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The history of Skunk Works, the top-secret division of Lockheed that specialised in extreme, highly classified military aircraft design....
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00:00:06When you have a super-secretive base in the middle of the desert, there is more than meets the eye.
00:00:16These incredibly nerdy engineers are really James Bond.
00:00:23Skunk Works originally started out as a highly secret bunch of revolutionary thinkers.
00:00:30Skunk Works was hidden within the Lockheed California Company.
00:00:35The Skunk Works created these incredible flying machines that fundamentally changed history.
00:00:42Area 51 was created for the U-2. That was the aircraft that discovered the missile sites on Cuba.
00:00:49That's when the Cuban Missile Crisis started.
00:00:52The Blackbird is probably the most popular airplane.
00:00:55People like the fastest, the highest, and it helped end the Cold War.
00:01:01In the Gulf War, the Nighthawk changed combat aircraft permanently.
00:01:06The Skunk Works created airplanes that changed world history.
00:01:09These guys are really at the nexus of mystery intrigue. Secrets are built in into the American military.
00:01:38For years, I had to live in the shadows.
00:01:41See, that's what we did back then.
00:01:45I led a top-secret organization called the Skunk Works.
00:01:50Funny name, I know. I'll get to that later.
00:01:54My men made the airplanes that kept America safe.
00:01:59I'm Kelly Johnson, and for years I was more than happy that very few knew my name.
00:02:07He's a figure in American military history that more people should know, but the CIA and the United States government
00:02:14did not want the public to know his name.
00:02:18People weren't supposed to know about Kelly Johnson.
00:02:23As head of Skunk Works, I wrote near daily in a logbook, making a record of my thoughts, plans, and
00:02:30ideas.
00:02:31It was my personal journal, hidden from the public.
00:02:36Until now.
00:02:38These mythical logbooks, I've seen pages out of them.
00:02:42They're kind of the holy grail of aerospace historians, because there's this detailed log of one of the iconic aircraft
00:02:48designers of the 20th century.
00:02:50But I've never seen a full run of them, because I think a lot of them are still classified.
00:02:54The Skunk Works is a concentration of a few good people solving problems far in advance, and at a fraction
00:03:02of the cost of other groups in the aircraft industry.
00:03:06Almost all of what we did was classified.
00:03:10We designed our first spy plane during a very different time in American history, when America was in the Cold
00:03:17War.
00:03:18The origins of the Cold War manifested in the late 1940s, early 1950s.
00:03:23The first big blow-up was in 1949, the Soviets explode their first atomic bomb.
00:03:37All of a sudden, America and the Soviets have this nuclear capability.
00:03:42This arms race ensues.
00:03:45They were boasting and bragging that they had missiles being pumped out like sausages.
00:03:51They had bombers.
00:03:53And everybody's scared that, oh my God, they've got so many bombers, they're going to fly over the North Pole
00:03:57and they're going to bomb the United States into, you know, Never Never Land.
00:04:00And it was simply a fact of life.
00:04:04There was a possibility that the threats and the desire expressed for world domination by the Soviet Union could turn
00:04:13into a nuclear conflict.
00:04:15It was implicit in all of the air drills that we did as children in grade school.
00:04:25The American government was desperate to find out how strong the Soviets were.
00:04:31And it was very difficult to get information out of the Soviet Union.
00:04:35They were a closed society.
00:04:38The CIA could not get any human spies on the ground in the Soviet Union.
00:04:43I mean, it was called the Iron Curtain for a real reason.
00:04:45You know, it was impenetrable.
00:04:47What Eisenhower was impressed with was data.
00:04:50I need to see what they're doing.
00:04:53I have to see that data.
00:04:54I have to.
00:04:55And it has to be of a quality that says that is a tank and not a two-ton truck.
00:05:00That is a missile and not a pipe.
00:05:04And the president authorized these incredibly nerdy engineers to create this spy plane that can fly high enough to be
00:05:17out of the line of fire of Soviet
00:05:19surface-to-air missiles.
00:05:23The year was 1955.
00:05:26Previously, Skunk Works had designed two successful jet fighters for the government, the Shooting Star and the Starfighter.
00:05:38Planes could soar to 50,000 feet.
00:05:41We needed an airplane that could go 70,000 feet, out of range of them Russian missiles.
00:05:48And from that height, we needed to capture images as tiny as my typewriter.
00:05:53That was the first reconnaissance aircraft built from the ground up, capturing secrets in the sky.
00:06:00We called it the U-2.
00:06:05Up until the U-2, there was no reconnaissance aircraft.
00:06:08It was a modified bomber with a camera.
00:06:12The U-2 was the first plane to be specifically designed to fly over foreign countries, to take pictures, to
00:06:18gather intelligence for review here by the United States.
00:06:23With the U-2, you wanted high altitude.
00:06:26That's what's going to be the way you survive.
00:06:29Well, if you want high altitude, then you've got to have light weight.
00:06:34So you do severe things.
00:06:36Like on the U-2, you have one main landing gear in the middle of the fuselage on the bottom.
00:06:41You don't have two or more landing gears.
00:06:44This was a plane that had to be so incredibly light to get up to 70,000 feet.
00:06:51I mean, the skin on the aircraft was something like .02 inches.
00:06:57In the camera system, they actually had two 9-inch reels of film, and they counter-rotated so that the
00:07:03weight between the two reels was always the same.
00:07:06It was that critical on that aircraft to keep the weight in balance.
00:07:10Everything we did had to be secretive.
00:07:13Even within our own parent company, Lockheed.
00:07:17During the 1950s, it was one of the top airplane manufacturers in the world.
00:07:23Skunk Works was a subdivision, yet very few within the company knew what we were doing.
00:07:31Skunk Works was physically in Burbank, and it was hidden within the Lockheed, California company.
00:07:40I had been with Lockheed well over 20 years, and I knew very little about the Skunk Works.
00:07:49The Skunk Works itself was a secret for a long time.
00:07:52When I hired in, I was not allowed to tell people I worked for the Skunk Works.
00:07:56When I first went to Lockheed, I didn't know a thing about it.
00:07:59And everybody that was there says, if you're a good engineer, maybe you'll get to go over to the Skunk
00:08:05Works someday.
00:08:06Now, as it turned out, when I did go over to the Skunk Works, it was a different world.
00:08:14Number one, you would not talk about your work to anybody, including your wife.
00:08:19They could fire you if you told somebody you worked for the Skunk Works.
00:08:23The second thing is, you had to be investigated to make sure you were an honest, loyal, trustworthy citizen.
00:08:30The fact that there was an organized approach by the Soviets to have spies here was a fact of life.
00:08:37There were undoubtedly hostile agents that were trying to steal the intellectual property, as we would say today,
00:08:45or understand what it is that was being developed.
00:08:48Simple things like watch the guy in the Xerox machine.
00:08:52Make sure he only replaces the cartridge, not put a camera in it.
00:08:58Russians and Chinese had ships out in the water, and they could tap your phone calls.
00:09:03And, you know, everything was just getting to the point where you couldn't trust anybody.
00:09:07So they started giving lie detector tests.
00:09:11Has anybody contacted you in this? Has anybody asked you this?
00:09:15Another thing everyone was afraid of was a honeypot.
00:09:18The honeypot is literally like a female paramour, a Russian spy,
00:09:24who would try to seduce a male worker at the Skunk Works and try and then, in pillow talk, get
00:09:32this information from them.
00:09:34The environment that created the U-2, they wanted to truly protect the fact that the airplane was even in
00:09:41development.
00:09:42Kelly had money delivered to his house, the payments for the contract.
00:09:46They set up front companies to buy equipment.
00:09:50Anything they could do to mask the fact that an airplane was in development.
00:09:55We needed a place to build the U-2.
00:09:58Somewhere completely off the grid.
00:10:01Not the kind of place you could find on a map.
00:10:04They have to find a base that is so secret that no one will know what they're doing.
00:10:11So, Kelly Johnson and the CIA's Richard Bissell start flying over the American West.
00:10:18And where do they wind up?
00:10:20Inside the middle of the Nevada test site, where the Atomic Energy Commission just so happens to be setting off
00:10:29nuclear bombs.
00:10:32I mean, I'm talking mushroom cloud and all, outside of Las Vegas, Nevada.
00:10:38It's impossible to imagine now, but this was going on in the 1950s.
00:10:42And they think to themselves, no one is going to follow us here.
00:10:47So, they partition off a segment of the Nevada test site specifically for this aircraft.
00:10:56And the reason it's chosen in particular is because it's an old dry lake bed.
00:11:01And it's extraordinarily flat.
00:11:04And that's what they need for a sort of natural runway.
00:11:09And it's called Groom Lake.
00:11:11And now we know Groom Lake to be Area 51.
00:11:31Well, Area 51, of course, in the 1950s, this is so isolated.
00:11:35A lot of activity could be conducted there without folks seeing it.
00:11:41Base location has been decided as Site 2, for which the government will accept my proposed name of Paradise Ranch.
00:11:50The Paradise Ranch name was given to it to try to make it sound better.
00:11:55There is just nothing there.
00:11:58And in the days of the U-2, it's a few trailers that are set up.
00:12:03So, you can imagine there wasn't really a lot of air conditioning or anything.
00:12:07This is rough working conditions.
00:12:10One of the lead physicists out there told me one of his most acute memories was looking across the way
00:12:17and being like,
00:12:18what is that?
00:12:19And realizing that it was a coyote chasing a rabbit, but they were both walking.
00:12:26One of the little not-so-good features was Yucca Flats was still detonating nuclear weapons.
00:12:32So every once in a while, everybody had to get out of town.
00:12:35And they'd have to wait two or three weeks, and they'd go back in with the guy or counters and
00:12:38make sure it was safe,
00:12:39and they'd go back tour.
00:12:44You can imagine how glamorous it must seem, but if you go back in time to 1955,
00:12:50the reality of the situation was that it was a bunch of engineers, test pilots, and CIA officers.
00:12:59It was an extremely tiny project in terms of need to know.
00:13:04There was the president, and there was only 200 people working out at Area 51 to get this U-2
00:13:11aloft.
00:13:12And then back in the old days, we flew up there from Burbank, and the first time you went up
00:13:17to the test site,
00:13:18you had to sit in a part of the airplane with the windows blocked so that you couldn't see where
00:13:24you were going.
00:13:25But once you got up there and filled out your paperwork to get the badge that you had to have
00:13:30when you were on the site,
00:13:31then you could sit in any part of the airplane where there was a window.
00:13:35It was fun.
00:13:36I hate to say this, but we got to fly over the craters that were in the ground up in
00:13:40north of Las Vegas
00:13:42where they were doing all the atomic tests, each of these big cavities and things.
00:13:50The U-2 was pushing the boundaries of what we knew how to do.
00:13:55But this was absolutely critical.
00:14:00This was at a time where, and we knew the Soviets were working on these nuclear weapons.
00:14:05There was even reports that they had a nuclear-powered bomber.
00:14:09But we didn't have any way to verify. We didn't have satellites then.
00:14:14We worked night and day perfecting the U-2 at Area 51.
00:14:18Sleep? That was just something we all dreamt about.
00:14:23Airplane essentially completed. Terrifically long hours. Everybody almost dead.
00:14:46We did everything we could to keep the U-2 top secret.
00:14:50But there were times civilians spotted the plane soaring in the sky.
00:14:55Luckily, the reports coming in were sightings of unidentified flying objects.
00:15:00I'm getting some reports from the tower, the Victorville tower, and the radar sites about the UFOs.
00:15:10During the testing of the U-2, people saw these quote-unquote UFOs.
00:15:15And 50% of all sightings in the 50s and 60s were because of Skunk Works aircraft.
00:15:21The CIA had a whole bureau to deal with U-2 slash UFO sightings.
00:15:29Because it was such a common thing to have happen, whereby someone would see something up in the sky that
00:15:36was completely inexplicable.
00:15:38I mean, the U-2, the wings are so long in it, it almost looks like a flying cross.
00:15:44And people just couldn't comprehend what could fly up that high.
00:15:51You know, imagine that you're a commercial airliner pilot and you're up at about 38 or 40,000 feet.
00:15:57You're pretty high.
00:15:58You know that military jets go to about 50,000 feet.
00:16:02And then you see something way above you.
00:16:06It is way above 50,000 feet.
00:16:08So now you see this very light-colored thing at twice your altitude.
00:16:14What conclusion are you going to draw?
00:16:16After one year's investigation, I believe that the flying saucers, seen by veteran airline and Air Force pilots, are objects
00:16:23from another planet.
00:16:26At Area 51, we did have creatures that seemed more than human.
00:16:32But they weren't spacemen.
00:16:34They were our test pilots.
00:16:37These men were a different breed of beings.
00:16:41And testing our machines was a test of their own mettle.
00:16:46If you go back and you say when these airplanes were designed, and you look at the tool sets to
00:16:50design them, most of them were done with simple slide loads.
00:16:54So there was a fair amount of uncertainty.
00:16:57We're talking, you know, the mid-1950s here.
00:17:00You know what I mean?
00:17:00The technology was still very crude.
00:17:04Flying at that altitude, you're above most of the atmosphere.
00:17:07The air is extremely thin, and getting a jet engine to run up there is very difficult.
00:17:12Keeping the pilot alive is very difficult.
00:17:16The aircraft is flying at 70,000 feet.
00:17:19Once you get above 63,000, 64,000 feet, if your body was exposed to the air pressure at that
00:17:26altitude, the blood inside your body would begin to boil.
00:17:31The human body is not designed to be exposed to air pressure that low.
00:17:35So you have to wear a pressurized space suit just to survive.
00:17:42It took three flight surgeons to help you into this suit to make sure there were no rips, that the
00:17:50zipper went up the right way.
00:17:51And then you sat and you re-breathed pure oxygen for two hours.
00:17:56High flights without pre-breathing would result in nitrogen bubbles forming in the blood.
00:18:02The painful and often fatal bends encountered by deep sea divers.
00:18:07What these pilots had to go through before they even got into the plane, it's just extraordinary to think about.
00:18:13That's American history.
00:18:14They're right on the edge of what their physical capacity is and, of course, what their aircraft's capacity is.
00:18:23This is a very rare breed and a very special group of Americans.
00:18:28You're essentially flying in what some pilots refer to as Coffin's Corner.
00:18:32You have about 10 knots of airspeed from stall to going Mach 1.
00:18:36So at either end, the plane is non-flyable.
00:18:40Doing a high rate of bank turn at that altitude, you can't do that either.
00:18:44Because the wingspan is so long, the inside wing is stalling and the outside wing is going Mach.
00:18:49So the pilots who flew these airplanes had to be extremely gifted pilots.
00:18:54You had to have the aptitude to fly this type of a mission and to keep quiet about it.
00:18:59Pilots were breaking the high altitude record every day, yet they couldn't tell anybody about it.
00:19:07Why does a guy like that get into a plane that's never been flown before with the possibility of death?
00:19:14Not everybody goes to work each day with a high possibility of being killed at the end of the day.
00:19:23I think most of us aren't quite that emotional about it.
00:19:26Crashes can be useful in sort of a perverse way in that, hey, we just found out something that's wrong.
00:19:37Oh boy, there have been so many of the guys that I know that have died.
00:19:41Hell, it's, I just can't even, it's hard to talk about those, those people that have died.
00:19:49We did the best we could and something that we couldn't possibly take into account happened.
00:19:55And the reason we concentrate on it so much is because these people's lives and their families' lives are on
00:20:02the line in our hands.
00:20:05Kelly was beyond devastated. He would cry.
00:20:13I mean, these guys are your friends.
00:20:18Whenever one of our planes went down, I'd get a bad stomach ulcer.
00:20:25If you go into Kelly's logs, you can tell that he took his responsibility very, very hard.
00:20:31He suffered from stress just a few months before they delivered the U-2.
00:20:36He had a complete physical breakdown that almost killed him.
00:20:40I just want to help the U.S., my people, and others.
00:20:45The sacrifices of these test pilots can't be in vain.
00:20:50And they weren't.
00:20:52Within the first year of operation, it dispelled the missile gap and the bomber gap.
00:20:57Because of the U-2 flights and the photographic reconnaissance imagery they brought home,
00:21:02America was able to prove and show internally that the Soviets were boasting about the missiles they had.
00:21:08They were not as far as advanced as we thought they were or as they were bragging about.
00:21:15We thought the Red's radar couldn't detect us, but we were wrong.
00:21:22The very first overflight of the Soviet Union was tracked on its full length.
00:21:27And that surprised the CIA and it surprised the American government.
00:21:31That was a bad thing.
00:21:32It meant that the Soviet radars were way better than we thought they were.
00:21:37They could pick the U-2 up, but they couldn't reach it.
00:21:40And it became obvious almost as soon as the U-2 was designed
00:21:44that it was going to become obsolete as soon as the Soviets had adequate surface-to-air weapons.
00:21:51In 1955, the Soviets only had one type of a missile, SA-1, surface-to-air missile 1.
00:21:58It could reach an altitude of 60,000 feet.
00:22:01The U-2s were flying at 70,000 feet.
00:22:03So for four years, they were out of harm's way.
00:22:07May 1st of 1960, my father is briefed that upon this mission,
00:22:13there are certain targets he should overfly, that they're trying to get information.
00:22:17One of the targets over Sverdlovsk was to film an SA-2 base,
00:22:23a new improved missile base that a previous mission had uncovered.
00:22:27The goal of this particular flight May 1st was to find out
00:22:31if the Soviets were getting ready to put operational the missile base they had discovered.
00:22:38And my father found out firsthand that it was operational.
00:22:44A United States Air Force plane shot down on Russian soil.
00:22:48Reportedly, an ultra-secret high-altitude reconnaissance craft.
00:22:52As the Soviet launches its most belligerent anti-American propaganda barrage in recent years.
00:22:57And it all went back to these engineers, you know, with the pencils in their pocket.
00:23:04The skunkworks are really at the nexus of history.
00:23:11At issue was nuclear war.
00:23:31We lost airplane flown by Francis G. Powers.
00:23:35There was an immediate Russian reaction and they claimed they shot down the airplane by missile.
00:23:41The political implications of the flight were extremely major.
00:23:47The aftermath of Powers being shot down was really interesting
00:23:52because he didn't report in or land when he was supposed to.
00:23:57So now you have the U.S. decision makers wondering what happened.
00:24:01They picked up some of the radio reports that maybe something had happened to him,
00:24:05but they didn't have confirmation.
00:24:06So now you had this silence as each other waited to see what the other one was going to do.
00:24:14The Soviets were playing a game.
00:24:16They were trying to trap the Americans.
00:24:18So they intentionally released this fake photo to see what the Americans would do.
00:24:25This photograph showed a pile of wreckage, plane wreckage, in a field with kids and farmers around it.
00:24:33Kelly Johnson takes one look at this photo and says the rivets are not lined up correctly for U-2
00:24:39and that the fuel intake and the jet intake isn't correct.
00:24:42That's not my plane.
00:24:44So I was given the job of insulting them to the point where they would show us what they had
00:24:50because we did not know whether Powers had just affected.
00:24:56So Kelly was brought in and made some public comments about what was being shown on TV saying,
00:25:03that's no U-2.
00:25:04Soviets are lying.
00:25:05As a result, all of a sudden, maybe they didn't shoot it down.
00:25:09Maybe there's no plane wreckage.
00:25:10Maybe the pilot died.
00:25:12They have no evidence.
00:25:13Release the cover stories.
00:25:14Then the U.S. announced, well, we lost track of a weather plane.
00:25:18It may have wandered into Soviet airspace.
00:25:21And the Soviets go, gotcha.
00:25:24Premier Khrushchev comes up and says, ah, we do have the pilot.
00:25:27Here he is.
00:25:27Ah, we do have the wreckage.
00:25:29Here it is.
00:25:30The trial, the guy gets stuck in a Russian prison, sentenced to 10 years imprisonment.
00:25:36The first three months of his captivity was solitary confinement.
00:25:42And then he was interrogated.
00:25:45Bright lights.
00:25:47Long days of questioning.
00:25:49Mutton Jeff type of scenario.
00:25:51One KGB guy would come in, rough and gruff, yelling and screaming.
00:25:55You tell us everything or we'll shoot you tomorrow.
00:25:57The next guy would come in.
00:25:59Mr. Powers, you help us, we can help you.
00:26:05Trying to get information out of him by any means necessary, short of physical abuse.
00:26:11He would reveal certain things that he knew they could find out in the press.
00:26:15He'd keep other things secret that he knew that they could have no ways of finding out.
00:26:21Francis Gary Powers was held for quite a while.
00:26:23And then eventually, you know, there's the story with the bridge of spies, you know, the movie that was done.
00:26:29February 10th, 1962, you have two spies on each side of this bridge.
00:26:34Rudolph Abel on the west side.
00:26:37My father on the east side.
00:26:40They are positively ID'd.
00:26:42They walk home to their respective freedoms.
00:26:45My father returns home to an American public that doesn't really know what to make of this ordeal.
00:26:50There have been misinformation and rumors in the papers that he had defected, that he had landed the plane intact,
00:26:57that he'd spilled his guts and told the Soviets everything he knew,
00:27:00or that he hadn't followed orders and committed suicide.
00:27:08Dad is not able to go back into the Air Force at the time.
00:27:12He's the known spy.
00:27:13If they employ him, they will be accused of employing spies.
00:27:18In the meantime, Kelly Johnson offered my dad a job as a Lockheed test pilot flying U-2s.
00:27:25One of the attributes of Kelly, while he was a tough guy, he had a soft spot.
00:27:31And he always wanted to take care of his pilots.
00:27:34And when Francis Gary Powers came back, Kelly couldn't stand to see that guy on the streets.
00:27:40This was a national hero, even though he wasn't being treated like one.
00:27:45So yeah, Kelly gave him a job.
00:27:48I felt for Powers.
00:27:50He and I were both now known to the public.
00:27:54After the U-2 incident, everything changed.
00:27:57It was suggested to me by security people that I not go to work by the same route.
00:28:04I've been told to avoid certain traffic intersections and watch out for big trucks.
00:28:10I slept with an automatic pistol close by.
00:28:14There were concerns, and the CIA told them that he needed to take precautions.
00:28:20Because somebody like him was somebody who an adversary might want to kidnap or do something about
00:28:26to prevent him from embarrassing them with new technology again.
00:28:31It does sound paranoid, but it wasn't crazy.
00:28:35The idea behind it is that they would, like, get them and torture them and say,
00:28:39tell us how you built the U-2.
00:28:41But that was a very real threat because, as far as we know,
00:28:45the Soviets never got a spy plane over the United States.
00:28:51The U-2 is still busy, now over Cuba.
00:28:55This aircraft took the pictures that were the basis for our move on Cuba.
00:29:00The images showed Soviet missiles just 90 miles from U.S. soil.
00:29:06That was the aircraft that discovered the missile sites on Cuba
00:29:10that weren't supposed to be there.
00:29:12That's when the Cuban Missile Crisis started.
00:29:14I have directed the continued and increased.
00:29:17Close surveillance of Cuba and its military buildup.
00:29:23A U-2 was shot down over Cuba.
00:29:25They had 11 radar and missile sites turned on against him
00:29:30and repeated their success with powers.
00:29:33Except this time, Major Rudolph Anderson was killed.
00:29:38It is apparent that the U-Bird has just about reached the end of its reconnaissance capability.
00:29:46We knew we needed a new kind of airplane.
00:29:50One that was near impossible to shoot down.
00:29:53A plane unlike anything man had ever seen before.
00:29:56Something so fast, the human eye could barely see it in the sky.
00:30:24We expected, two years before the U-2 was shot down,
00:30:28that we ought to be working on something that would go higher than the U-2.
00:30:30Go faster, go further.
00:30:33We'd be starting from scratch, just like the Wright brothers.
00:30:40Kelly Johnson and the Skunk Works team realized that they had to develop some kind of an airplane
00:30:45that could fly higher and faster than the U-2 in order to avoid Soviet missiles.
00:30:50We have to design something better.
00:30:53It was impossible to think about.
00:30:55But, Kelly Johnson said, we did it with the U-2, we can do it.
00:31:00We need an airplane that flies not at 70,000 feet, but at 85,000 feet and above.
00:31:07Instead of an airplane that flies at 450 miles an hour,
00:31:10we need an airplane that flies at 2,100 miles an hour, Mach 3+.
00:31:17Mach is a designation for capturing the speed of airplane relative to the speed of sound.
00:31:24Mach 1 is the speed of sound.
00:31:28Mach 3 means that you're covering one mile every second and a half.
00:31:39Mach 3.2, the airplane goes faster than the .30-06 bullet.
00:31:43You cannot turn the airplane in the state of Ohio.
00:31:45It goes so fast.
00:31:49What made it so special and so difficult
00:31:52was that there were so many things in it that had never been done before.
00:31:55You know, for example, that's the first time we ever built anything large out of titanium.
00:31:59The decision to use titanium is traceable to the environment in which it flew.
00:32:05When you're traveling 2,000 miles per hour, the friction of the air rubbing over the airplane
00:32:11heats up the airframe to about 550 degrees Fahrenheit,
00:32:16which is about as hot as your oven can get at home.
00:32:19He could almost immediately rule out aluminum
00:32:22because aluminum above 300 and about 70 degrees loses its strength.
00:32:29So he was driven to titanium because it's as strong as steel and half the weight of steel.
00:32:35But we really hadn't used much as titanium.
00:32:39To get the titanium, we went to an unlikely source.
00:32:44Our enemy.
00:32:45We don't have a titanium source in the United States.
00:32:48So the CIA eventually set up a frontal company in Europe,
00:32:53and the Russians sold us all with titanium.
00:32:55They never knew who they sold it to.
00:32:58So you had the CIA buying the materials that they needed for this aircraft
00:33:02so it could fly over the Soviet Union and spy on them.
00:33:05It was an incredibly ambitious aircraft to design.
00:33:09The other issue is that jet engines are really, really good, even up to Mach 2, Mach 2.5.
00:33:17But once they go beyond that speed, it gets very tricky.
00:33:22For Mach 3 flight, you have to funnel just an amazing quantity of air through these jet engines.
00:33:28The quantity of air is like as much water as flows over Niagara Falls.
00:33:31That's the volume of air that you're funneling through.
00:33:34The problem is when you're funneling that volume of air in,
00:33:37you get these shock waves in the air that prevent the air from actually reaching the jet engines.
00:33:41So the engine stalls and the airplane crashes.
00:33:46We needed a special engineer to solve the airflow problem on our new plane.
00:33:52His name, Ben Rich.
00:33:55Ben Rich helped solve that problem by designing this cone in the middle of the jet engine
00:34:00and it moves in and out depending on how fast you're flying.
00:34:03And that allows the aircraft to control shock waves.
00:34:08One of Ben Rich's early signature achievements.
00:34:11You're not talking about a computer that, you know, you can just put a couple lines of code in to
00:34:16operate the intake.
00:34:17You know, you're talking mechanical hydraulic systems that was very difficult to operate and it was Ben's job to fix
00:34:24it and he did.
00:34:25And he solved that problem without computers and without digital, all analog.
00:34:30And that made him famous.
00:34:36I remember walking around and I'd see these big 500 gallon drums and they catch the leaking fuel.
00:34:44The airplane actually expands in flight because of the heat soak.
00:34:48They couldn't get a sealant that would really work tight.
00:34:51So what happens is the plane leaks on the ground.
00:34:53A lot of fuel.
00:34:55But once it gets up to speed at altitude, the airplane tightens up and it's tight as a drum.
00:35:05Middle of July in 1961, the airplane was being assembled.
00:35:11And from that time, not a very long period of time, from July to the next February, a whole airplane
00:35:18was built.
00:35:20Took them on a truck, took them up to the test site.
00:35:24At the time, the Soviets had a new ally in Cuba.
00:35:28It seemed at any moment we could be on the brink of nuclear war.
00:35:33We needed to test our new recon plane.
00:35:35And we went back to the place where we had our greatest success.
00:35:41Area 51.
00:35:44Out at Groom Lake, Area 51, they worked on doing testing,
00:35:49which essentially turned that from a temporary area into a permanent facility.
00:35:54That's when they realized they needed hard, fast buildings.
00:36:19In testing while flying Mach 3.2, we found we could reduce the internal temperature by painting the plane
00:36:27and black.
00:36:28Hence the name, Blackbird.
00:36:34There was a great deal of risk involved for everyone.
00:36:38We had to make sure the pilots didn't cook in the cockpit.
00:36:45The environment that they were in, the minimum surface temperature around the cockpit was 550 degrees
00:36:51and some parts of the cockpit windshield were up at 640 degrees Fahrenheit.
00:37:00The test pilots knew the risk they were taking because of the nuances associated with propulsion ramping.
00:37:07There was always a 5-6% chance.
00:37:09You'll get a shock wave that goes around the entire vehicle.
00:37:12And we had one and it snapped the vehicle in half.
00:37:15It literally broke the vehicle in half.
00:37:17We lost the pilot.
00:37:20So Kelly, he was very nervous in the beginning.
00:37:23Did I get the calculations right?
00:37:24Did I use the right safety factors?
00:37:28These are individuals who voluntarily went into that world, understanding the risk,
00:37:34just constantly pushing the envelope, knowing the importance of the tasks in which they were engaged.
00:37:45The day of the mission, you came in about two and a half hours before the flight.
00:37:49You had to have a physical before every flight that you had to pass.
00:37:52At that point, they fed you high protein food to give you the energy through the flight, steak and eggs.
00:37:59About an hour 15 prior, you donned your space suit.
00:38:03They then took you out to the airplane.
00:38:11Then gave you time to taxi out to the runway.
00:38:18Your greatest sense of speed is on takeoff.
00:38:21You release the brakes, you light those two powerful afterburners.
00:38:25Within 20 seconds, you're going to go 4,500 feet and lift off doing 240 miles an hour.
00:38:35You'll climb through 20,000 feet less than two minutes from the time you release the brakes.
00:38:42Now once you got up there, typically around 78,000 feet, you can see the curvature of the Earth.
00:38:49The sky above you is absolutely black because 97% of the atmosphere is below you.
00:38:55At night, the sky is absolutely spectacular.
00:38:5890% of the stars you can see up there, we can't see on the Earth because the atmosphere filters
00:39:03them out.
00:39:05It's very quiet.
00:39:06You're in an airplane that's traveling at three times the speed of sound, so most of the sound's behind you.
00:39:12You see the Earth from a different perspective.
00:39:24Those were 11-hour and 20-minute missions, some of them.
00:39:28So, it's like the long-distance runner.
00:39:31You're not necessarily sprinting, but you've got to keep your energy up.
00:39:34So, you watched your diet.
00:39:37I remember once on a mission the night before, I'd had a seafood dinner and I had an explosive diarrhea
00:39:46attack.
00:39:47One of those really interesting moments in your life.
00:39:51We had a discussion and we kind of said, well, you know, if you don't change a baby's diapers, what's
00:39:55the worst thing that can happen?
00:39:57Maybe you'll get a rash.
00:39:58So, I told my back shooter, I said, I think we can press on.
00:40:01I said, the last thing I want is a message sent to the president.
00:40:05The pilot pooped in his suit.
00:40:07So, they had to return back.
00:40:10I can't remember if I got a rash, but they had to tear out the liner when we got back.
00:40:13And I gave our suit maintenance people a case of beer for having to reconstitute my suit.
00:40:25The blackbird made my men go beyond their limits.
00:40:29The men who flew.
00:40:31And those who made it possible to fly.
00:40:34Our engineers.
00:40:37To me, some of the most remarkable thing of it is that it was all done using logarithms and trig
00:40:44tables and Freedon calculators.
00:40:47It's just so remarkable to think about.
00:40:50You know, they were just looking at physics.
00:40:53They're looking at basic foundations of how science works.
00:40:59They simply used their minds, their imaginations, and their willingness to engineer a system.
00:41:10They didn't have computers.
00:41:12How could you possibly come up with such advanced technology?
00:41:19So, a lot of people came to believe that the Skunk Works were actually reverse engineering some kind of alien
00:41:27technology Kelly Johnson brought to Area 51.
00:41:42Kelly Johnson filed a report with the Air Force in December of 1953.
00:41:48He had gone home to his ranch in California, and he looked out and saw something he couldn't quite understand.
00:41:58This was something that was moving at a very high rate of speed away from him.
00:42:01And he drew a little sketch of what the aircraft looked like.
00:42:07I have definitely believed in the possibility that flying saucers exist.
00:42:13This is in spite of a good deal of kidding from my technical associates.
00:42:18I am now more firmly convinced than ever.
00:42:24Because of this extraordinary circumstance, whatever it may have been, a lot of people came to believe that the Skunk
00:42:32Works were actually reverse engineering some kind of alien technology Kelly Johnson brought to Area 51.
00:42:45There were some people, they had come up with this idea, all these weird things that supposedly happened at the
00:42:52test site to do with the Blackbirds.
00:42:55Because how could you possibly come up with such advanced technology?
00:43:00They didn't have computers.
00:43:05What about the conspiracy theories that the Blackbird was based on alien technology?
00:43:10They like to believe it because they can't envision a class of people that can think out of the box.
00:43:17There was no magic that didn't come from any else.
00:43:20It just came from somebody having a dream.
00:43:22If you look at Kelly's design book, it's about 20 pages.
00:43:27I was very, very interested in understanding how he managed to envision something so unique from the technology that existed
00:43:37at the time.
00:43:38I didn't get the magic until there was one chart that had a propulsion curve in it.
00:43:42And he said, you know, I think I can get 20% higher.
00:43:46And it finally dawned on me, if you go 20% higher on every part of the design,
00:43:54it's easy to go from 1.5 Mach number, which we know how to do, to 3.
00:43:59And that was how genius works.
00:44:06All it really is, is the application of common sense to some pretty tough problems.
00:44:13The mental challenge is entertainment for me.
00:44:18It's always been, even back to my first day at Lockheed.
00:44:24He gets the job at Lockheed as a tooling engineer, by the way.
00:44:28He wasn't hired to be an aerodynamicist.
00:44:30He was hired to design the tools to build the airplane.
00:44:33But he goes to the chief engineer, Paul Hibbert at the time, his first day on the job, and says,
00:44:39this is your design for the Model 10 Electra, which was the newest plane that Lockheed is developing,
00:44:45is unsafe and unstable, and you can't build it that way.
00:44:50This was a passenger aircraft, and you don't want that kind of airplane to be unsafe.
00:44:55It was all he could do to keep from firing the kid on the spot.
00:44:59Who are you? You know, where'd you come from?
00:45:03But he'd bring Kelly in the next day and says, okay, why is it not going to fly?
00:45:08And Kelly's able to answer every one of his questions to the satisfaction that Hal gives this college graduate the
00:45:15model for the aircraft and says, fix the airplane.
00:45:18And that's what he did.
00:45:20He said, I think the way to solve it, instead of having one tail, have two.
00:45:25And they tested it, and sure enough, the twin tail solution solved the problem, and it turned out to be
00:45:30a kind of hallmark of a lot of that generation of planes.
00:45:33You don't see too many split tail designs until 1933, and then you see it with the Model 10, and
00:45:39then suddenly everybody's got a split tail design.
00:45:42It gets copied by almost everybody, but essentially he saved the company.
00:45:47You know, with that idea in 1933.
00:45:51Because if they had come out with the airplane that they had designed originally, it would have been too unsafe,
00:45:56and airlines just wouldn't buy it.
00:45:59I quickly got promoted, eventually becoming Chief Research Engineer.
00:46:05Over the next decade, I worked with the likes of Howard Hughes and Amelia Earhart.
00:46:14It was in 1943 that I set up a secret division within the Lockheed Corporation to build the P-80
00:46:22during World War II.
00:46:24Officially, we were called Advanced Development Research.
00:46:27But the boys came up with Skunk Works because we were hidden next to a plastics factory, and the fumes
00:46:35drifting over stunk.
00:46:39Everyone at Skunk Works understood our mission.
00:46:42We had our own set of rules.
00:46:45My rules.
00:46:48If there was a Steve Jobs of the aerospace industry, it was definitely Kelly Johnson.
00:46:54And what Kelly did in his approach was to simplify everything, and above all, keep the momentum going.
00:47:02The way he put it was, I'd rather make a wrong decision that keeps things moving forward than to stop
00:47:08everything for several weeks to make sure that we're making the right decision.
00:47:13Three times, I was offered company president at Lockheed, and three times, declined it.
00:47:19To me, there was no better job at the corporation than head of Skunk Works.
00:47:27We were about getting things done, but not everyone appreciated our methods.
00:47:34The Skunk Works did have its enemies.
00:47:37People didn't like the way the Skunk Works did things, believed that they cut corners, that they were not living
00:47:44by all the rules and everything.
00:47:47You know, it was like, on the fly, go, go, go, we have, we don't have time for bureaucracy.
00:47:52And this became a problem later in the 60s, when that was threatening to the machine that was the Pentagon.
00:48:01And surely someone like Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who loved to control things like the businessman that he was.
00:48:10And you could see Robert McNamara making a move to take out Kelly Johnson and the Skunk Works.
00:48:23The Blackbird was the fastest jet-powered manned aircraft ever made, with speed records that were never broken.
00:48:32It was also known as the SR-71.
00:48:36The SR stood for Strategic Reconnaissance.
00:48:40The SR has an unequaled reputation for accomplishing what it was set out for.
00:48:47During the Arab-Israeli War in 1973, 95% of the imagery that our president used to render decisions came
00:48:57from the SR-71.
00:48:59And the photography was spectacular.
00:49:02If you take a normal sheet of paper, and you're holding it out of the parking lot, and I fly
00:49:08over at 85,000 feet, doing 35 miles a minute, I will take your picture, and I will see you
00:49:14standing beside your car, holding the sheet of paper, and most of the time I could tell you what kind
00:49:20of a car you were driving.
00:49:22But that's the quality of the imagery we brought back for the leadership here in this country.
00:49:28Six presidents used us because they knew they could send us out, and we'd come back.
00:49:35I've heard stories from pilots where they'd be flying missions during Vietnam, and they would see the missiles come up,
00:49:42and they would see them fall back down.
00:49:44Because the SR was going so fast, the missiles could not keep up with them.
00:49:48They've been over 5,000 surface-to-air missiles that have been fired at the SR-71 by hostile countries.
00:49:54Not one of them ever hit an SR-71.
00:49:58As Dad used to say, it helped end the Cold War with Russia because they spent, you know, a lot
00:50:02of money shooting surface-to-air missiles and never getting it hit.
00:50:05So it helped Russia go bankrupt a little faster.
00:50:09With the success of the SR-71, I wanted to build a new version of the Blackbird, more than just
00:50:16a recon plane, something far greater.
00:50:23Once they finished building the SR-71s, if you go into Kelly's logs, you can tell that the one that
00:50:30he wanted to build the most was a fighter-interceptor version.
00:50:34Called the YF-12A. And it was a missile shooter. It was being proposed as an interceptor.
00:50:41There was a lot of fear about what would happen if the Soviets decided to attack us with bombers rather
00:50:47than missiles.
00:50:48So the whole idea of that airplane was intercepting an incoming Soviet bomber.
00:50:55And Kelly wanted to sell that to the Air Force. Sell hundreds of them, actually.
00:51:00And this became a problem later in the 60s, when at the Pentagon, now led by Secretary of Defense Robert
00:51:07McNamara, who loved to control things.
00:51:11And there's a sense of, wait a minute, that boys' club out in California called Skunk Works has a little
00:51:17too much power.
00:51:18And you could see him, you know, making a move to take out Kelly Johnson and the Skunk Works.
00:51:26And McNamara shut it down, shut the program down, said it wasn't needed.
00:51:31McNamara's decision is almost unbelievable. The Air Force has gone with us all the way supporting the plane.
00:51:39But McNamara and his band see it differently.
00:51:43Now, what happened was, Kelly was a very influential player in Washington at the time, with his contacts in the
00:51:52agency that had used SR-71 and his contacts with the Air Force, right, the Air Force pilots like the
00:51:58SR-71.
00:51:59So he started going around the system.
00:52:02And McNamara was furious.
00:52:06And a decree came back, you will cut up the SR-71 tools.
00:52:10And you will destroy all the drones.
00:52:13And that was an edict.
00:52:16You know, to kind of get the point across, they told Lockheed to destroy the tooling, which the U.S.
00:52:23government owned.
00:52:24And when you do that, you make the cost of restarting production astronomically higher.
00:52:30So that was the decision that finally killed the Blackbird.
00:52:34The damage has been done.
00:52:36The tools destroyed.
00:52:38We were never able to build a version of the Blackbird our country needed.
00:52:42The YF-12.
00:52:44To this point, I have laid off 130 people in engineering.
00:52:49And it's a sad time for me.
00:52:52This was a really difficult time for the Skunk Works when it happened.
00:52:57It needed money.
00:52:59It had a few thousand employees.
00:53:01And they needed things to do.
00:53:03And the F-12 was supposed to be that thing.
00:53:08Yesterday, I took my yearly physical.
00:53:11The doctor says I must have an operation.
00:53:14My stomach has so many ulcers that the outlet is down to the size of a pencil.
00:53:19Constant pain.
00:53:22And at that point, Kelly's health was deteriorating to the point where he had started thinking about whether he should
00:53:29retire.
00:53:29But he also didn't like the idea of retiring either.
00:53:33That wasn't really sort of in his DNA.
00:53:35So he kept going.
00:53:38But by 1972, 1973, they decided to pass it on.
00:53:44And Ben Rich was the guy.
00:53:48Ben, he had an extremely hard job because Kelly was still a consultant.
00:53:53So he was still coming to Lockheed.
00:53:56He still had that strong loyalty bond with so many of the engineers and people that would work there.
00:54:02That instead of going to Ben for answers, they would wait for Kelly to come in on his day of
00:54:07work.
00:54:08So Ben had to overcome all that to establish his leadership, his fingerprint on the Skunk Works.
00:54:16The key job in running the Skunk Works is to work on the future.
00:54:22Ben understood that, and he worked hard at it, and he was very good at it.
00:54:27Once he saw stealth, he took hold of it and pursued it with a vengeance.
00:54:35If I made it a plane invisible to radar, would you buy it?
00:54:42Kelly was never impressed.
00:54:43He thought Ben had the wrong idea, that Lockheed was just going to waste money.
00:54:48He pretty much put his reputation and his whole career on the line when he went after that stealth technology.
00:55:00After Vietnam, our losses to surface-to-air missiles were pretty bad.
00:55:04It became pretty clear that unless you had some way of defeating these ground-based radars that could cue these
00:55:12surface-to-air missiles,
00:55:13that you were going to lose your entire air force if you ever got into combat again.
00:55:16So they had to come up with a way to make aircraft less visible to those radars.
00:55:23That's right, DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, sent out a request to the seven most recent fighter-building
00:55:33companies for experimental stealth technology.
00:55:37And they had a requirement to get the radar cross-section down to certain levels.
00:55:44Okay, so think about the radar cross-section on the SR-71, that it shows up on enemy radar the
00:55:53size of a man.
00:55:55Okay?
00:55:56We need an airplane that's going to show up the size of a ball bearing.
00:56:02That was the new challenge.
00:56:04We're going to make an invisible airplane.
00:56:08How we came across stealth was the SR-71 and the angles of the tails were taking the radar section
00:56:16and bouncing the radar beam away.
00:56:19So the radar system was not picking up that reflection.
00:56:23And Ben said, if I can make a plane with all flat planes, that radar don't pick up the signal.
00:56:31Ben went to the CIA. The CIA gave him permission to brief the Air Force on the stealth technologies embodied
00:56:38in the Blackbird.
00:56:39And say, hey, we deserve entry into this.
00:56:42And they said, well, we've already given out all the contracts. There's no more money to give out.
00:56:47So if you want to participate, you've got to kind of do it on your own.
00:56:51And so Ben says, well, participate, give us a $1 contract, which means we have a formal relationship with you,
00:56:56but we basically pay our own way.
00:56:59Skunk Works is on its knees at this point in 1975. It's got to have something new.
00:57:06The company needs to upfront $10 million as their share in building a prototype.
00:57:10So he has to go to the corporate fathers and say, give me $10 million because I've got to build
00:57:15an airplane for unproven technology.
00:57:18He pretty much put his reputation and his whole career on the line when he went after that program.
00:57:27Kelly was never impressed. He thought that Ben had the wrong idea, that Lockheed was just going to waste money.
00:57:34To describe the radar cross-section, Ben would roll marbles across the desk.
00:57:39Ben went to Kelly and said, look at this. What would a Soviet radar see? Here's a marble.
00:57:47And based upon that, they would not identify that as a significant threat, but rather a radar anomaly.
00:57:57And Kelly just thought, you're not going to be able to make it, and quite honestly, broke one of his
00:58:02own rules.
00:58:02Kelly would just assume something could be done, and that's what he expected his teams to do.
00:58:07But that's where you see Ben having that piece of DNA of the Skunk Works.
00:58:11You know, let's just assume it can be done. Let's make it happen.
00:58:15Denny Overholzer came up with this idea that reflects the beams in all the directions to where they don't make
00:58:22a return based on a bunch of Russian calculations.
00:58:31Just like they once sold us the titanium for the Blackbird, the Russians inadvertently helped Skunk Works again.
00:58:40Dennis had come across a Soviet mathematics journal.
00:58:44The Soviets had no idea that that's what those equations could be used for, or they would never have allowed
00:58:48it to be published in that kind of publication.
00:58:50But because they did, and Dennis read it and applied it, the Skunk Works suddenly had sort of a secret
00:58:56sauce to breaking this problem that had affected aircraft in Vietnam and the U-2 itself, which is radar detection.
00:59:04So, Alan Brown comes in, and he's leading Lockheed's effort under Ben Ridge.
00:59:10And he doesn't care about the aerodynamics, because he's a propulsion guy.
00:59:14First of all, we did the calculations.
00:59:17We built third-scale models, which we tested on radar ranges.
00:59:22It's made up of a whole bunch of flat plates.
00:59:25And the reason for that was that we did not have the technical capability to calculate the radar cross-section
00:59:34from curved surfaces at that time.
00:59:37Keep in mind, this is why Kelly Johnson hated this approach that Ben Ridge took.
00:59:44There aren't any airplanes out there that are made flat, because air doesn't like flying over corners, right?
00:59:50You want nice, smooth, rounded surfaces in it.
00:59:54There wasn't a rounded surface anywhere on that airplane.
00:59:56He called it the hopeless diamond.
00:59:59And it was a way of sort of ridiculing this design that, to an aerodynamicist, is sinful.
01:00:06I think some people call it the hopeless diamond because they thought it was a hopeless effort.
01:00:13The shape of it was it was actually a geometry problem, pretty much.
01:00:18You want to, you know, angle of incidence and angle of reflection.
01:00:21If a radar hit comes in this way, it's going to bounce off.
01:00:24So what you want to do is control the way it bounces off, so that the bounce doesn't go back
01:00:30to the guy that shined it on you in the first place.
01:00:33When the radar hits it, right, instead of bouncing right back to you, if I can curve it,
01:00:39I'm bouncing it here, that radar don't pick up the signal.
01:00:42So it's analogous to playing billiards.
01:00:45You hit one cushion, it goes to someplace else.
01:00:50The first phase of the competition was to build a scale model to test its invisibility to radar.
01:00:57Ours was easily the best.
01:00:59But next we had to build the actual plane.
01:01:03Could this hopeless diamond really fly?
01:01:08To find out, we needed to test it.
01:01:11We needed to go back to where we had our greatest success and our most guarded secrecy.
01:01:17We needed to go back to Area 51.
01:01:33At Area 51, Ben's hopeless diamond was going to be tested.
01:01:39We were going to find out if an airplane could really become invisible on radar, if it could become completely
01:01:47stealth.
01:01:50The stakes were high.
01:01:52If the airplane showed up on radar, the project could be scrapped.
01:01:56But Ben and his team believed they could do it.
01:01:59I still had my doubts.
01:02:02You have to remember that Area 51 has not only the most interesting new top secret development that the air
01:02:09forces are coming up with,
01:02:12but they also had the top radar people.
01:02:17So we were going to fly against the very best radar team in the country.
01:02:24So we said, OK, we'll make it easy for you.
01:02:27Tomorrow afternoon at 3 o'clock, we're going to come over that hill at 500 feet altitude.
01:02:34You won't even have to look for us.
01:02:37You'll be pointing in the right direction right at the beginning.
01:02:41OK, off we go.
01:02:46Three o'clock comes and goes, and they said, oh, guess you missed your takeoff time.
01:02:53I said, I don't think so.
01:02:55There's a guy looking through a telescope, which has run a tide parallel to the radar.
01:03:02Looking through his telescope, he said, I've just picked the airplane up, it's just eight miles out.
01:03:09The radar guys immediately kicked their radar, assumed it wasn't working properly.
01:03:15We flew over the whole situation without being seen at all.
01:03:21As soon as that happened, immediately the Air Force said, OK, we've got to have a military version of this.
01:03:29The damn thing worked.
01:03:32Didn't happen too often, but this time I was wrong.
01:03:36And I told Ben as much.
01:03:39Kelly was always quite stubborn and always quite insistent that he was right.
01:03:44And he would do these bets with people.
01:03:47He would bet them a quarter.
01:03:48And, you know, it was a really big deal if you want to bet against Kelly.
01:03:53Because he would pay you the quarter.
01:03:55You know, he would admit that he was wrong.
01:03:57But it would just very rarely ever happen.
01:03:59And so he paid Ben Rich a quarter and admitted that he was wrong.
01:04:06Our plane would be called the F-117 Nighthawk.
01:04:10The prototype got off the ground, but much work still remained.
01:04:14This would be the first completely stealth aircraft.
01:04:19And also be the first jet fighter Skunk Works built in over 20 years.
01:04:26The F-117 has a radar signature less than a BB on the radar.
01:04:33So you get anything over a BB, you pick it up.
01:04:36Let me give you an example.
01:04:37If I accidentally left a nut in the leading edge, that would be picked up by radar.
01:04:46So you're sitting there saying, wow, we're making all these airplanes.
01:04:49How do I know a manufacturing guy didn't drop a nut?
01:04:52So that's the concern.
01:04:56When the F-117 Nighthawk came along, I mean, it was so secret and it was so important to keep
01:05:02it secret.
01:05:02They gave it its own test flight facility out in Tonopah, which is on the far skirts of the Nevada
01:05:09test site.
01:05:09And it became known as Area 52.
01:05:14And they built a whole setup specifically for the F-117.
01:05:22I was flying the F-15 at Langley Air Force Base and my squadron commander called me in and shut
01:05:27the door and said,
01:05:28Hey, are you interested in going to fly at the 4450th test group?
01:05:34None of us knew what was going on, but we knew there was something highly classified and different.
01:05:40I decided to go.
01:05:43After you've checked out, they put you in a room and they turn on a projector and they show you
01:05:47pictures of the F-117 for the first time.
01:05:51And usually the first comment is, that thing flies, because it doesn't look very aerodynamic.
01:05:59The first test flight was my first flight in the F-117.
01:06:02So what scared me more than anything isn't so much that something could happen physically to hurt me.
01:06:11It's the fact that we work very hard in airplanes to eliminate single point failures.
01:06:17And the airplanes are very redundant.
01:06:19When you walk out to the airplane, I am a single point failure.
01:06:22If I goon it, I've ruined it for a lot of people and it's very much a team effort.
01:06:28The idea of a pilot, you know, first flying an F-117 was pretty scary to me.
01:06:36I mean, at 4.30 in the morning, they'd be stuck into the cockpit.
01:06:40They open the hangar doors.
01:06:42There are no lights anywhere on the airfield.
01:06:46And they tell the guy, okay, you taxi out there, turn right, half a mile, you get to the main
01:06:52runway, turn right again, take off.
01:06:55So you're taking off on a runway in the dark.
01:06:59Oh, by the way, don't worry about the control system.
01:07:02It's completely disconnected from all the controls.
01:07:05It just goes to a computer and the computer operates the controls because the airplane is basically unstable.
01:07:12Good luck. You'll be fine.
01:07:17You get acclimated to totally night flying.
01:07:21We had flight surgeons and doctors that monitored what we did and decided that we had to do certain things
01:07:27to be able to fly at night and sleep during the day.
01:07:30So at Tonopah, we had room darkening shades.
01:07:33They velcroed black across our windows.
01:07:37So when we were in there during the day, you couldn't tell what time of day it was.
01:07:41They also had a rule that at night after flying, we had to be in our rooms before the sun
01:07:46came up because the doctor said if the sun came up, your mind would go, oh, something's wrong here.
01:07:51All of us are daytime creatures. We don't usually live in the black world.
01:07:57When you consider that there were something like 10,000 people that worked on the F-117.
01:08:05And they all kept this secret for 21 years.
01:08:11That's a remarkable piece of American history.
01:08:17On August 6th, in response to the unprovoked Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, I ordered the deployment of U.S. military
01:08:25forces to Saudi Arabia in the Persian Gulf.
01:08:27Iraq's brutality, aggression, and violations of international law cannot be allowed to succeed.
01:08:37President Bush made the decision to deploy 42 F-117s from Tonopah, Nevada to Saudi Arabia.
01:08:50I'd been briefed on the F-117 for a number of years.
01:08:54And when it was deployed, you just had this sick feeling it was actually going to be used, that we're
01:08:59going to go to war.
01:09:01A good friend of mine, Al Whitley, who was a full colonel.
01:09:06On the first night of the war, Whitley and one of his young pilots were walking out to get in
01:09:12their airplanes.
01:09:12They were both going to Baghdad.
01:09:14The pilot said to Whitley, I hope this s**t works.
01:09:33I had been convinced that stealth was the technology that will change the character of aerial warfare.
01:09:41If the enemy can't see the aircraft with radar, he can't hit it.
01:09:47The role of the F-117 in the Gulf War was to wipe out the whole command and control system
01:09:56of Iraq flying night missions.
01:10:00The design of the F-117 was to be the first ones in.
01:10:07We were told what the F-117 radar cross section was, how it would perform.
01:10:14So we had to trust the engineers to scot works.
01:10:18But I can tell you, flying the first night of Desert Storm, we're not sure as pilots whether or not
01:10:24the stealth technology is going to work.
01:10:28On the first night of the war, well, I felt an emotion, every time I think about this, I felt
01:10:39an emotional attachment to these guys.
01:10:42This was their first ever combat mission.
01:10:45Ever.
01:10:50I used to go spend nights with them at Tonopah.
01:10:55So, I knew these people.
01:10:58And I had become personal friends.
01:11:09We promised them a lot.
01:11:11And we had never proved it.
01:11:14It's one thing to test an airplane on a range where you measure this stuff.
01:11:17It's another thing to go to Baghdad at night.
01:11:24The first night of Desert Storm, I was chosen to lead the first attack.
01:11:29It was a thousand miles from our base to Baghdad, so these were long missions.
01:11:35We took off that night the way we practiced.
01:11:38No lights on airplanes.
01:11:40We found our tankers.
01:11:46We would top off with fuel and at a designated time, stealth up our aircraft.
01:11:52Bringing in the antennas so that you can no longer talk to anybody or hear anybody.
01:11:57Once we did that, we're gone.
01:12:01I had the first target, so my only goal right now was to find that target and hit it at
01:12:07the time they wanted me to hit it.
01:12:10I found the target.
01:12:13The weapons bay doors automatically open.
01:12:16I pickle off the bomb.
01:12:19The door is slammed shut.
01:12:29I look back over my left shoulder and when I look back, I've always described it as looking at a
01:12:36giant fireworks display.
01:12:41This was anti-aircraft artillery.
01:12:44I noticed it was coming at me.
01:12:46So I thought, I'm getting out of here as fast as I can.
01:12:53We have to go to Baghdad. We're going to Bernard Shaw.
01:12:56Something is happening outside. People are shooting towards the sky and they are not aware or cannot see what they're
01:13:03shooting at. This is extraordinary.
01:13:07We're being told to get off this platform and get inside into the air ratio.
01:13:11We still have seen no signs of any airplanes coming in here. All we are seeing is the Iraqi response
01:13:17from the ground.
01:13:20I have a statement by the President of the United States. The liberation of Kuwait has begun.
01:13:26When they broke in and said that the first attacks had happened, I knew that the Skunk Works jets were
01:13:34in doing their job.
01:13:36Just prayed that everybody made it home safe.
01:13:38Five months ago, Saddam Hussein started this cruel war against Kuwait. Tonight, the battle has been joined.
01:13:47The US airstrike was almost certainly designed to begin with the stealth fighters.
01:13:52The sky over Baghdad was lit up.
01:13:55I thought about the guys that were flying with me that night and I thought, those going into Baghdad are
01:13:59going to have it tough.
01:14:02The pilots on the 117 were very dicey. Are they shooting at me? We know they're shooting. The question gets
01:14:08to be why is the pattern so erratic?
01:14:12Baghdad air defenses could not see that aircraft coming. Why? Because it was stealth.
01:14:22All hell is broken loose because they are just firing stuff up in the air pretty much regardless. You know,
01:14:30not knowing where anybody is.
01:14:33The only way they knew the 117s were overhead was things started blowing up.
01:14:42It was a harrowing experience and I thought it was unique that I was able to make it through there.
01:14:48And now I snapped the aircraft back to head back to Saudi Arabia.
01:14:53I had a list of all 12 pilots flying in that first go and I wanted to hear them all
01:14:58check in.
01:15:00I checked in my wingman and he answered.
01:15:02And then as we rejoined, I heard other pilots checking in and I checked off the names as their call
01:15:08signs were read.
01:15:09And right before approaching my tanker, I looked down and I had a check mark next to every call sign.
01:15:14So I knew everybody was coming home that first night.
01:15:17Our 12 aircraft came back.
01:15:19There was not one single thing wrong with any of those planes.
01:15:23We all realized this stealth technology works.
01:15:32The F-117 team made up approximately 2.5% of the total Allied Air Force that was there.
01:15:39And they would wind up taking out about 40% of the high value targets.
01:15:44Their value can't be overstated.
01:15:48We flew 1,271 sorties in Desert Storm and never got touched by anything.
01:15:54Statistically, nobody had ever seen anything like this before.
01:15:58The F-117 was a really major factor in the success in the first Gulf War.
01:16:06The accuracy was just unprecedented.
01:16:11The airplane did exactly what it was supposed to do.
01:16:15Six weeks since the start of Operation Desert Storm, our military objectives are met.
01:16:23Kuwait is liberated.
01:16:25Iraq's army is defeated.
01:16:30The F-117 had proved its worth to the American public.
01:16:34And after we got home, one of the stories we all would tell is how this aircraft saved our lives.
01:16:41We all came home because of the engineers.
01:16:44The engineers that built this aircraft built it right.
01:16:48With anything that you do like that, you always have it at the back of your mind, you know, did
01:16:54you think of everything?
01:16:55And we were very pleasantly surprised that we didn't have a single casualty in either of the Gulf Wars.
01:17:04You know, you put that much of your heart and soul and time away from your family and everything into
01:17:09something.
01:17:09It's kind of heartwarming to see it come to fruition and that everything you'd done had a good ending to
01:17:15it.
01:17:15The bottom line is it changed the nature of military combat aircraft permanently.
01:17:23Stealth was the most important technological change in military combat aircraft since the introduction of the jet engine.
01:17:35Before stealth technology, war planners used to think about how many aircraft do we need to take out?
01:17:45A certain enemy facility.
01:17:47After stealth, it was how many facilities do we want to take out with a single aircraft?
01:17:55It proved again our axiom.
01:17:58If you have a good man and let him go, he'll really perform.
01:18:05My own life has come full circle.
01:18:09But if God should call me tonight, I will have had more than my share of it all.
01:18:28In the 90s, because of the evident success of the stealth aircraft in the Gulf War, the Skunk Works really
01:18:34became famous in a sense.
01:18:36People started asking, you know, where did these airplanes come from? And then the Skunk Works was it.
01:18:42Then Ben Rich publishes a book about the development of stealth and the longer history of the Skunk Works.
01:18:49And the book is a real gift to our family because I learned a lot about his career.
01:18:56We knew he was an engineer and we knew he worked for Locky. That was, you know, but details I,
01:19:03you know, did not know.
01:19:05And my sister, I remember her looking at me and saying, you know, Dad worked on that?
01:19:14And this book, that's a bestseller and Skunk Works becomes kind of a buzzword in corporate management circles.
01:19:19And every company has to go out and form their own Skunk Works, which is where you do these kind
01:19:22of secret, you know, cutting edge projects.
01:19:26Other aerospace companies have their equivalent of Skunk Works.
01:19:30Boeing has its Phantom Works, which is basically Skunk Works knockoff.
01:19:35But they don't have 75 years of lessons learned and the continuous record of technological breakthroughs.
01:19:47A lot of the future technologies are being worked on by the Skunk Works right now.
01:19:56They're constantly working on other things that have other missions. You just don't know about it. You have no need
01:20:02to know.
01:20:05People used to ask me all the time, what's Skunk Works working on?
01:20:07And I would, I kind of stopped once we got to the F-117.
01:20:11And people said, what are you doing now? You're doing nothing.
01:20:14And the answer is, of course, we're doing a lot. Ask me in 25 years, I'll tell you what we
01:20:17were doing.
01:20:22What is known to the public about Skunk Works is maybe 10% of the actual work that Skunk Works
01:20:31has done so far.
01:20:33But there's also another thing that I found so interesting learning about the Skunk Works.
01:20:41The U-2 is still flying today.
01:20:43So when you think about that, it's remarkable. It's never been retired.
01:20:49There's been an effort to develop an unmanned aerial vehicle called the Global Hawk and others that could actually replace
01:20:55the U-2.
01:20:56But each time it's about to be retired and finally put to rest, if you will, there's a recognition that
01:21:04what it provides is still uniquely worth preserving.
01:21:09In Iraq and in Afghanistan, there were some specific battles in which the U-2 was very, very useful, again,
01:21:16because of the precision of its optics and the resolution of the cameras.
01:21:23It is still very, very useful.
01:21:34For me, it was the place to work because of the legacy with these incredible flying machines.
01:21:42The Skunk Works created airplanes that changed world history.
01:21:46What makes the Blackbird special to me is it is this piece of sculpture that is sinister-looking, it is
01:21:57purposeful-looking, and it draws out an emotion.
01:22:01For me, it's a blend of excitement and pride and awe that such a machine even exists.
01:22:11Kelly Johnson, he always considered the SR his greatest achievement of all the airplanes that he had developed starting in
01:22:18the 30s until he retired.
01:22:21The retirement of the SR-71 took place just a few months before he died.
01:22:26The Air Force, to sort of say thank you to the people of the Skunk Works, took one of the
01:22:32remaining aircraft and did a flyby over the runway at Burbank.
01:22:39And I know that Ben had gone to the hospital to get Kelly, and Ben said he really didn't talk
01:22:45very much.
01:22:47Ben Rich picked up Kelly in a car and drove him out to the runway at Burbank to see the
01:22:52SR-71.
01:22:55They kept the windows up, they didn't let the employees come to see him because they knew, they may not
01:23:01even know who they were.
01:23:02There was some level of dementia that he lived with that got worse and worse and worse.
01:23:08But then, when he heard those engines of the SR-71, he responded.
01:23:20And all of a sudden he came alive.
01:23:24He knew something special was happening.
01:23:46Then it wasn't too long after that, he died.
01:23:51Aircraft designer Clarence Kelly Johnson died today at the age of 80 after a long illness.
01:23:56Johnson helped to design more than 40 advanced aircraft.
01:23:59During his long career at Lockheed, he organized Lockheed's Skunk Works unit and worked on the SR-71 Blackbird, the
01:24:05U-2 and the F-104 Starfighter.
01:24:07During his long career in aviation, Johnson received three presidential citations, including the Medal of Freedom.
01:24:14I equated the time I was able to spend with Kelly Johnson equivalent to the privilege of being able to
01:24:20fly the airplane because he was such a giant in his industry.
01:24:26He was the Leonardo da Vinci of aviation. His designs, so unique. The guy's a genius.
01:24:35He combined really extraordinary technical knowledge with equally extraordinary leadership capacity.
01:24:43Kelly Johnson never, in a sense, got the credit that he was certainly due because of the covert nature of
01:24:48what was being done, but was not one, I don't think, who cared about that.
01:24:53He was devoted to, as we say, a mission larger than self that was of enormous importance.
01:24:59And he and his team performed near miracles with cutting edge work.
01:25:06To do something spectacular required unconventional methods.
01:25:12It is amazing what can be accomplished when no one cares who gets the credit.
01:25:19You do what's right by sticking to your convictions, and you'll do okay.
01:25:37Like a lot of 12-year-old kids in the 1920s, Clarence Kelly Johnson liked drawing pictures of airplanes.
01:25:43Unlike those kids, Kelly Johnson never stopped drawing planes.
01:25:47I think it will be a long, long time before we have an airplane that has higher performance than the
01:25:52SR-71.
01:25:54So we may be seeing here the highest speed military airplane that there will be around for a long time.
01:26:02This is Dennis Quaid with an American portrait.
01:26:04Ask
01:26:04Well I think I did a lot ofками from the
01:26:08Yes, and
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