Kelly Johnson, the Man Who Saw Air
Kelly Johnson, the Man Who Saw Air
The founder of Skunk Works transformed Lockheed into an aerospace giant
What does the Lockheed Electra—the twin-engine, propellor-driven passenger plane made famous by Amelia Earhart and Casablanca—have in common with the SR-71 Blackbird, the faster-than-a-speeding-bullet, titanium-and-plastic spy plane that’s so advanced the world literally can’t make it anymore?
The answer, besides the fact that they both have wings and fly, is that they were designed by the same engineer: Clarence “Kelly” Johnson, father of Lockheed’s Skunk Works and the most legendary aerospace engineer of all time.
Kelly was an engineering prodigy. He got his start at Lockheed right out of the University of Michigan, where he had tested Lockheed plane designs in the university wind tunnel. His first act as a junior employee was to inform his boss that the plane he had tested on campus—a plane that the company pinned its hopes on—was unstable in all directions.
This was a bold way to start his career, especially since two older and well-respected aerospace engineers had already signed off on the design. But Johnson’s boss was wise enough to take this criticism in stride. He ordered Johnson back to the wind tunnel to investigate and fix the problem, which Johnson ultimately did by giving the plane a double vertical tail.
That plane ultimately flew as the Electra, one of the most commercially successful passenger aircraft of the pre-war period. Singlehandedly, the plane transformed Lockheed from a startup fighting for its life into a going concern.
Kelly’s career was off to a strong start—all because he was willing to challenge the status quo and back up that challenge with hard work and ingenuity.
The outbreak of the Second World War transformed Lockheed into the aerospace giant it is today. It was during this period that Johnson started Skunk Works, a super-secret, tightknit unit set up with such speed that it initially worked out of a circus tent.
The unit’s mission was to help the United States catch up in jet aircraft. The War Department gave Lockheed 180 days to build a prototype; Skunk Works delivered in 143. The P-80 Shooting Star streaked over European skies in the final days of the war, and saw much greater action in Korea a decade later.
Kelly was able to deliver this plane ahead of schedule due to his forceful personality and several features unique to Skunk Works. As Kelly’s protege and successor, Ben Rich, wrote in the book on the secret unit, Lockheed underlings viewed Kelly “with the knee-knocking dread and awe of the almighty best described in the Old Testament.” He had a razor-sharp mind (according to one of his bosses, he could “actually see air”), he did not suffer fools lightly, and he invited only the best of the best under his circus tent. He was also an organizational genius who insisted on tight control of Skunk Works’ operations. For decades, Skunk Works would be Kelly’s personal fief. Head count, budget, and, crucially, outside meddling, were kept to a minimum. When the Air Force and the CIA tried to assign minders to Skunk Works to oversee its increasingly classified and consequential projects, Kelly battled their demands to a bare minimum. He knew that more oversight meant more delays, which would be bad for business and bad for the country.
New employees at Skunk Works were read Kelly’s “riot act,” a list of principles to guide their actions. The principles stressed the importance of on-time delivery, off-the-shelf components, and proximity to the factory floor (“within a stone’s throw”). Eventually, these principles were expanded and codified as Kelly’s fourteen rules of management, which remain a kind of bible to startups and other insurgent organizations to this day.
It was thanks to Kelly’s insistence on control, accountability, and excellence that Lockheed created some of the most important (and spectacular) aircraft of the Cold War. Skunk Works produced the U-2 spy plane, capable of flying thousands of miles at 70,000 feet in temperatures of 70 degrees below zero, in roughly a year. The planes cost $1 million a pop, making them, in Rich’s words, “the greatest procurement bargain ever.”
But Skunk Works’s, and Kelly’s, greatest coup was the SR-71 Blackbird. When the Soviets finally shot down a U-2 in 1960, the United States had to develop a new way to spy on Soviet missile installations. The first Corona spy satellite was already in orbit, but satellites operated on fixed trajectories that allowed enemies to hide their activities during overflight. Kelly proposed a more radical solution: a plane that would fly at 90,000 feet, at Mach 3 speed, for four thousand miles. A plane, in his words, that would “rule the skies for a decade or more.”
In fact, the SR-71 Blackbird would rule the skies for nearly four decades, but it would take incredible technological breakthroughs to make it happen. Building the Blackbird essentially required the Skunk Works team to re-invent the airplane. In Rich’s words, “All the fundamentals of building a conventional airplane were suddenly obsolete” at the edge of space and at supersonic speeds. Kelly put it more succinctly: “Everything about the plane had to be invented. Everything.”
The plane was made out of titanium and special composites that could withstand the searing heat of supersonic flight but that required custom-build tools and dies. It required special fuel and oil that were stable at incredibly high and low temperatures. It incorporated special black paint to minimize the plane’s radar signature, an early instance of stealth technology. It even required special wheels—impregnated with aluminum and inflated with nitrogen—that wouldn’t melt or explode in flight.
The result of this innovation was a spy plane that still seems more like an alien spaceship than anything that has existed, before or since. The plane was so fast it was never shot down—although the Soviets and the Chinese certainly tried.
When Kelly Johnson died in December 1990, his country was at the peak of its economic and military power. The United States was marshalling strength for Operation Desert Storm, a blowout in which several Skunk Works aircraft played vital roles.
Kelly could’ve been content in his later years to coast off his many successes. That wasn’t his style. Instead, he warned of trouble on the horizon. The freewheeling qualities that had made Skunk Works a success were being stifled by red tape, gatekeeping, and risk-aversion: “I see the strong authority that is absolutely essential to this kind of operation slowly being eroded by committee and conference control from within and without,” he wrote.
He offered this insight into the nature of innovation, which will sound familiar to readers of First Breakfast: “Development of some of this country’s most spectacular projects—the atom bomb, the Sidewinder missile, the nuclear-powered submarine—all were accomplished by methods other than the conventional way of doing business outside the system.”
Kelly would know. His career was anything but conventional. It was legendary, from the propellor age to the very edges of space.
Further Reading (and Listening)
Skunk Works by Ben Rich and Leo Janos
Kelly: More Than My Share of It All by Clarence L. Johnson and Maggie Smith
“Lockheed Martin,” Acquired podcast