockheed's chief engineer, and explained to Hall Hibbard that the Electra was unstable under certain flight conditions. Well, Paul Hibbert thought about firing him on the spot for insubordination. Was this young trickster fresh out of school to tell him that this incredible plane that was carrying Hibbert that transport that Hibbert had designed by the light was Hall's plane? Who was this young trickster to tell him that this plane was unstable, especially when they were betting the future of the company, but Kelly showed him the wind tunnel research showed him what he had seen and sure enough, Hall Hibbard saw exactly what he saw.

Kelly saw and agreed and as penance he made Kelly go get the scale model out of storage and push it back. out of the van and drive it to the University of Michigan, put it back in the wind tunnel and find out what was wrong, so take a close look at the tail of this plane. Here is a photo of the production model of the Model 10 Electra. changed from a T-tail to an H-tail on the back so you can see again that the H-tail is the result of 73 wind tunnel iterations that Kelly took it through. Moulton Electra became a huge commercial success for Lockheed. of the iconic airplanes of early commercial aviation, the problem was that after this airplane, Lockheed did not have much luck in the commercial aviation market, they could not find any other success and there were so many airplanes coming out of the First World War that were They made it the duty of passengers that there wasn't much of a market Lockheed might have failed if not for the emergence of World War II.

Kelly Johnson actually designed one of the most iconic aircraft of World War II, the P-38 Lightning. Yes I have been to an aviation museum that has some airplanes from World War II. They probably have one of these. It is one of the most exhibited aircraft in the world. He is a great combat dog. It was the fastest object in the skies. It was one of the workhorses of the United States Air Force Arsenal during World War II, it dominated the skies of Europe in World War II until the appearance of this aircraft, the German Messerschmitt me-262, now this aircraft has The distinction of being the first fighter aircraft to be placed into active service by any air force in the world, it was the only thing in the sky that was faster than the P38.

It turned out that the Germans had invested in jet propulsion long before anyone else and had such a huge advantage that the Americans hadn't even started working on a jet engine, but luckily for the Americans, you Brits beat us to it and They kindly offered to license the de Havilland H1B goblin engine to our air force. The Army Air Force met with Lockheed and asked if they would be interested. When designing an aircraft around this engine, the Air Force specifically proposed that Lockheed build a single prototype. The reason for this is that Havilland was literally hand-assembling these jet engines off the assembly line and they only had one engine to deliver and not only that, but the Air Force wanted it in one hundred and eighty days, well, most of Lockheed's factories at the time seemed so full to the brim building p-38 lightnings, so the Lockheed Executive Board Locky didn't have much interest in making one... outside of the prototype aircraft and what a huge investment for company as far as they were concerned, but Kelly Johnson and Hal Hibbert were very interested in jet propulsion, both were very eager to build a jet aircraft, and what's more, Kelly had been annoying his superiors at Lockheed for a long time for an experimental aircraft division where you could take designers, manufacturers, and mechanics and have them work together without having to deal with all the Lockheed bureaucracy under the theory that if you could do this, they could innovate faster. so partly to make one of his chief engineers happy and partly to shut him up Lockheed threw this project in his lap and said here you go Kelly, this is what you've been asking for, you have six months to do it.

The first problem Kelly had to solve was where to work. It's like I said. Mosul wok The EADS factories looked like this, so the first thing that came to mind was probably what you would do too. He went out and rented a circus tent and set it up next to an existing factory on the Lockheed factory grounds. he installed phones, air conditioning, desks, everything he would need to make this a real office. This 10, the building he installed it next to, was a plastics factory and apparently that plastics factory smelled. terrible, so they codenamed this plane xp-80 and everyone on the project was under strict orders not to talk about what they were doing, couldn't tell their spouses about it, and especially couldn't say anything related with the project when I answered the phone I answered Irv Culver one of Kelly's staff engineers on the project referencing a comic he was populating the day he took to answer the phone skunkworks Irv here Kelly didn't like it, but everyone else in that skunkworks yes and they started answering the phone the same way and the rest is lost in history so if you ever called the division of your company skunkworks you called it that because Kelly Jonathan set up a tent next door from a smelly plastics factory, the contract for the xp-80 was signed on June 24, 1943 from the 180 day clock, the only concrete information they had was the dimensions of this engine, as I said, they were assembling it at hand and the engine was going to be ready at about the same time as the airplane, so they built a mockup and then started building an airplane around the mockup of this engine.

Normally, instead of going straight to the plane, they would have first built a plywood mockup of the entire plane to make sure all the pieces fit together and that they made everything exactly like that, but Kelly said you know we're in a hurry here, we're just building one of these, so treat the plane as your model, you are free to make it separately. place and put it on the plane, not only that, but it reduced the formality of the drawing approval process Normally at Lockheed, as you would expect from any physical engineering company, they would do a lot of documentation before placing a single rivet. , but Kelly said.

We don't need to be just building a plane here, we have a small group of people that we can all communicate with about this, so if you can draw something that communicates the meaning of what you need to build, that's not all the documentation. We needed it and it worked on November 13th. They finished only one hundred and forty-three days since they started. They had a whole plane. The engine appeared on the other side of the Atlantic. They disassembled the plane, packed it, loaded it onto a flatbed truck, and. I drove it 70 miles to Muroc Air Force Base in the middle of the Mojave Desert.

Now, why did they do so well? They didn't exactly have a lot of faith in how this experiment was going to go and shortly after New Year's, the xp80 took flight for the first time and flew like a dream, the prototype you see here would actually become the first airplane built in the United States. in flying over five hundred miles per hour and level flight not only that, but this plane that got together with a skunk. In 143 days they put it into production, built a ton of them, it would become the first aircraft fielded by the United States Air Force and would be in service well into the 1980s.

It had a service life of over 40 years by plane. They were put together in 143 days, quite impressive, but military spending decreased again after the war, we may have money for new planes, by that time we had spent all our money on the SecondWorld War and the Pentagon thought their current arsenal was good for everything they had to do they didn't have any particular niche they needed to fill in their hangars, but in the end this photo is of Winston Churchill on the left, Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the middle and Joseph Stalin at the end, this is part of the Alta conference, which were the post-war negotiations where the future of the European continent was essentially decided and you could say there were some differences of opinion in this group, so not much happened some time after the three-lecture series concluded. that both the US and the Soviet Union started increasing military spending like crazy, we had entered the Cold War and it wasn't just military spending that skyrocketed, reconnaissance activity skyrocketed as well, a good reason for that 55% of the American population at the time thought they were more likely to die in a thermonuclear war than of old age.

They were so lethal to the other side, that if someone decided to attack, you could hit them back with equal force and thus maintain that delicate situation. Each side needed to know what the other side was doing and they spent a lot of money trying to find out what the CIA was desperate in particular for information about this place kapustin yar now if you have heard of area 51 in the United States States that this is more or less the Russian analogue of area 51, is it its main missile defense or its main research facility and missile development.

The CIA had been pressuring the Air Force to fly over Kapusta and take photographs, but the Air Force deemed this flyby too dangerous with their existing arsenal due to how heavily defended they flatly refused to do so. Finally the CIA pressed hard enough and they used this martin b57 canberra plane this plane is actually designed like a bomber and they basically went through and stripped this thing down as much as they could, flared it out as much as they could until they got to about 50,000 feet, which was a really impressive feat to get a plane so high these days and that's what they used for reconnaissance.

Because they had no better answers at this point, they tried to fly this thing over Kapusta. New thread, they got their pictures, but this plane limped back to base with over 12 bullet holes. I did not do it. that again the CIA the CIA needed a different answer, okay I'm going to take a breath, that was great intelligence, so the intelligence indicated that the Russian radar was essentially blind at about 65,000 feet and couldn't see anything, so So the CIA decided that what was needed was a plane that would logically fly 70,000 feet above the Russian radar and they solicited bids and since they had no

means

of reconnaissance over Russia, they were in a hurry to get this plane, so so the Kelly Johnson company proposed a reworking of an existing design.

This plane, the F-104 starfighter, up to that point was the fastest plane ever built in the US, it was capable of Mach 2 runs and level flight, but that's not what they needed here, they needed two planes that could go relatively slow for that long. Since it could fly high, the plan was to get rid of all the weight so they could stretch the wings and change the engine for something that would actually work at 70,000 feet because no one had ever built an airplane that breathed air and flew that high because their proposal was based on an existing design and because Skunkworks had demonstrated their ability to build aircraft quickly with the p80, they outbid other manufacturers.

The plane they were building, if you look closely, you can see it as the u2 that the team started. Work on the project in November 1954 was so secret that the initial funding for u2 was actually a $1.1 million check sent to Kelly Johnson's home address in the name of Jay Engineering C&J, the initials being Clarence Johnson, they took the f-104 and made it thinner, made it out of wafer-thin aluminum, so thin, in fact, when a worker accidentally bumped this thing into his toolbox, it left a four-inch dent. long on the side of the fuselage, now if you collide with a normal airplane.

That's not going to happen, you might scratch the finish, but you're not going to leave a big dent, so there were a lot of people around Skunk Works who were really worried that this plane was actually going to be strong enough to fly. together when he did, however, eight months later, in July 1955, they created it and loaded it onto the 124th Sea Cargo Plane. This time he was taken to a specially built air base in the middle of the Nevada desert. Why the Nevada? desert because there are a lot of dry lake beds there, so there are plenty of places to land.

This is something going sideways. This photo taken by Kelly Johnson himself is from the first actual flight on August 4, just a hair over eight months away. when the first metal was cut, they reached the deadline a month after this first flight, the pilots were breaking altitude records almost daily in this plane when testing was over, the plane had reached 70 4,500 feet and is 5,000 miles in a period of time. of 10 hours on a single tank of gas exactly what they set out to build if I show both planes at the same time you can clearly see the family resemblance, especially from the wing forward, the big difference is that the f-104 has about 22 ft wingspan and the u2 has approximately an 80 ft wingspan so there is approximately 60 ft of extra wing on the u2 even though these two aircraft weigh exactly the same, 14,000 pounds, they would shave significant weight off the already light f -104 to get They raised it as high as they needed it, but despite the ability to fly three miles higher than any other aircraft ever built to that point, they chose a remarkably simple weight, it was all they discovered from the beginning: each pound cost them about a foot of altitude. so in every design decision they made, they talked about how much altitude it was going to cost them.

This wing weighs about four pounds per square foot, typical for a jet engine of this era would be twelve pounds per square foot, so it's super light weight, the problem with that is, it's not very rigid, so If you hit turbulence in a U2, the plane's wings literally flap like a seagull, not exactly the most reassuring thing for a pilot, but the wings have never fallen off. Another way to reduce weight was that. The u2 was designed with tandem bicycle landing gear, there is no wing gear on this, it is quite common to see this on a glider and the reason they do it on the glider is the same reason we did it here is to reduce weight, but I wouldn't normally do that on a jet airplane, the combined weight of that landing gear mechanism is 200 pounds, from what I've read, it's the lightest landing I've ever implemented on a jet airplane. reaction and I can tell you how it works, but it's much easier to show you and here we are riding in the chase car behind the U2.

Now the reason there is a chase car is because the pilot is in a bulky pressure suit and literally can't see the ground while they are. landing so the chase car sits or shouts altitudes to the pilot three feet two feet a foot contact and now the pilot is literally flying the plane down the runway, he's trying to keep it balanced until he gets low enough to finally bleed out enough. speed, once that happens, it will gently tilt it under the wing and then this crew jumps out of a pickup truck and starts hanging off the wing of the plane trying to lift it off the ground, which they're trying to do. a landing gear that fits into a socket under the right wing, they're trying to install that landing gear and if you look at the way you can see how much it flexes as they do this, they finally get it off the ground and they get it.

Pogo landing gear underneath and then you can watch it roll with the Pogo gear in place, it actually takes off the same way those wheels just fall off when you take off and someone runs out onto the runway and picks them up, what a great trick. every part of you - had only one purpose and that purpose was to get this payload 70,000 feet over Russia safely. This payload is currently located at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. It is a high resolution camera with a focal length of 36 inches. lens and can resolve objects as small as two and a half feet across 70,000 feet now at this point this is the highest resolution camera ever built because that's what they cared about they hacked the rest here's a modern variant of the u2 has bigger wings it has more carrying capacity could have made the wings stiffer so they wouldn't flap as much but it didn't matter pilots love to say that this plane is the easiest thing in the world to fly between 60,000 feet and six inches well, With all the overhaul cycles they have had on this airplane it would have been easy to add landing gear, it didn't matter, the pilot landed just fine, they learned how to do it and never did it. had a landing accident just after the u2 went into service they found a problem almost on the first flight over Russia the pilot looked down and noticed a MIG about 15,000 feet below a few flights later there was a squadron of MiGs flying below trying to block the view and these marks with missiles of endless fire because there is no way the missiles that we are going to reach as high as the u2, but the CIA knew it was only a matter of time, they knew that Russia would figure out how To match their move in the arms race and how to shoot down this plane, they found out that they had 18 months to two years of mission feasibility on this thing, so as soon as they put it into service, they put it into service. four offers for the replacement, the Air Force and the CIA needed that replacement for about 22 months, when they thought the viability of the mission for the two of you would end, they wanted a plane that would fly at a hundred thousand feet and reach Mach two and so on. answer skunkworks had no idea if they could do this or not, but they started a design studio.

This is the first plan in the archangels design studies series. By the time we get to revision 11, it's starting to look a little more familiar you probably know where I'm going but you're wrong this is not the sr-71 this is the Lockheed a12 and the technological leap that this aircraft represents is almost impossible to understand it's designed to fly five miles higher than the u2 at ninety thousand feet around 27,000 meters it is designed to fly four times faster at Mach 3.25 exceeding the CIA specification at one point at five times the speed of sound now this is faster that the capability of the F-104 remember that it could fly Mach 2 at - so, in a couple of minutes, the a12 was designed to fly at Mach three point two five to go at that speed for four hours straight, the problem is that it works if those extremes meant that almost everything the skunkworks team knew about aircraft design they didn't. apply like I said the CIA generously gave them 22 months to figure out how to build a plane like this from scratch now normally if you wanted to build a plane that could fly as high as possible you would build it out of aluminum because it has a really high strength to weight ratio It is very light but really strong the only problem is that aluminum loses its tensile strength around 300 degrees Fahrenheit 50 Celsius the A12 was expected to have 800 degrees Fahrenheit in the nose around 425 Celsius and in the engine cowlings it was expected that it was 1200 Fahrenheit, that is 650 Celsius, so if you built this plane out of aluminum when you accelerated it, it would literally start to melt and bend on itself, they considered that the stainless steel would have withstood the heat well and Our problem is that the Stainless steel is very heavy and there is no way they could have gotten it in the opposite place they needed to get it too, so Henry Combs, the lead structural engineer on the project, suggested that they consider titanium, instead he had designed The engine exhausts on the F-104 starfighter needed to be constructed of titanium to withstand the heat of the afterburner and I knew it would withstand the mission requirements of this aircraft.

It is as strong as stainless steel, but half the weight and can withstand higher temperatures. and pressures the problem was that no one had ever worked with titanium on an airplane scale before no one had built something that big with titanium yet the initial reaction from John Kelly Johnson of Kelley was favorable, he said that any material that can reduce our gross weight to half is Very tempting even if it drives us crazy in the process and that my friends are foreshadowing so Skunkworks ordered a test batch of titanium and when it showed up they realized they had no idea how to extrude it, they didn't know how to extrude it. weld it, they didn't know how to rivet it and they didn't know how to drill it.

The drill bits they used on the aluminum would literally break as soon as they tried to drill into the titanium, not only that, but America's only weapon. The supplierCytanium in those days didn't have the capacity or the ability to produce the quality they needed to build an entire plane out of titanium, so the Skunk Works people went to the CIA and said we'd really like to build this plane made out of cytonium, but we didn't get it, you will have to help us find a supply chain for this and therefore, through a series of shell companies and third parties, the CIA established a supply chain of the main exporter. of titanium from the then-Soviet Union, so the SR-71's extreme operating environment required adaptation throughout all parts of the aircraft.

Early calculations indicated that at Mach 3 the plane would actually stretch two to three inches due to frictional heating of the air and so all of the systems in the plane had to deal with the heat and stretching. They built the control cables with a material called L joy now L Jewell is commonly used in Watch Springs because you can stretch it and it doesn't lose its capacity. to bounce back after hundreds of thousands of stretches, the engine nozzles they built with a rare alloy called hastelloy hours. At one point, commercially available electronics weren't working due to the extreme temperatures, nor were commercially available oils, hydraulic fluids, greases, you name it, they came up with a custom fuel for this airplane because when you build a airplane flying Mach 3 and it gets hot, the fuel gets hot too and the last thing you want is for a fuel to explode when you're flying at 90,000 feet.

The problem was that the fuel they came up with had such a low flash point that they literally couldn't light it and so they use this to light it, that green flash you see, it's boring triethyl. Boring traveling is a really unpleasant thing that when you expose it to the Earth's atmosphere it spontaneously combusts. With this bright green flame, using a chemical that will spontaneously combust, try to ignite this fuel, that's how hard it is to lie. Propulsion was actually the biggest challenge they faced when building this plane. I mean, nothing had ever gone that fast and certainly.

At this speed, at that altitude, Kelly Johnson handed the project over to his lead propulsion engineer. A 32-year-old guy named Ben Rich. Ben had also designed the U2's propulsion, so he knew a thing or two about designing high-altitude propulsion systems for Jets. They took the j58 turbofan engine that Pratt Whitney had designed for a supersonic fighter project that had been canceled and They started revising it to make it work on this plane. Pratt & Whitney was willing to do everything they could to make this engine work because they really wanted to recoup some of the investment they had made in this engine before the project was canceled and that was good because it required a lot of overhaul.

They had to revise the internal compressors to work in the super thin air at ninety thousand feet. and to resist the heat produced by the afterburners, but as much work as they did on the compressor, the real innovation is the cone that you see there now as this airplane cruises at Mach 3, that cone actually moves 26 inches inside the engine nozzle. and the massive compression that that cone produces is actually responsible for about 70 percent of the thrust this engine produces at altitude and speed. Jet engines work by compression which they take by taking a giant ball of air in the front and compressing it through a series of The fan blades move down to a small jet that comes out very quickly from the back.

If you think about what happens when you put your finger on the end of a water hose, that's exactly how a jet engine works, you're accelerating the material coming out the end. of that opening and make it go faster and further in altitude, like I said, the cone contributes 70% of the thrust, the afterburners contribute another 25%, the engine itself, the inward-spinning turbine only contributes about the 5% of thrust when this aircraft is at altitude. and speed and they were happy to have it there, which was really efficient for an engine that operated at 9,000 feet, but as much innovation as there was in the Splane, the things that they decided not to solve or it's just interesting is that there is no fuel system.

There was a sealant that could work in the entire temperature range in which this plane operated, so the engineers had to choose and what you see on the runway under the A12 is not water, it is fuel dripping from the plane. they would sit on the runway and drip fuel because it didn't matter, it didn't affect anything, they would just take off with the fuel dripping and then when they reached altitude and speed the plane would heat up and stretch and seal everything up and everything would be fine. Another problem they faced was how to start the engines.

I already talked about triethyl brain, but that's only half the equation. For a jet engine to fire up and be self-sufficient, you have to get it. spins first before igniting the fuel, they had to make the mass of the j58 turbofan spin at 4500 rpm. It takes a lot of energy to do it. On a commercial airplane you would have a starter motor that would spin the turbine before turning it on. the fuel, but on this plane as big as these turbines, where that was an option, it would cost you a ton of altitude to put a starter motor big enough to spin that turbine, so this is the answer they came up with .

Instead, this is the AG. 330 starter car, better known to ground crew as Buick and the reason they called it Buick is because it's actually two Buick Wildcat v8 engines coupled together, they physically coupled it to the starter shaft of the j58 turbofan and they spin these things at full speed. Spin the turbine and then turn on the test borane and then you have a capped engine. The crews said it sounded like a car race in the hangar every time they started this plane, but it didn't cost the plane altitude. It also didn't produce a huge amount of lift, so it turns out that you can't actually fill it with fuel on the ground because it won't be able to take off.

It's very close to not being able to fly at ground level, so instead, every The moment an SR-71 took off immediately after takeoff, it would have to crash into a tanker truck and get a tank of gas because it would simply They put enough fuel on the ground for it to take off and get into the tanker, that's all, I mean, it would. I've leaked the rest anyway, so why bother? There are only two things that mattered when building the A12. I needed to go very fast and I needed to go very high, five miles higher and four times faster than the YouTubers on April 30, 1962, one year. and 100% over budget skunkworks gave the CIA what they wanted those photos of the fuel leaking a12's first flight couldn't start its own engines without crazy chemicals in a couple of v8 race car engines but it didn't matter that the team would have spent their time and money on the things that mattered, the titanium construction, the radically new propulsion, I worked my way around the rest because of that relentless focus, this thing reached Mach three at ninety thousand feet over some of the territories most hostile in the world.

After building 15 A12s for the CIA, the Air Force took over the CIA's aerial reconnaissance operations and the Air Force requested a two-seat version of this aircraft. They wanted a dedicated reconnaissance systems operator who could sit in the back seat and operate. all the spy equipment and they wanted double the payload capacity so they could have more altitude sensors take more photographs that plane is a 12 spar more famous younger brother the sr-71 which flew for 30 years and has the distinction of being the unique to us. A military aircraft has never been shot down despite more than 3,500 sorties over hostile territory and hundreds of missiles launched at it and it holds almost all the speed and altitude records that exist, so for the alpha tube it flew at 85,000 69 feet, which is just a hair's breadth from 26,000 meters, we know that the plane almost certainly went higher than this, this is before the program was completely declassified and was on a course known and set in advance so that people who could interested could look at the flight pattern so we know that it almost certainly didn't, almost certainly didn't take it to the extremes of its operational capability, but that's the official speed record 2190 3.2 miles per hour, now that's about Mach 3 3, we know for a fact that it will go faster than that because Brian Shul and his books give the driver the story of how he fled from a missile in Libya, crossed the border and looked down and realized he had pushed This plane is just a hair above Mach 3 5, so we know it will go faster than that, but it's still a ridiculously high number.

To give you some context for that speed, the muzzle velocity of a .22 caliber rifle bullet is 2046 miles per hour, so at cruising speed, the sr-71 was literally faster than a speed bullet, in terms Practically speaking, the SR-71 could do the new. The journey from York to London takes one hour and 55 minutes. On a good day with the wind at its back, the Concorde took 2 hours and 52 minutes to make the trip from Los Angeles to Washington, one hour and four minutes, that is, approximately four and a half hours and five business hours. flight, but my favorite is the one that's easiest to understand how ridiculously fast this thing is in the middle of that race from Los Angeles to Washington, they tracked its speed from st.

Louis to Cincinnati, the Blackbird could do it in eight minutes in 32 seconds according to Google Maps, if you do it in your car, it's 5 hours and 16 minutes, it's much faster than us, it will probably hold these records forever with the arrival of satellite photography and drones, we simply no longer need an aircraft that can perform at this end. The sr-71 was Kelly Johnson's crowning achievement in 1975. Fiat Lockheed Martin's mandatory retirement age was 65 and he passed the reins. for this man, his protégé Ben Rich, the same Ben Rich who had designed the A12 propulsion system at 32 years of age and Ben took charge of skunk works that are truly tumultuous at a time when the United States' appetite United for defense spending was very low after Lockheed in Vietnam attempted to re-enter the commercial aviation market this aircraft, the Tristar L-1011, was a massive failure that cost the company around two billion dollars and those They are 1975 dollars, it is a lot of money and that is why the rich had to find new and important work and quickly or they would have to start getting rid of their most expensive and most experienced people, but the Cold War continued.

Leonid Brezhnev, the Russian prime minister during much of the Cold War, would remain in power in Russia for another eight years. The USSR had invested around 300 billion rubles in developing radars and surface-to-air missiles like this SA V battery that were far more advanced than any of the US strike capabilities and thus maintain the mutual assured destruction it had maintained. the delicate balance of the Cold War for so many years that the United States needed to develop something that could get through these defenses and that was the only thing the Department of Defense was willing to spend money on at the moment, but ideas were in short supply until Dennis Ol Overholser, 36, a math and radar expert at The work staff came in and threw this document under his desk.

Pat Quad talked this morning about the principle of information hiding and this is a fantastic example that in this paper he had published the edge wave method in the physical theory of diffraction. by cutter of the 7th of the Moscow Radio Engineering Institute about 10 years before he drew attention to the covers, the reason for this is that several years had passed before the military bothered to translate it, they read the title in the tab, that's useless. Overholser, however, once he read this thick document, got to the end and saw formulas on the last page that had some substance, saw a method for calculating the radar cross section of both the edge and the surface of the wing and thought We could use those formulas to come up with a fairly precise number, now to understand why this is so important, we need to know how they normally went about trying to minimize the radar signature of an airplane by placing it upside down on a pole in a field. radar and shoot the radar and see how it looked on the radar.

Now someone who knew math and science could make some reasonable inferences about what might affect radar observability, but it was largely black magic, there wasn't much science to it, it was just developed by instinct, stealth technology had been Long discussed, it is the Boldin grail of military aviation technology, but was always considered too difficult and too expensive to do effectively on other submarines. he was convinced that he hadthe formulas that would allow them to predict observability in advance and empirically designed them to do so. He convinced Bin Rich to let him spend some time creating software to do it.

A couple of weeks later, Dennis Overholser walked into Bin Rinse's office and handed him a sketch of this, the plane that quickly became known around the skunkworks offices as the Desperate Diamond. The reason they called it that is because everyone knew there was no way in the world they would ever get this thing off the ground. I've been rich just to see if Denisova's real sword really figured out anything about radar technology or not, he went ahead and ran a green line radar range test to see what it looked like, so they put it on the pole and then Rich is sitting in the cockpit with the radar operator and the radar operator starts testing and asks Ben to stick his head out and make sure they have finished installing the plane on the pole.

I can't see the planes there and like Ben Rich has his head out. from the operator's cabin looking looking at this plane, a crow lands right on the nose of the plane and the radar operator says oh, never mind, I got it. Ben Rich didn't have the heart to tell him that he was a pin, a crow. not the plane and in that moment he knew they were headed for something really big. At that time, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the same DARPA that invested in the early Internet, held a design competition for stealth aircraft, five companies participated and selected two winners. from the first round Lockheed and Northrop and they gave them 1.5 million dollars to build a 38 foot scale replica of their design and they were going to test it at the military's most sensitive radar range at White Sands New Mexico and that's what In this image I see the 38-foot Lockheed model.

The only problem is that the model is so good that all they saw on the radar was the pole. Now the Air Force had always assumed that this pole was invisible because the way radar works is the brightest. What you see on the screen is what they had never seen before, but it is because they had always captured more signatures from the plane on the pole and, in order to perform accurate tests, Dennis Overholser simply designed them a new survey that cost about five hundred thousand dollars, but it was no longer visible on the radar, so at this point they could vaguely see the signature of the plane, hardly these are with the most advanced and powerful radars of the US military, but they wanted to quantify exactly what the signature of this plane's radar and they came up with a really unique way to do it.

They knew what a ball bearing looked like on radar and started gluing successively smaller ball bearings to the front of this one. On the plane they started with a 3 inch ball bearing which is a little bigger than this one, this one is a 2 inch bearing, so it went up 3 inches. 2 inches kept going down and I kept seeing the ball bearings, eventually they all ran away. I finally when a 1/8 inch ball bearing came down that most of you probably won't be able to see, it's smaller than a ball, you could finally see the plane and not the ball bearing, so radar observability of this model is slightly larger than this ball bearing.

The math worked, so obviously Lockheed won the competition and the next step was to build a real prototype to fly against a radar facility and see if it could really do what the model did once they added things to the model. It had no engines, no air intakes, no landing gear, and no pilot's head on the windshield, things that would be observable on radar. Potentially, the Air Force wanted two prototypes in 14 months. The Air Force is always in a hurry for things and the skunks agreed. I'm sure that just in time they had a plane ready to fly now this thing is a bucket of spare parts the flight control computer came out of the f-16 then the inertial navigation system from the b-52 the seat also from the f-16 the front screen of the t2b buckeye trainer f-18 engines the only new thing is the skin that is seen on the outside the most important thing they had to solve was the aerodynamics for which they chose the s16 flight controller a very specific reason and that is because The F-16 is actually unstable in the pitch axis of flight, so while the F-16 is flying, the flight computer constantly calculates what it needs to do to keep the plane flying straight and level and takes that and does it. it adds up with the pilot's inputs to the plane and that's how it decides what went down the control surfaces, so it's correcting a lot on the subsecond scale this plane, some say it has pitch like the f16, but it's also unstable and roll and yaw in the three axes of flight dynamics, this plane is unstable, so they took the code that the f-16 used for pitch correction and used it in the three flight axes, that's why the first pilots of Testing nicknamed this thing the wobbly elf because it took a while to set up and it literally wobbled while you flew it as it wasn't quite right.

Corrections, but true to form, made it fly. Actually, this is the only photo I have been able to find. this thing in the air because most of the test flights were done at night they didn't want prying eyes to see this thing flying before they actually had it up and running now that they had it in the air they needed to see if it could live it complied the promise of their own eNOS, so they took it to the Nevada desert and flew it against one of these. The target acquisition radar of a hot missile battery.

This was the most advanced missile battery in the US at this time. Normally, what you would expect. What happens is this plane flew over, you would expect the missiles from the missile battery to follow the plane as it flew over in case you wanted to shoot it down, that's how it worked, it just happened to Thomas Lee every time he saw a plane. They started tracking, so they have a blue prototype that flew directly over the missiles, they never moved the radar battery, they never saw this plane, less than five years later, the first F-117 stealth fighter detachment was in operation in a large amount of the Tonopah Proving Ground.

The airport is part of the famous Area 51 pilot complex. They were initially skeptical about flying it because I mean, just look at it, but once I was in the air, they actually found it a lot of fun to fly, it was a very responsive airplane in the first night of Desert Storm, a total of 22 of these flew. Baghdad and privately the Air Force expected to lose about 30% of them, in reality they didn't lose a single one of these, the entire Operation Desert Storm never shot down one. This whole plane is a big trick, they need it to be invisible on radar. and they got really close basically not caring about the laws of aerodynamics at all and just getting around the instability with the computer system.

The reason this plane has flat surfaces is because the computers of that era were not powerful enough to calculate the radar observability of a curved surface, so instead of thinking about it too much, the assault holes are designed simply to point out flat surfaces and call it a day. Kelly Johnson liked to say that beautiful airplanes fly beautifully, this airplane with all its flat surfaces and its strange tail and strange diamond shape is certainly not beautiful in the conventional sense of the word, but it didn't matter, it did what had to do, so how the hell did they do it?

All of these incredible airplanes, each of which was innovative in some significant ways. way and many others we haven't even talked about, these are simply the greatest hits, well our story ends in the same place where it began with Kelly Johnson and the p80, a badass team of 23 designers and 105 manufacturers at their peak created the PA around a simulated engine in 143 days and that plane flew for 40 years, not much about Kelly's philosophy on how skunkworks built planes changed over the years, even when he handed the reins to Ben Rich and the The reason for this is because he codified this in What is still maintained in Lockheed Martin's culture as the Kelly Rules.

You can look them up on the Lockheed site later if you want to read them, but I'll just share a few of my favorites. The first is to use a small number of good people. Kelly's actual quote on this is that the number of people who have any connection to the project should be restricted in an almost cruel way. He used a small number of good people and then 25 percent compared to the so-called normal systems now to give context for that quote. At its peak there were 75 engineers working on the A12 design. Boeing used more than 10,000 engineers to design the triple 7 and that was with the help of CAD software.

Kelly and his team are still drawing all of their diagrams by hand. Kelly hired smart people. in this organization and I trusted them to do a good job one of my favorite examples of this is Peter Drucker tells the story of a young infantry captain in Vietnam a journalist asked this infantry captain how in the fog of war he kept the command of his troops and This young infantry commander said that around here I am the only one responsible if these men do not know what to do when they encounter an enemy in the jungle. I'm too far gone to tell them that my job is to make sure that knowing what they do depends on the situation, that only they can judge, that's how all our teams operate, whether we recognize it or not.

Your team is constantly making decisions as they evaluate problems, and as they write code, you can trust your team to do so. good decisions or you can try to smother them with processes and micromanagement, try to be involved in every decision they make, but good leaders hire smart people and trust them to make good decisions on code that can't be trusted. Leaders should also focus on enabling their team to make good decisions, ensuring they have good context and understand the overall goals of both their work and the business as a whole. Your team will make decisions.

Your job as a leader is to take. Make sure they have the context and information they need to make the right decisions, so one of the things that Kelly did so well, another one, guys, is to provide a very simple draw and release system with great flexibility to make changes. Sounds familiar. I mentioned earlier the lightweight drawing system that Kelly implemented for the p80, this actually became one of those rules on an ongoing basis. Skunkworks never used the same rigorous documentation practices that the rest of Lockheed used, they kept the process to the minimum necessary for their team to get what was required.

In context, these teams made light drawings because they didn't need anything else but collaborated closely. Now this lightweight process would not have been possible if they were in the main Lockheed plant, producing a much larger volume of aircraft with less skilled workers, they needed the The context and documentation for the work is correct, but on a small team where most of us work, you don't need all that context in all that structure. Sara Mae is one of my favorite voices in this kind of thing and she had a great tweet. Once upon a time, team pathology always depended on processes suitable for a smaller team or early adoption of processes suitable for a larger team.

Enough processes are needed so that everyone has the context they need, but not so much that people turn off their brains and wait. tell you what to do, the process is there to serve you, not for you to serve the process, and this is what Kelly did so well that there is no way all this innovation could have come from the brain of a man Kelly I didn't have everything. She didn't have that in mind, no matter how smart he was, but the processes she put in place allowed her teams to set the right priorities and make the right trade-offs when they made decisions.

One of my favorite rules. Kelly was a pragmatist every time. Kelly was a pragmatist every time. decision he made revolved around how to deliver the greatest value in the shortest possible time for his client and at the same time get the best out of his people and for the freedom and trust he gave to his teams and for the clarity with which he established the objectives for each project they were able to deliver. some of the most amazing planes ever built the u2 landed with terrible landing gear because they came the team decided it was worth saving weight in favor of altitude it's a good compromise driven by the goals of this plane the sr-71 is the The fastest plane ever built couldn't even start its own engines it was sitting on the runway dripping fuel because those things just didn't matterin the scope of this aircraft's mission.

The team spent all their time trying to figure out how to build a titanium plane and then make it reach Mach 3 at 90 thousand feet and I didn't worry about the rest of the stuff, the f-117 violates almost all the laws of aerodynamic design, but they fixed that to make it invisible on radar. contradicts conventional wisdom in almost every way possible because of the trust that has been read and the teams of Dennis Overholser Kelly and later Ben had unprecedented input into what they were building, they had incredible freedom and trust from their leaders . You have to find ways to give your team that.

Trust and that freedom that you have to impose as many decisions and as many responsibilities on them as you can because they have the information that they are going to make better decisions than you almost always, as long as you have done your job of giving. To show them the broader business context, you need to make sure you've identified and clearly and consistently communicated that business context, the two or three most important things your team needs to work on so they can make good decisions, and if you do that, You need to remember that sometimes good decisions will turn out to be wrong, so you need to create a healthy learning culture and not point fingers to make this work.

For this to work, you must take the time to build and refine a process that works for you. your team and give them enough context, but you give them a lot of freedom to do their best work and if you do these things, there's no telling what you and your team will be able to do together, thank you.