Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed

Headed by thirty-three-year-old Johnson, that original Lockheed Skonk Works set out to design the first U.S. jet fighter in 180 days. Working furiously against its deadline, the group managed to produce a prototype of the P-80 Shooting Star with 37 days to spare. World War II ended before the plane could be produced in large numbers, but the P-80 w

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In late 1970, Lockheed was near bankruptcy because of the large debt they had built up to fund the L-1011 Tristar commercial aircraft program. They approached the Nixon administration for a $250 million loan guarantee to avoid insolvency. That is about $1.9 billion in today’s dollars. Here was an opportunity to transfer the assets to a private defe... See more

Skunk Works creator Kelly Johnson was a visionary on at least two fronts—designing airplanes and organizing genius. Johnson seemed to know intuitively what talented people needed to do their best work, how to motivate them, and how to make sure that the desired product was created as quickly and as cheaply as possible. In time, Johnson wrote down t

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The Manfield amendments were a huge blow to Project Whorl. Panic set in among the Trustees as they scheduled urgent meetings with top officials from the Nixon administration, including the president himself. Out of those meetings came a brilliant idea. The Gang of Eight has to be briefed on all special access programs, even those that are waived an... See more