Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed

Around the time Kelly’s crew raised their circus tent, cartoonist Al Capp introduced Injun Joe and his backwoods still into his “L’il Abner” comic strip. Ol’ Joe tossed worn shoes and dead skunk into his smoldering vat to make “kickapoo joy juice.” Capp named the outdoor still “the skonk works.” The connection was apparent to those inside Kelly’s c

These calculations predicted the manner in which a given geometric configuration would reflect electromagnetic radiation.

Kelly would borrow the best people he could find in the main plant to get the job done. That way the overhead was kept low and the financial risks to the company stayed small.

The open secret in our business was that the government practiced a very obvious form of paternalistic socialism to make certain that its principal weapons suppliers stayed solvent and maintained a skilled workforce.

In his dealings with me, he appreciated the fact that I always provided him with alternatives when presenting him with a problem: I’d say, “Solution one will cost you so much money. Solution two will cost you so much time. You’re the boss. Which do you choose?” So often, others would come to him like errant schoolboys and moan, “Kelly, bad news. We

quarter. It was a rare win. So Kelly approved my idea of painting the airplane black, and by the time our first prototype rolled out the airplane became known as the Blackbird. Our supplier, Titanium Metals Corporation, had only limited reserves of the precious alloy, so the CIA conducted a worldwide search and, using third parties and dummy compan

some of

coast he scrubbed us from the mission. He simply did not want to reveal the existence of this top secret revolutionary airplane to the Russians that soon. In my view Weinberger booted it. The raid was carried out using Navy fighter-bombers off carriers, and Kaddafi escaped with his life because Libyan defenses picked up the attackers coming in time

“Going to the verge of war without actually getting into war is the necessary art,”