The Skunk Works was not in good odor. Kelly Johnson was seen as arrogant and difficult, living in the days of its past glories. To inform the DARPA scientists of the work the Skunk Works had done nearly a decade before, Rich had to persuade the CIA to release information on the stealthy technology of the A-12 and the D-21. With that information in hand he persuaded DARPA to let Lockheed participate.
One day in April 1975, just as he had settled down to a cup of instant decaffeinated coffee, Ben Rich had a visitor. He had taken over as boss of the Skunk Works in January and was looking for projects. Now a young man named Denys Overholser sat down and began to tell Rich about a footnote in a nine-year-old Russian technical paper that had only recently been translated by the Air Force Foreign Technology Division. Bearing the engaging title “Method of Edge Waves in the Physical Theory of Diffraction,” the article was the work of Pyotr Ufimtsev, chief scientist of the Moscow Institute of Radio Engineering. It was about radar-evading, “low observable” shapes, what would soon be known as “stealth.”[7]
Overholser explained to Rich that Ufimtsev had updated the equations of Hertz and Hermann Helmholtz so that one could for the first time calculate the radar reflection of a two-dimensional shape, such as the surface of an airplane. With that knowledge, you could design an airplane so that it would reflect radar waves away, off into space, instead of back to the receiver. And you could do this regardless of the size of the shape — in other words, a huge shape could be made to look small, almost invisible, on radar.
Overholser, a chunky mountain biker who had shaped radomes for the Skunk Works, was now assigned by Rich to turn the equations into a computer program and the program into the shape of a new airplane.
In five weeks, he and Bill Schroeder, the longtime Skunk Works radar and math whiz who had come out of retirement, wrote a program called Echo to do the calculations of an optimum shape for scattering radar beams. They took the numbers to a junior designer, Dick Sherrer, and by May 5 were back in Rich’s office with the results: drawings of an arrowhead-shaped airplane they called Hopeless Diamond.
“So would this one,” Rich asked, suggesting for comparison radar signatures given in terms of aircraft or bird types, “be the size of a Cessna or what, a condor, an eagle?”
“Ben,” Overholser said. “An eagle’s eyeball.”
Thereafter, Rich got hold of a number of ball bearings the approximate size of an eagle’s eyeball, and took them on his trips to the Pentagon, rolling them across generals’ desks and saying, “There’s your airplane!”
A few months later, someone on Rich’s staff gave him a bowling ball painted TOP SECRET: It was the radar signature of the whole Pentagon after it had been subjected to the Skunk Works stealth treatment.
When Johnson saw the sketch of the Hopeless Diamond, he literally kicked Ben Rich in the ass. “It’ll never get off the ground,” he predicted. Johnson had always said that if an aircraft looked beautiful, it would fly well. It was the classic premise of the great clipper-ship designers and race-car engineers. But this plane was ugly. Rich would write, “No one would dare to claim that the Hopeless Diamond would be a beautiful airplane. As a flying machine it looked alien.”
Johnson also loathed electronics, and this was an airplane designed for its electronics, by electricians. “If Kelly could find a hydraulic radio, he would use that,” went an old chestnut around the Skunk Works. He was famous for winning his quarter bets on this or that issue of technology; his penny-pinching ways were legendary at the Skunk Works, tokens of his hardscrabble upbringing. Now Rich bet him that the Hopeless Diamond would have a lower radar cross section than the fifteen-year-old D-21. (The calculations suggested it would be a thousand times less visible on radar.) On September 14, 1975, they took the two wooden models of the two aircraft into an electromagnetic chamber. The results were clear, and Johnson handed over the quarter, mumbling, “Don’t spend it until you see the thing fly.”
In October, they took the model to Gray Butte, the radar cross-section test site that belonged to McDonnell Douglas. On one occasion when the model was on the test pole, there was a sudden blossom of reflection. Uh-oh, the guys in the test center thought, was there some angle they had not considered? Then someone looked out at the model; on its pole in the middle of the concrete, they noticed that a large blackbird had landed on it. Even the droppings from birds could add to the radar reflection — a decibel and a half, as these things were measured, to a total reflection of three decibels.
Then in March 1976 they trucked the black-painted wooden model all the way to the Ratscat — the “radar scatter” facility at White Sands, New Mexico — for a “fly-off” with Northrop’s stealth model. The results were so overwhelmingly in favor of the Lockheed model that Northrop radar expert John Cashen was dismayed. The Hopeless Diamond was revolutionary — if it could actually fly. Nor was it clear that Kelly Johnson would be wrong about that. Making this shape fly depended on computers, as the airplane would be too unstable for a mere human pilot alone.
Although Johnson was appalled by it, the Stealth’s shape provided the very embodiment of the Skunk Works doctrine of simplicity. “It looked totally alien,” Ben Rich had said, because it was radically simple. It was a sculpture on the theme of the cutting away of excess, an airplane that flew no better than it had to so that it could not be seen.
Born inside a computer, it resembled what programmers call a wireframe drawing, making the most of limited processing power. In fact, it resembled the angular tanks and obstacles and flying saucers in the early video game called Battlezone. These shapes would eventually show up in a new kind of aerial combat that itself resembled a computer game.
With the machinists union on strike, Skunk Works managers did much of the work on the prototype. The engines were ground-tested at night in a rigged-up barrier composed of two tractor trailers. Then, on December 1, 1977, Bill Park, having demanded and received a twenty-five-thousand-dollar bonus to fly the ugliest airplane he had ever seen — especially after seeing the cockpit, which offered very little space from which to escape — lifted off the runway at Groom in what was now called the XST — experimental stealth testbed — or Have Blue.
Now the Skunk Works had to prove that the real airplane was as stealthy as the wooden model on the pole. Park and other pilots began testing it against real radars, the bad-guy radars, surreptitiously obtained, like the Red Hat squadron’s MiGs, and as carefully hidden in the remote corners of the Tonopah Test Range adjoining Dreamland.
During one test, Have Blue showed up as a bright blip on the screen. The engineers couldn’t understand what was wrong. Then someone noticed that three screws had not been driven flat. The heads sticking up just a fraction of an inch triggered a huge radar return.
It was soon clear to William Perry, who had become Stealth’s champion at the Pentagon, that his scientists were looking at something as groundbreaking for warfare as the jet engine had been, or the machine gun, perhaps even as revolutionary as gunpowder or the crossbow. Keeping this shape hidden was vital. More than any airplane before, perhaps, the form signaled function. You got the idea just by seeing it.
7
The Soviets were so skeptical of the idea of stealth that they ignored the implications of this study. In