During work on the Constellation, Johnson met often with Hughes, huddling with the billionaire in one of his bungalows. A pilot whose fame had grown from a record round-the-world flight during the 1930s, Hughes tested the plane himself. Once when he took the wheel of the prototype, Johnson and others in the plane were overcome with terror as Hughes attempted to stall the airplane to test its stability. When the airspeed indicator read dead zero, Johnson forced Hughes away from the controls.
Johnson’s methods were instinctive and highly practical. He demanded whenever possible that stock parts be used or adapted, and he administered by emotional economy as welclass="underline" by temper and fear. But he could exhibit flashes of kindness, too.
Bison recalled that “Johnson could be intimidating and brutal, but at our parties he was delightful. When I had to go to Kelly’s office, I was in fear, but in the end I was always amazed at his knowledge of the most detailed things.” The key to Skunk Works speed was efficient administration. “The main thing was that Johnson cut the paperwork. We drew things upstairs, then walked down and told the mechanic, ‘Build the damn thing,’ and then you helped him do it.”
Johnson and his staff had already been looking ahead to jets. They had proposed a design called the L-133, a stainless steel vision of the future, with a jet engine of Lockheed’s own design, a long fuselage, and canards promising a top speed of 650 miles per hour. On May 17, 1943, when Johnson was on a visit to Florida’s Eglin Air Force Base, a general took him aside and told him of the XP-59A, that hapless Bell jet, kept secret at Muroc with a fake propeller on its nose. He wanted Johnson to do something better. On the airliner home, his ulcer working overtime, he jotted down the ideas for a jet fighter he thought could be built in six months, something that could be a war winner.
The spaces where the engineers set up their drawing boards and the shops downstairs were cobbled together around a machine shop beside Lockheed’s wind tunnel, housed in a leaky addition built from the old wooden crates in which Wright engines had been shipped, the roof made from a rented circus tent.
Working ten-hour days, six days a week, the group put the jet in the air just 143 days after formal signing of the contract. The smell of chemicals seeped into the crude buildings from a factory next door, and an engineer named Irv Culver picked up the phone one day and spoke the immortal words, “Skunk Works.” Inspired by Al Capp’s Li’l Abner comic strip, Skunk Works is named after the still where a character named Injun Joe brewed up a foul moonshine called Kickapoo Joy Juice. And the question Culver and the others kept being asked but could not answer was “What’s Kelly brewing up in there?”
The name was born of secrecy. There was no official designation, so those inside had to dream one up.
Johnson continued to call the base Muroc for years after the name was officially changed to Edwards Air Force Base, after Glen Edwards, a test pilot killed in a crash. But by 1955, when the Skunk Works was looking for a place to test the U-2, Edwards was no longer private enough. Like some wild species that needed lots of range or whose environment was changed by the advance of civilization, the engineers who built secret aircraft had to flee farther and farther into the wilderness.
The Skunk Works would create the airplanes that made Dreamland necessary, and its legend grew up along with the secret base. It developed a far-flung fan club of buffs as devoted and dogmatic as any group of Roswell believers or saucer conspiracists. It even emerged as a business model, a method to get things done in a lean and mean way, after the management guru Tom Peters wrote approvingly of it. The Skunk Works, the buffs believed, had done nothing less than save the world several times. The U-2 and the Blackbirds had prevented World War III; the Stealth fighter had won the Gulf War.
One day I drove to Burbank to visit one of the Skunk Works’ most devoted buffs and see the original site. My guide was a local man named R. C. “Chappy” Czapiewski. Chappy was proof of the power of the legend: He had never worked at the Skunk Works or served in the branches of the military that flew its airplanes, but was simply a citizen who appreciated its achievements and was caught up in its history and lore.
We met in downtown Burbank, which contrary to all of Johnny Carson’s jokes struck me as a pleasant place: an inoffensive mall, a new media center, and a series of elegant Modern-style public buildings. The soaring lobby of its city hall was a WPA-era fantasy, painted with romantic murals of thirties aircraft and heroic images of movie cameras — icons of the leading local industries.
A querulous man who spoke with an edge of outrage, Chappy appeared something of a pain in the ass to the local city councilmen. I had to like him right away. Over a Japanese lunch he agreed to take me on a tour. He gave me a yellow-green button that read SOS: SAVE OUR SKUNK WORKS.
He was trying to muster the citizenry of Burbank to save the original Skunk Works buildings from destruction and turn at least one of them into a museum dedicated to the airplanes designed here, from the P-38 to the Stealth fighter.
The organization most opposed to this plan, he told me, was Lockheed itself. The local airport authority coveted the land on which the hangars stood for a planned expansion, and Lockheed had agreed to sell it.
“This was historic,” Chappy lamented, “and now it’s being forgotten. It was secret, but we — all of us living here — knew what was happening. The U-2, the Blackbird, the Stealth — they won the Cold War. Kids today don’t remember the Cold War. They think U-2 is a rock band.”[4]
We wandered among the hangars. Crape myrtle trees dotted the avenue in front of them, their pinks and greens virtually the only touch of color across expanses of gray pavement, gray chain-link.
Lockheed had painted the hangars a soft yellow, the yellow of crème brûlée or the yellow rose of Texas. They had chosen the same color out at Helendale in the secret RCS complex.
We could see building number 360 with its complex system of window panels. This, Chappy pointed out, is where they did the F-104—“the Starfighter,” “the missile with a man in it”—developed to counter the superiority of the MiG-15s American pilots encountered in Korea. Stubby-winged, with a downward-firing ejection seat, it would be a hot rod, but also a widowmaker, with no more glide in it than a bathtub pushed off a roof.
Here, Kelly and his boys created the U-2, and turned back over to the U.S. government — your tax dollars at work—$2 million of the $26 million he had agreed to accept and a tossed-in half dozen extra airplanes to boot. There, first for the CIA and then for the Strategic Air Command, they built the Blackbirds, the A-12 and the YF-12, then the SR-71, pioneering whole new technologies such as extruding titanium to create a plane that, through the millennium, will be the fastest and highest-flying.
“Beside those hangars,” Chappy said, “is where they set up the first Stealth prototype between two tractor-trailer trucks with camou net covering the ends and fired up the engine.”
There, the Stealth fighter grew from a mere footnote in a Soviet scientific journal into a black-faceted body. Appearing hacked, chopped, with every corner cut, its shape was the very embodiment of the Skunk Works philosophy, a treatise on the theme of cutting away all excess. “Keep It Simple, Stupid” was the motto — KISS. “Simplificate and add lightness.”
At the end of the flight line was the big hangar, where stealth watchers had seen shadowy tarpaulin-covered payloads moving into huge cargo planes — things on flatbed rail cars.
4
According to