Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed

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Forgotten the title or the author of a book? Our BookSleuth is specially designed for you. Visit BookSleuth The result? They built a laser-fast fighter jet in only 143 days (7 days ahead of schedule). It was called the P-80 Shooting Star and it won history’s first jet-versus-jet dogfight in 1950. Finally, Ben Rich articulates a positive and deterministic vision for America and American technologists that has become rare in the 21st century's worship of market efficiency and indeterminate optimism. He ran one of the most high-performing engineering teams in the world, and he's completely confident that without those people, working together, the world of aviation would be totally different. In the face of the statistical historians of technology, Rich provides a full-throated defense of exceptionalism, not just at the individual level, but exceptionalism at the organizational level. There are places that are special, and the Skunk Works during the mid 20th century was one of them.

Further, Rich covers many of the technical details and challenges that the Skunk Works team faced overcoming engineering problems, along with the more straightforward difficulties with funding and politics. He litters the story with personal details, sometimes discussing pilots who were injured, captured or killed. He also tells part of his own personal story, including the death of his wife and his second marriage. He even delves into the life of his boss, Kelly Johnson, with whom he eventually became very close, following years of being intimidated by him. There must be mutual trust between the military project organization and the contractor with very close cooperation and liaison on a day-to-day basis. This cuts down misunderstanding and correspondence to an absolute minimum. Pointedly, the book ends with a lengthy section about how to do R&D, especially for defense and intelligence, with optimal accomplishment at minimal cost, using the Skunk Works' history as an example of success contrasted with normal corporate-government contracts as examples of inefficiency and waste. As such, skunkworks projects focus on disruptive innovation versus incremental improvements to an organization's existing product line or processes.

The new factory is Skunk Works’ first since the 1980s. Instead of being designed to assemble a specific aircraft, the building has no fixed machines or tooling, which means it can be easily reconfigured to host new projects, Babione said.

Apply lean methodology. Evaluate everything: relationships, decisions, resources BEFORE committing resources. The contractor must be delegated and must assume more than normal responsibility to get good vendor bids for subcontract on the project. Commercial bid procedures are very often better than military ones. Aside from that, this book appeals to the avio-geek in me and provide loads of interesting information on the how and why of exotic airplane development. get. Considered by many insiders to be the definitive history of the Skunkworks, Miller's book covers everything - from the XP-80 up to the F-22 - Military aircraft were so expensive and complex and represented such a sizable investment of taxpayers’ money that no manufacturer expected to win a contract without first jumping through an endless series of procurement hoops, culminating in the flight-testing phase, that under normal circumstances stretched nearly ten or more years. From start to finish, a new airplane could take as long as twelve years before taking its place in the inventory and become operational on a flight line long after it was already obsolete. But that was how the bureaucracy did business."A fascinating insights into the very secretive Skunk Works. Covering mostly the famous U2, SR-71 and F-117 with a bunch of side stories. The Eisenhower administration was not alarmed by the revelation of Soviet Sputnik technology because Sputnik technology was not superior to existing American satellite technology. The US had superior technology...Sputnik was not a demonstation of technological prowess; really, it was more of a public relations coup. Eisenhower wished to ignore it, in fact. He was finally persuaded to mount what was in essence a public relations counter-measure to the Soviets and also a strengthening of the hand of the political-economic element in the US which benefited from the crisis mentality of the Cold War. This classic history of America's high-stakes quest to dominate the skies is "a gripping technothriller in which the technology is real" ( New York Times Book Review). Kelly was a formidable leader. He did not suffer fools gladly, losing him some contracts. He would not build a plane he didn’t believe in. He had zero tolerance for pretense. He had an amazing knowledge of every aspect of aviation engineering. He insisted that engineers work in close proximity to the shop floor. Rich speculates that such a leader probably would not be possible in his own era. During his time as President, Eisenhower was scoffed and resented by management in the aerospace industry because he moved slowly, cautiously, and was conservative on military spending;

Despite the Tom Clancy recommendation glaring on the cover of this edition, Skunk Works isn't a bad read. Whatever the writing skills of engineer Rich, cowriter Janos's collaboration with him resulted in an engrossing text. Of course I've long had a special interest in the history of espionage, so the subject-matter went far towards keeping me involved. After their first success, they applied the Skunk Works method again to create the world’s first spy plane in 1954 that could take crystal clear pictures at 70,000 feet. Skunk Works allows creative people to try their crazy ideas—which can lead to groundbreaking results. Very interesting and geeky discussion of the attempts to build a hydrogen powered aircraft in the Sixties. "On the drawing boards was a design for the dart-shaped CL-400 that would fly at 100,000 feet at Mach 2.5 with a 3,000-mile range. The body was enormous, dwarfing any airplane on the drawing boards. On the playing field at Yankee Stadium, for example, the tail would cover home plate and the nose nudge the right-field foul pole, 296 feet away….And the reason the body was so gigantic was that it would carry a fuel load of liquid hydrogen weighing 162,850 pounds, making it the world’s largest thermos bottle. Flying at more than twice the speed of sound, the outer shell of the body would blaze from heat friction above 350 degrees F while the inside skin would hold the frosty fuel at temperatures of minus 400 F—an 800-degree temperature differential that represented an awesomely complicated thermodynamic problem."Kelly Johnson and his team designed and built the XP-80 in only 143 days, seven less than was required. Seecompletedefinition Lean startup Lean startup is an approach to building new businesses based on the belief that entrepreneurs must investigate, experiment, test ... This memoir chronicles the development of “stealth technology” and the F-117A. The result played out years later in Iraq: