The story of how skilled people broke all the rules and created the most amazing high-tech weapons in the world.
American generals missed everything. Shortly before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, they laughed at the German plans to create a new engine for the high-speed aircraft. Now, in 1943, as Allied forces were preparing to invade France, intelligence reported that the Germans were finalizing a high-speed fighter equipped with the same "propeller-free" jet engine that the Americans had recently rejected.
The US War Department wanted a miracle plane and turned to the only person who could make such a device in six months - design engineer Clarence Johnson, nicknamed Kelly. At 33, Kelly Johnson was already a respected man in the aviation world. Its 650 km / h twin-boom P-38 Lightning was not only the most maneuverable fighter, but also the most beautiful Allied aircraft during World War II. The War Department wanted Kelly to create a craft that could fly another 300 km / h faster, actually near the sound barrier itself.
Kelly knew exactly what to do. He rented a big top circus tent and pitched it in the huge Lockheed Aircraft complex in Burbank, California. Officially, this simple workshop was called "Lockheed Advanced Development Department". The smell from the nearby plastics factory easily penetrated under the tent and was so unpleasant that engineers began to call the department "skonk works". This name was borrowed from the popular comic strip "Lil Abner" (Li'l Abner), where a particularly strong "flammable" drink was prepared from finely shredded skunks and old boots. Despite such harsh conditions, it took Kelly's team of 23 engineers and 30 workers only 143 days to give birth to Lulu Belle, the prototype of the P-80 Shooting Star. America entered the jet age a month ahead of schedule.
The P-80, later renamed the F-80, received its baptism of fire in the Korean War, where it confronted Soviet MiGs. In the entire history of Lockheed, nearly 9,000 aircraft of this model have been produced. Kelly's group moved permanently to a windowless hangar where bombers used to be assembled. The vile smell that gave rise to the name of the department has sunk into oblivion, but the name itself remains. At least until the lawyers for the authors of the comics about Leal Abner made a fuss. Then one letter was changed in the name, and instead of Skonk Works it turned out to be the current Skunk Works.
The Skunk Works was to aviation what Edison's Menlo Park was to the world of electricity. The daily pursuit of the impossible creates technologies that are almost indistinguishable from magic. The Skunk Works got off to a good start and helped them survive through tough times. According to Ben Rich, Kelly's protégé and successor, the second and third projects - the Saturn cargo plane and the XFV-1 vertical take-off deck aircraft - ended in complete failure. Ben Rich wrote in his memoirs: "It was no secret to anyone at the firm that the director, Robert Gross, looked at Kelly with adoration and believed that he was able to walk on water."
Aircraft creation
This attitude was well deserved. As a 23-year-old student at Michigan State University, Kelly saved Gross's investment in Lockheed. He discovered and corrected a serious error in the stability calculation of the twin-engined Electra aircraft. Kelly's solution was a two-girder tail design, which later became the company's trademark. This layout was used in the Constellation, P-38 and Hudson bombers. The latter were commissioned by the British Royal Air Force.
Everyone who worked with Kelly quickly recognized his genius. Hall Hebard, Kelly's boss at Lockheed, witnessed how he converted an Electra plane into a Hudson bomber during a 72-hour design marathon. “This damn Swede seems to be able to see even the air!” - he later told Ben Rich (Kelly's parents were immigrants from Sweden). When Kelly found out about these words, he said that it was the best compliment in his life.
Kelly made no secret of how he works miracles. The work at the Skunk Works went almost like car fanatics who assemble real racing cars from old wrecks in garages. Engineers and workers made the coolest airplanes ever to sail the ocean. Here were created such outstanding American aircraft of the twentieth century as the F-104 Starfighter, reconnaissance aircraft U-2 and SR-71, the "invisible" F-117A. The Skunk Works' involvement in the creation of the F-22 Raptor and the F-35 fighter under the Joint Strike Fighter program established their strong position in the formation of the 21st century air force. And the experimental stealth ship Sea Shadow outlined the prospects for the development of the naval forces of the future.
Creation of myths
Kelly took the Skunk Works' reputation as seriously as he took his planes. He formulated the philosophy of the organization in the form of 14 working rules. To this day, Skunk Works employees remain true to simplicity, speed and mutual assistance, while rejecting paperwork and over-organization. The reviewing commissions took their word for it, imbued with the spirit of the Skunk Works. But the two most important rules were unwritten. “All planes were Kelly's planes. And if a man appeared in a blue uniform with stars on his shoulders (a military representative), then only Kelly was authorized to speak to him,”says Rich. Kelly extended his "star" rule to contact with the CIA. He always insisted that he should be the only contact with the intelligence agencies, which eventually received from him two of the most prominent reconnaissance aircraft of the Cold War - the U-2 high-altitude aircraft and, later, the SR-71 high-speed aircraft.
The U-2, which resembles a sailboat-airliner hybrid, was the most important reconnaissance tool of the Cold War era. When he was ready to fly, US President Dwight D. Eisenhower considered his mission so important to the country's security that he insisted that each flight over the territory of the USSR be coordinated with him personally. “The effect was as if our intelligence had had a cataract removed,” recalls former CIA director Richard Helms. "The camera on the U-2 literally opened up a new dimension for us." One of the earliest U-2 victories was associated with the debunking of the myth that the Americans are far behind with their strategic bombers B-52 from the Soviet "Bison" (as the US called the M4 design Myasishchev). The photographs from the U-2 showed that the hundred Bison flying over the stands at the May Day military parade in Moscow depicted only thirty aircraft flying in a circle.
Tan
Even before the U-2, piloted by Francis Powers, was shot down and flights over Soviet territory were officially terminated, the plane's camera recorded something that prompted the Skunk Works to accelerate the development of the most impressive aircraft ever to be completed - CL-400.
Reconnaissance work usually boils down to looking for anomalies. During the hot days of the Cold War, no anomaly was as ominous as the liberation of scientists from the Gulag camps. When Pyotr Kapitsa, a well-known scientist in the field of low-temperature physics, arrested in 1946, was transferred to one of the closed Soviet research institutes, the CIA immediately had a question - why? Photos of the Soviet cryogenic complex for the production of liquid hydrogen, taken by the same U-2,gave rise to a frightening guess: Kapitsa was "rehabilitated" to work at the plant, which was built as part of the project of an orbital aircraft operating on hydrogen. In the last days of the war, the Germans were actively working on a similar device, which was supposed to take off from Germany, go into space and bombard New York. However, after the end of the war, no evidence of the existence of this project was found. Therefore, the version that everything connected with him was exported to the USSR is not without grounds.
The prospect that Soviet reconnaissance aircraft would fly over US territory with impunity as the U-2 flew over Mother Russia did not inspire the CIA in the least, and the Skunk Works received $ 96 million and a mission to build a top-secret hydrogen-powered orbital plane that would a response to the new "red threat".
Shortly before the Suntan project was given the green light, Kelly came up with the idea to burn hydrogen cooled to –212 degrees Celsius in a jet engine slightly modified for this purpose. In theory, the hydrogen apparatus could easily glide in the upper atmosphere at an altitude of 30 km at a speed of Mach 2. Kelly's team worked hard to provide the military with a complete set of equipment, including tanker aircraft and a liquid hydrogen plant. In almost one day, Skunk Works became the world's largest producer of liquid hydrogen - 750 liters per day!
At this time, the CL-400, in accordance with the Suntan hydrogen aircraft concept, began to take on specific shapes. The plane was shaped like a deltoid wing and was essentially a huge thermos the size of two B-52s. Kelly ordered 4,000 running meters of aluminum profiles. Pratt & Whitney was commissioned to modify the engine for hydrogen fuel. The control system was handled by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But suddenly a fundamental problem emerged.
There was no doubt that the CL-400 would fly. But he could not fly faster or further than his kerosene cousin. There was no advantage of hydrogen. Kelly resigned himself to failure and returned the unspent $ 90 million to military customers. As for the Soviet plane, it was never created. Apparently, Kapitsa was engaged in another secret project that escaped the attention of the CIA - possibly over the world's first artificial satellite of the Earth.
Aurora
The myths surrounding the hydrogen spy plane grew over time to become one of the biggest mysteries of the firm now associated with the Aurora project. Air Force and Lockheed officials insisted that Aurora was simply the codename for the project that entered the B-2 stealth bomber competition (won by Northrop). But people who closely followed the fate of the CL-400 insisted that the project had a continuation. Several people claim to have seen an unidentified high-speed aircraft, similar in shape to the CL-400. In addition, there is documentary evidence that in one of the projects funded by NASA, technical problems that slowed down the Suntan project were solved. In the early 1970s, Gerald Rosen, a physics professor at Drexel University in Philadelphia and one of the leading theoretical physicists in the United States, signed a contract with NASA to find out if hydrogen could be stored not in molecular but in atomic form. His theoretical studies proved that this is possible. Moreover, it turned out that atomic hydrogen takes up very little space during storage, so that, for example, a lunar rocket could be made the size of a small truck. But since no one takes official responses seriously, Aurora remains a perennial topic of rumors.
The fastest
Like the U-2, the SR-71 high-speed high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft began as a CIA project. And, like the U-2, it fell victim to the scientific and technological revolution. American achievements in the form of satellites of the CIA and the US National Intelligence Agency played an evil role. Today, most of the SR-71 aircraft and their predecessors, the A-12, are on display in aviation museums. NASA uses one SR-71 for environmental science research. The second copy, according to the military, is used from time to time for experiments in the field of high technology.
Kelly saw the future of the SR-71 very differently. He was confident that these aircraft would be produced in hundreds in different modifications: bombers, fighters and missile carriers. The state not only rejected this idea, but also ordered the destruction of all technological equipment for the SR-71.
Before the SR-71 was destroyed in its prime, it took part in an experiment that took the Skunk Works to the next level in high-altitude reconnaissance vehicles. As part of the Tagboard project, the D-21 high-altitude high-speed unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), launched from the SR-71, was tested. After several sorties, one of which resulted in the loss of an aircraft and pilot, the Tagboard project was canceled.
Building on the lessons learned from Tagboard and the new stealth technology developed for the Have Blue project, the F-117A prototype, the Skunk Works began working with Boeing on the DarkStar project. Using stealth, high-speed, long-range drones, the military will be able to carry out reconnaissance operations where it is impossible for manned vehicles and expensive for satellites.
Plans for the future
The legendary planes created by the Skunk Works are no longer needed by the military. Kelly and Rich retired. Following the merger of Lockheed and Martin Marietta in May 1995, a new company, Lockheed-Martin, spun off the Skunk Works into a separate division located in Palmdale, California. A new generation of engineers, workers and pilots is committed to the best Skunk Works tradition. One of the latest creations of the Advanced Development Department, as the Skunk Works is now officially called, is the P-175 Polecat unmanned vehicle, which made its first flights this year. "The strategic goal of this UAV was to study the 'flying wing' design as part of the future combat unmanned aircraft," explained Frank Capuccio, executive vice president and head of Advanced Development and Strategic Planning. Developed in just 18 months and funded by Lockheed-Martin, the Ferret demonstrates the strengths of the Skunk Works. “We are testing three technologies on this aircraft: the rapid design and creation of new-generation composite materials, the aerodynamics required for extended high-altitude flights, and an autonomous control system,” says Capuccio. At their core, the "black projects" that the Skunk Works are doing were, are and will be secret. What Popular Mechanics learned from management and test pilots, what they saw on the unclassified part of the territory, is just what the Skunk Works thinks it is possible to share. It is clear that the Skunk Works will still write about the work, but everything in due time. Looking at the tall white hangars sparkling in the bright sun, we can only guess what miracles are happening inside them.
