Kelly: More Than My Share of It All

Poor But Not in Spirit

Kelly Johnson’s childhood in the iron-mining town of Ishpeming, Michigan, forged his self-reliance, mechanical aptitude, and singular ambition to become an aircraft designer through poverty, hard physical labor, and voracious reading.

• Johnson’s father Peter immigrated from Sweden in 1882 with $600 to buy a Nebraska farm, was swindled by con men in Chicago, and ended up stranded in Ishpeming, Michigan—a misdirected beginning that shaped the family’s hardscrabble life in the mining town where Kelly was born in 1910.
  • Peter was a mason who initially had to lay railroad ties in midwinter before finding construction work, and could lay 2,000 bricks a day in good weather.
  • The family survived on his mother’s laundry work and coal picked from railroad tracks; Kelly contributed $7 weekly for room and board by age 12 through lathing work.
• The Carnegie Library in Ishpeming was as formative an influence on Johnson as his father, opening a world of aviation literature through the Tom Swift series that crystallized his goal to become an aircraft designer by age 12.
  • Johnson read Tom Swift and His Aeroplane and the entire series multiple times, explicitly modeling his ambitions on Tom Swift as ‘a very highly skilled designer, engineer, pilot, and operator of many kinds of locomotion.’
  • By age 12 he had written his first book on aircraft from clippings, designed his first plane—the Merlin battleplane—and made hundreds of model airplanes.
• Johnson’s nickname ‘Kelly’ originated from a schoolyard fight where he broke the leg of a larger bully who had been calling him ‘Clara’—his refusal to tolerate disrespect and willingness to act decisively against odds became a lifelong characteristic.
  • After breaking the bully Cecil’s leg by kicking him behind the knee and jumping on him, Johnson spent a night in his hidden woods camp rather than face potential punishment at home.
  • His schoolmates, impressed he did not cry despite a ruler-breaking spanking, named him ‘Kelly’ after the popular song ‘Kelly from the Emerald Isle.’
• Johnson’s early construction work alongside his father and brother taught him practical building and mechanical skills that would directly inform his later aircraft design work, including construction techniques and respect for tools.
  • By age 12 Johnson was earning $10 per day putting up 2,000 laths and was fully self-supporting, contributing $7 weekly to the household.
  • His father built a rocking horse and wagon from scratch with hand tools, instilling in Kelly a lifelong respect for precision craftsmanship.
• The family’s move from Ishpeming to Flint, Michigan in 1923 improved their economic prospects, and Johnson’s vow as a boy hauling laundry through back alleys—that he would one day return on the best streets—captures the determined social ambition underlying his career.
  • Johnson gave all $31 he earned picking wild blueberries to his mother, an act he considered more meaningful than any contribution he made afterward.
  • An arrow injury nearly blinded him for two weeks as a child, and the experience sparked a lifelong interest in oxygen systems and pressure cabins when he later encountered oxygen problems at altitude.

A Good Move

Johnson’s years in Flint and at the University of Michigan transformed his boyhood dream into professional preparation, as wise mentors steered him away from detours and toward engineering, while part-time wind tunnel work with Studebaker and Indianapolis racing teams gave him applied aerodynamic experience before graduation.

• Two key mentors intervened at critical junctures to keep Johnson on the engineering path: teacher Bertha Baker persuaded him not to take a year off after high school to travel, and pilot Jim White refused his $300 for flying lessons, telling him to go to university instead.
  • “White told Johnson, ‘You don’t want to end up as an airport bum like me,’ forgoing money he needed, in what Johnson described as an act of genuine wisdom and generosity.” —Jim White
  • When a southern university tried to assign Johnson entirely to physical education as a football scholarship player, he refused and drove to the University of Michigan instead.
• Johnson and classmate Don Palmer ran the University of Michigan wind tunnel commercially for $35 a day, testing Studebaker automobiles and finding that oversized headlamps consumed 16 percent of engine power at highway speed—giving Johnson practical aerodynamic consulting experience before he graduated.
  • Working with the Pierce Silver Arrow and other Studebaker models, they shaped the headlamps into the fenders to reduce drag, an application of aircraft aerodynamics to automobile design.
  • They also designed wind tunnel-optimized bodywork for five Indianapolis 500 qualifying cars, improving fuel economy from 7 to 11.6 miles per gallon at 113 mph.
• Johnson’s wind tunnel tests on Lockheed’s new Electra design revealed serious longitudinal and directional instability that his professors had accepted as tolerable—his refusal to accept this imperfection and willingness to challenge authority became the founding act of his career.
  • Professor Stalker and Lloyd Stearman had certified the Electra’s test figures as acceptable; Johnson disagreed and later proved his concerns correct through 72 additional tunnel runs.
  • When he arrived at Lockheed for his first job at $83 a month, practically his first act was to tell chief engineer Hall Hibbard that their airplane was unstable.
• Johnson completed three years of university work in two, earned a master’s degree on the Sheehan Fellowship studying supercharging and boundary layer control, and arrived at Lockheed in 1933 as one of only six engineers—subjects chosen for graduate study that would prove directly applicable to the high-altitude aircraft he would later design.
  • He tutored in calculus at $7.50 an hour, worked in the wind tunnel for hire, and worked in a fraternity kitchen washing dishes before his academic progress earned him an assistantship.
  • The commercial wind tunnel work attracted faculty attention when it became too lucrative, prompting him to leave the university for industry rather than jeopardize professorial relationships.

Becoming an Engineer

The University of Michigan’s distinguished faculty gave Johnson a rigorous multi-disciplinary engineering education, while his unconventional combination of academic work, commercial wind tunnel consulting, and willingness to argue with professors established the pattern of independent technical judgment that defined his career.

• Professor Felix Pawlowski, trained by Eiffel himself and a collaborator with Sikorsky on the world’s first four-engine aircraft, taught Johnson his first aerodynamics course and an enduring epistemological lesson: never automatically dismiss any phenomenon, even those science cannot yet explain.
  • Pawlowski showed Johnson wax ‘spirit hands’ from a seance that were entwined in physically inexplicable ways, using them to illustrate the principle of keeping an open mind.
  • He also taught Johnson to argue back when correct—changing a grade from B to A when Johnson proved his wind tunnel computations were right.
• Johnson’s Michigan curriculum required mastery of all engineering disciplines—civil, chemical, electrical, mechanical—before specializing in aeronautics, giving him the interdisciplinary foundation that enabled him to personally work on aerodynamics, stress analysis, weight and balance, machining, and construction on the same aircraft.
  • A three-day continuous heat-balance test of the university’s steam power plant, where Johnson led mechanical engineering students in measuring all energy inputs and outputs, taught him energy system analysis he later applied to aircraft.
  • Professor O.W. Boston’s metalworking courses, including thermocouple measurements of cutting tool temperatures, gave Johnson methods he later applied to machining titanium for the Blackbirds.
• Johnson and Don Palmer became commercial wind tunnel operators while still graduate students, renting University of Michigan tunnel time for $35 a day and conducting aerodynamic work for Studebaker and Indianapolis racing teams—teaching Johnson the practical gap between theoretical aerodynamics and real-world vehicle dynamics.
  • Solid disc streamlined wheels they proposed for racing cars were rejected after demonstration showed crosswinds picked the car up and set it down four feet off course.
  • Dive brakes to control speed at track turns were also rejected because asymmetric opening would swap the car end-for-end; Johnson notes they still are not used decades later.

A Growing Airplane Company

Johnson’s bold challenge to Lockheed’s new Electra design on his first day proved correct after 72 wind tunnel runs, resulting in the distinctive twin-tail configuration that defined early Lockheed aircraft; his subsequent work as flight test engineer and designer under Hall Hibbard established him as the company’s indispensable technical leader despite repeated early misjudgments about colleagues and procedures.

• Seventy-two wind tunnel runs to fix the unstable Electra led Johnson to the twin-tail configuration—adding a double vertical tail after a single rudder proved insufficient and removing wing fillets that had caused instability—a solution that defined Lockheed’s commercial aircraft family through the 1950s Constellation.
  • “Hibbard wrote a personal letter staying late to type it himself, telling Johnson ‘it is apparently a rather important discovery and I think it is a fine thing that you should be the one to find out the secret.’” —Hall L. Hibbard
  • The Electra became the first all-metal surface aircraft in U.S. production, cruising at 190 mph; the distinctive triple tail of the Constellation grew from the same tunnel test program.
• Flight testing the Electra with pilot Eddie Allen taught Johnson that engineers who fly with test pilots—sharing the genuine danger of first flights and dive tests—build mutual respect that eliminates the communication breakdown that otherwise plagues engineer-pilot relationships.
  • “During a full-power dive to 320 mph with lead bars simulating gross weight, Allen’s windshield blew in; he calmly brushed insulation from his face with one hand while pulling out of the dive with the other, saying only ‘Got something in my eye.’” —Eddie Allen
  • “Johnson’s philosophy: ‘I figured I needed to have hell scared out of me once a year in order to keep a proper balance and viewpoint on designing new aircraft.’” —Kelly Johnson
• Hibbard’s reprimand of Johnson for moving lead ballast bars himself rather than hiring a union flight mechanic taught him the essential management lesson that even efficiency-motivated actions that cut workers out of their jobs and pay create lasting damage to morale and labor relations.
  • The mechanic Dorsey Kammerer filed a union grievance; Johnson and Kammerer later became good friends and Kammerer served as crew chief on experimental aircraft for years afterward.
  • “Hibbard’s message: ‘Kelly, you’ve got to learn to live in the world with all of these other people, and the sooner you learn that the better off you are going to be.’” —Hall L. Hibbard
• He taught me that it is much better to lead people, not to drive them. Drive yourself if you must. But not anybody else.
• The Electra’s near-disastrous one-wheel landing after CAA certification—with only three of six landing gear bolts installed—illustrated both the dangers of under-inspected production and the financial fragility of early Lockheed, which skipped several payrolls including Johnson’s $83/month salary to fund the emergency repair.
  • Jimmy Doolittle, observing on the ground, chalked ‘Try landing at United—good luck’ on his Orion’s fuselage and flew alongside to communicate since there was no radio link to the stricken Electra.
  • Test pilot Marshall Headle made a perfect single-wheel landing with only wingtip damage; the solution was simply replacing the sheared shaft with one twice as large.
• The retractable landing gear analysis Johnson performed for Jimmy Doolittle’s Lockheed Orion—his first contact with the famous aviators who frequented the plant—established his reputation for rigorous structural analysis, with Johnson doubling all tube gauges to ensure the gear would survive Doolittle’s rough-field operations.
  • The Orion flew for Varney Speed Lanes between Los Angeles and San Francisco in 65 minutes at 227 mph, the fastest commercial aircraft of its day.
  • Doolittle returned every six months to have the airplane tightened up, and the two maintained a friendship for decades.
• Johnson built Lockheed’s first private wind tunnel in 1939 for $360,000—designing the aerodynamics himself and having the bare structure built for $186,000—because the company could no longer depend on Cal Tech scheduling; the tunnel’s unique constant-speed drive was so effective that Lockheed sold the design to six other companies for $10,000 each.
  • The twelve-by-eight-foot test section operated at a simulated 300 mph; the tunnel paid for itself on its first major test by revealing the compressibility phenomenon on the P-38 fighter.
  • Johnson completed all coursework for a doctorate at Cal Tech but abandoned it when he discovered a requirement for technical German that he did not have time to acquire.

The Good-looking Young Paymaster

Johnson’s marriage to Althea Young, Lockheed’s assistant treasurer, formed an equal partnership that extended from dancing and horseback riding to ranch management, providing him personal stability and a counterweight to the obsessive work pressures that caused recurring ulcers throughout his career.

• Johnson’s courtship of Althea Young, who initially considered him ‘a snippy young kid,’ began when he decided he could not let that characterization stand unchallenged—a response revealing the same competitive self-regard he applied to engineering criticism.
  • Their first date was a 75-cent steak dinner in Glendale, paid Dutch because Althea was earning twice his salary as assistant treasurer before he was hired.
  • They waited four years to marry in 1937 because Johnson wanted to earn enough to support a wife without her needing to work—Althea agreed to quit work and take care of the house.
• Johnson applied engineering methodology to building his Encino hillside home, constructing a detailed scale model of the site to optimize placement of house, pool, and tennis court while minimizing expensive excavation in near-solid rock—but the contractor’s workers still created unforeseen problems, including using tomato juice cans instead of pipe unions for pool drains, which failed after six years.
  • Johnson built all the retaining walls on the property himself from rock excavated for the basements, work he described as keeping him busy for years.
  • The hidden plumbing failure—discovered only when the ground began to sink—required an air hammer to reveal cans encased in cement and full pipe replacement.
• Johnson’s experience with a ‘World Peace Building’ campaign in the Encino Chamber of Commerce—where an outside group tried to attach a political name to the community building fund he helped raise—taught him how subversive groups exploit civic institutions, a lesson reinforced when Lockheed’s lawyer warned him not to make accusations he could not prove in court.
  • Several supportive neighbors privately agreed something was wrong with the offer but refused to say so publicly because of business vulnerability, leaving Johnson to fight alone.
  • He was not re-elected to the Chamber’s board of directors as a result of the controversy—a personal cost he paid for holding his position.
• The Lindero Ranch—226 acres with its own water, power, and livestock systems that Johnson designed and built largely himself—represented the self-sufficient engineering project and outdoor refuge that balanced his high-pressure professional life, with Althea as an equal partner operating tractors and managing the 20-head Hereford herd.
  • Althea once threatened to run Johnson over with the C-2 caterpillar tractor at four miles per hour when he corrected her handling technique, and he wisely retreated to let her finish the discing.
  • Johnson carefully computed tilt angles before moving a 1,000-pound water tank by tractor on a downhill slope above the house to prevent both tipping and structural damage.

Wiley, Amelia, and Others

Johnson’s working relationships with aviation pioneers Wiley Post, Amelia Earhart, and Charles Kingsford-Smith placed him at the center of 1930s record-setting aviation, and his careful technical analysis of their accidents—particularly Post’s nose-heavy floatplane and Earhart’s navigation limitations over the Pacific—reveals how engineering warnings went unheeded with fatal consequences.

• Wiley Post’s three failed attempts to fly his stripped-down Vega across the country at 40,000 feet and 400 mph were visionary but unachievable given engine limitations; Johnson’s best calculation showed 300 mph was the realistic ceiling, and Post’s bet of a 20-inch slide rule for better numbers was never paid.
  • Post dropped his landing gear at takeoff to save weight, planning to land on a belly skid on the Mojave dry lakes—requiring extraordinary depth perception for a one-eyed pilot who had already proven his skill flying around the world solo.
  • Post achieved 253 mph at 30,000 feet on his best attempt but could not use full engine power without overboost damage.
• Both Johnson and assistant chief engineer Gerschler warned Post that adding the largest available engine with the biggest propeller to his modified Orion floatplane made it dangerously nose-heavy with insufficient elevator power for normal takeoff—Post dismissed the warnings, devised a rocking technique to bounce airborne, and died with Will Rogers in Alaska when the engine failed on takeoff in poor visibility.
  • Post obtained CAA certification despite the imbalance by rocking the airplane fore and aft on its floats with power on until it would bounce into the air.
  • In poor visibility with no visible horizon, a pilot cannot judge angle of attack; Post’s wristwatch stopped at 8:18 p.m. on impact 300 miles inside the Arctic Circle.
• Johnson worked intensively with Amelia Earhart to maximize range for her around-the-world Electra, flying with her as flight engineer on fuel optimization tests using a Cambridge exhaust analyzer, and provided detailed written specifications on fuel loads, flap settings, and takeoff procedures for each leg—warnings she generally followed, but her navigation over the featureless Pacific ultimately exceeded what any pilot could overcome.
  • Johnson’s February 1937 letter to Earhart specified fuel loads and gross weights for six transoceanic legs and cautioned that wing flaps must not be raised unless 120 mph was reached after takeoff, to prevent losing altitude.
  • Howland Island—the target for the fatal leg from Lae, New Guinea—was one and a half to two miles long and rose only about two feet above sea level; with 23 hours of fuel exhausted and overcast preventing sun shots, Johnson believes they ditched and did not survive.
• Johnson’s philosophy of life—belief in God, health, purposeful work, a loving spouse, and respect of colleagues—was confirmed in conversation with Anne Lindbergh at a Beverly Hills banquet and has remained his guiding framework.
  • Anne Lindbergh, whom Johnson described as ‘a serious writer in her own right, a sensitive poet, and a concerned advocate for aviation,’ agreed with all five items Johnson named as the most important things in life.
  • Her husband Charles had flown an early polar route survey in a modified Lockheed Sirius with pontoons for Pan American Airways in 1933, which inspired Anne’s book North to the Orient.

A Family of Aircraft

The original Electra spawned a family of increasingly capable twin-tailed transports through systematic innovation, while Johnson’s personal encounters with high-altitude oxygen deprivation, carburetor icing disasters, and flutter phenomena drove him toward the pressurized cabins, reliable engine systems, and thorough flight testing regimes that would define his later work.

• The Electra’s twin-tail derivative, the Model 14 Super Electra, introduced two major innovations—the Lockheed-Fowler flap that slid backward to increase wing area for takeoff and the ’letterbox slots’ based on the Coanda effect—earning Johnson the 1937 Lawrence Sperry Award, his first major engineering honor.
  • The Fowler flap, unlike ordinary flaps that act as air brakes, slid backward out of the wing and effectively added wing area, providing a large wing for low-speed control and a small wing for high-speed cruise.
  • The letterbox slots released fresh high-speed air over the outboard wing section where stall threatened near the ailerons, preventing the dangerous tip-stall condition discovered during 550 stalls flown over the San Fernando Valley.
• A near-death experience from oxygen deprivation during high-altitude Electra certification testing for Brazil—where outdated wisdom restricted supplemental oxygen and Johnson became so ill after landing that he had to be driven home and could barely stay in bed—sparked his decades-long commitment to oxygen systems, pressure suits, and pressurized cabins.
  • The only oxygen delivery system available was a cigarette holder connected to an oxygen line; it took three flights to achieve the required 23,000-foot altitude for the sealed barograph certification.
  • The XC-35—a pressurized Electra modification for the Army Air Corps maintaining a 10-pound-per-square-inch differential—won the 1937 Collier Trophy, validating the pressurized cabin concept that Wiley Post had pioneered with his pressure suit.
• A Northwest Airlines Model 14 crash near Bozeman, Montana, where the vertical tails had simply separated from the aircraft, led Johnson to full-scale wind tunnel flutter testing at Cal Tech that proved the accident was caused not by the regulatory fix of lead balances but by a cracked ball-bearing race in the rudder tab that allowed immediate catastrophic flutter when it finally broke.
  • The Guggenheim tunnel at Cal Tech under von Kármán and Millikan confirmed the rudder would not flutter under any normal condition, but immediately blew off when the tab was disconnected to simulate the broken bearing.
  • To satisfy CAA requirements Johnson, test pilot Headle, and inspector Holoubek then flew 50 hours in the worst icing conditions they could find in Minnesota, landing once with full engine power after collecting four inches of ice in four minutes.

War and Mass Production

The British military commission’s 1938 visit to Lockheed produced a massive 200-plane Hudson order that launched the company into large-scale production; Johnson’s 72-hour redesign in a London hotel room and the Hudson’s combat debut in the Battle of Dunkirk established Lockheed’s reputation as a military aircraft manufacturer, while the company’s subsequent anti-submarine patrol aircraft lineage—from Hudson through PV-2—grew directly from that single contract.

• Lockheed secured the largest U.S. aircraft production order to that date—200 Hudsons plus up to 50 more—by building a wooden mockup in five days after receiving five days’ warning of a British purchasing commission visit, then spending a 72-hour holiday weekend redesigning the entire aircraft in a London hotel room after the British rejected the initial concept.
  • The British wanted bombs in a bomb bay instead of stacked Army-style, their own oxygen system, rear gun turret and forward guns, and complete compatibility with British stores—changes affecting the entire structure, weight, balance, and performance.
  • Returning on the German ship Bremen, the team’s cabins were searched within 30 minutes of boarding; their preliminary drawings had already been burned in a Mayfair Court fireplace that ignited years of accumulated chimney soot and burned frighteningly for 15-20 minutes.
• British skepticism about relying on a 28-year-old engineer’s guarantees was overcome only by Courtlandt Gross’s personal assurance to the Chief of Air Staff—demonstrating both how young Johnson was when he took on major wartime responsibilities and how much Lockheed management had already staked on his judgment.
  • “Air Marshal Virnay told Gross he was ‘very unused in this country to dealing—particularly on transactions of such magnitude—on the technical say-so of a man as young as Mr. Johnson’ and required a personal guarantee.” —Arthur Virnay
  • When Johnson returned to England to prove performance on the first three delivered Hudsons, he spent three months at Martlesham Heath flying in RAF blue as unofficial flight engineer—with one memorable low-altitude dive so close to the terrain that he could see the flowered curtains in a cottage window.
• The Hudson became the first aircraft to capture a submarine and was borrowed back by the U.S. after Pearl Harbor—when German Wolf Packs were burning oil tankers within ten miles of the East Coast—initiating a Lockheed anti-submarine warfare aircraft lineage that eventually built more such aircraft than all other companies combined.
  • A Hudson kept its guns trained on a surfaced U-boat until a destroyer arrived to accept the surrender—the first such capture in history.
  • Nearly 3,000 Hudsons were built by war’s end for Britain, Australia, and the U.S.; the lineage continued through PV-1, PV-2, and eventually the carrier-based S-3A still in service decades later.
• On the PV-2, Johnson solved an engine-to-propeller mismatch by asking Hamilton Standard to reduce a 17-foot propeller to 10 feet 6 inches—making it shorter but wider—demonstrating his principle that engineering constraints often require counterintuitive solutions that preserve function while respecting structural limits.
  • The engines had so much power that the proper-diameter propeller would have chopped into the fuselage; moving nacelles far enough outboard to clear a 10.5-foot prop was the structural solution.
  • To maintain proficiency in mathematics, Johnson spent one summer vacation reworking all problems in Fred Weick’s Aircraft Propeller Design and another reworking all of Clyde Love’s Differential and Integral Calculus.

Into the Unknown

The P-38 Lightning—built around twin Allison engines with counter-rotating propellers—became the first aircraft to encounter compressibility at high speed, and Johnson’s years-long battle to diagnose and solve the phenomenon through wind tunnel tests, dive flaps, and urgent advocacy illustrates how wartime bureaucratic resistance and tragic accidents compounded a purely aerodynamic problem.

• The P-38’s radical twin-boom design was not arbitrary aesthetics but the logical result of packaging two Allison liquid-cooled engines with turbo-superchargers, Prestone radiators, and retracting landing gear—each component dictating the next until the distinctive shape emerged inevitably from engineering requirements.
  • Counter-rotating propellers on the P-38 eliminated torque effect and the one-sided pull that all single-propeller fighters experienced, a significant handling advantage in combat.
  • The plane went through 18 versions and the last carried a bomb load greater than the early B-17 Flying Fortress; pilots could slow nearly to stalling, reverse on one engine, and face their adversary—impossible for German fighters.
• NACA refused to risk its wind tunnel on P-38 compressibility tests at high speeds until General Hap Arnold personally ordered them to proceed—‘If it blows up, call me’—demonstrating how institutional risk-aversion by the very agency charged with aeronautical advancement could delay critical wartime research.
  • Previous high-speed tunnel tests had caused violent model thrashing that NACA feared would damage their facility; the organizational risk calculation placed tunnel preservation above solving an active combat problem.
  • After tests confirmed compressibility rather than flutter, Johnson went back to Burbank and designed external dive flaps on the front wing spar that automatically pulled the nose up out of dives—so effective that letting go of the wheel allowed the plane to recover on its own.
• 487 sets of P-38 compressibility dive flaps—along with aileron boosters and engine cooling improvements—were loaded on a C-54 transport for the Eighth Air Force in England, but RAF fighters shot the transport down near Ireland mistaking it for a German Condor; the modification that would have made the P-38 ’the most maneuverable fighter in the world’ never reached the theater where it was needed most.
  • Simultaneously, a ship carrying more than 400 P-38s headed for the Soviet Union during the Battle of Stalingrad was sunk by a submarine—two catastrophic losses at critical moments when the superior aircraft would have made a real difference.
  • Project officer Ben Kelsey, initially a doubter about the need for the dive flaps, became a believer when he personally encountered compressibility so extreme he could not reach the flap switch before the tail broke off, forcing him to bail out.
• NACA’s suppression of Johnson’s cleared compressibility paper—recalling it and labeling it secret after other companies had already received copies—was exposed as institutional protectionism when postwar investigation found German literature had thoroughly documented compressibility solutions including swept wings, which Germany had been flying since the start of the Polish campaign.
  • Johnson presented his technical paper at the American Institute of Aeronautical Sciences in January 1943 after War Department clearance; it was then recalled because NACA did not want to acknowledge industry-initiated research.
  • By end of 1943, compressibility was ’the talk of P-38 pilots everywhere,’ while horsepower doubled on the P-38 engines had produced only 17 mph more speed because compressibility was already limiting the propellers.

The Big Time

The Constellation transport—born from Howard Hughes’s specifications and Lockheed’s insistence on building something far more ambitious—put Lockheed into large-scale commercial aviation, but Howard Hughes’s erratic piloting on the checkout flight and his competitive business decisions ultimately cost Lockheed its market leadership even as the Constellation set records worldwide.

• Johnson convinced Howard Hughes and TWA to accept a much larger aircraft than requested—capable of transatlantic flight and carrying over 100 passengers—rather than the 20-berth transcontinental plane Hughes had specified, by demonstrating that the economics of the larger airplane made the smaller one commercially unsound.
  • Hughes’s original half-page specification called for 20 sleeping passengers and 6,000 pounds of cargo across the U.S. at 250-300 mph at 20,000 feet; Lockheed proposed instead a transatlantic airliner using the Wright 3350 engine being developed for the B-29.
  • “Johnson persuaded Robert Gross to accept hydraulically boosted power controls—the first in any airliner—by pointing to Gross’s new Chevrolet: ‘You didn’t really need power to steer that car, but it makes it a hell of a lot easier, doesn’t it?’” —Kelly Johnson
• During Howard Hughes’s checkout in the Constellation, he pulled all four throttles to takeoff power with full flaps and raised the nose 90 degrees to the horizon until the airspeed indicator read zero—a maneuver Johnson had never seen with a four-engine aircraft—then made increasingly dangerous asymmetric takeoffs; Johnson ordered Milo Burcham to take the plane home, overriding Hughes at the cost of a furious and temporarily damaging confrontation.
  • “Jack Frye, sitting in the passenger section observing, told Johnson ‘Do what you think is right, Kelly’ when asked for guidance—declining to be the one to cross Hughes.” —Jack Frye
  • Hughes subsequently spent a weekend making 50-60 practice takeoffs and landings, became competent, and set a Los Angeles-to-Washington transcontinental record of 6 hours, 57 minutes, 51 seconds.
• Hughes’s insistence that no other airline receive Constellation deliveries until TWA had 35, combined with his refusal to double-crew nonstop flights to avoid a union overtime rule, squandered TWA’s monopoly on transcontinental nonstop service and permanently damaged Lockheed’s relationship with American Airlines—which never bought a Lockheed aircraft again.
  • Johnson, Gross, and Hibbard had to tell American Airlines they could not build an airplane with the Constellation’s performance—while American knew perfectly well they were building exactly that for TWA.
  • American’s decision to buy Douglas DC-6s and DC-7s instead, and later its purchase of hundreds of Lockheed Electra turboprops, effectively prevented Lockheed from being an early entrant in the jet transport field.
• The C-130 Hercules—designed in the Skunk Works as the first cargo aircraft conceived from the ground up for turboprop engines—established a new standard for military airlift with its 45-inch-high fuselage floor enabling easy loading, a drop-down rear ramp, and ability to operate from short rough strips, making it one of the most versatile and durable military transports ever produced.
  • The fuselage was so low to the ground that loading under any conditions was practical without special equipment; the rear section lowered to become a loading ramp and the aircraft converted quickly from personnel carrier to hospital ship to heavy machinery transport.
  • The plane was designed at the Skunk Works but assigned to Lockheed’s Georgia company for production; many of its features were later adapted to the much larger C-5A.

The Jet Age—and the First “Skunk Works”

Locked out of normal factory space and engineering resources, Johnson created the Skunk Works in 1943 by building walls from discarded engine crates and renting a circus tent, then built America’s first tactical jet fighter in 143 days with 23 engineers—establishing the small-team, direct-authority principles that would guide all subsequent Lockheed advanced projects.

• Johnson established the first Skunk Works in 1943 out of operational necessity—no space, no spare engineers, a wartime plant already building 28 aircraft per day—by constructing walls from surplus Wright engine crates and a rented circus tent adjacent to the wind tunnel, then ‘stealing’ 23 engineers from around the factory to build the XP-80 jet fighter.
  • The name ‘Skunk Works’ reportedly came from engineer Irv Culver’s reference to Al Capp’s ‘Li’l Abner’ comic strip, where a character stirred up ‘kickapoo joy juice’ in a big brew—someone asked what Kelly was doing and the answer evoked the comic strip.
  • The project operated with its own purchasing, tooling, and administrative functions completely independent of the main plant—the direct relationship between design engineer and mechanic that Johnson had been advocating to Gross and Hibbard for years.
• The XP-80 flew in 143 days against a 180-day contract—on January 8, 1944—achieving 502 mph and becoming America’s first fighter over 500 mph, while a subsequent 132-day rebuild with a larger GE engine produced the YP-80A ‘Gray Ghost’ that added 80 mph and led to production of over 6,000 F-80 Shooting Stars.
  • The British De Havilland engine expert sent to help install the engine arrived with no travel papers, was arrested for jaywalking on Hollywood Boulevard without a draft card, and had to be freed by the Army Corps before work could resume.
  • A final engine run-up the day before first flight produced a catastrophic bang that collapsed the intake ducts and destroyed the only engine; a replacement had to be flown in, further delaying the flight.
• Six F-80s were lost to turbine disc failures caused by welds in the main shaft—because the largest forging press in the country could not forge hub and disc together—establishing Johnson’s career-long crusade for a 250,000-ton titanium press that the U.S. still lacked decades later while the Russians had built such capability.
  • The solution was to spin each turbine with its shaft in a vacuum at speeds exceeding operational—a test Johnson found troubling because the procedure itself could initiate cracks that X-ray might miss.
  • Milo Burcham died in an F-80 production model when a fuel pump shaft spline sheared on takeoff; the result was a mandatory dual fuel pump system that Johnson later described as saving many combat pilots’ lives in Korea.
• Mock combat exercises at Edwards AFB using F-80s against every existing U.S. fighter—armed with gun cameras—proved that frontal attacks by jets were nearly impossible to counter but irrelevant because the closing speed left too little firing time, while rear-quadrant attacks where jets could match speed and aim carefully required fighter escorts watching backward—a tactical lesson adopted by the Eighth Air Force before Korea.
  • Johnson spent over five hours daily at 25,000 feet riding piggyback in a P-38 with Tony LeVier wearing tennis shoes and shorts with only a parachute, spinning repeatedly trying to gun down the jet; no film showed a hit on the F-80.
  • In January 1946, Col. William Councill flew nonstop from Long Beach to La Guardia in 4 hours, 13 minutes at an average 584 mph; in 1947, Col. Albert Boyd set a world speed record of 623.8 mph.

Lessons from Korea

A 23,000-mile combat zone tour in 1952 where Johnson interviewed pilots climbing out of overloaded fighters gave him the design specification for the F-104 Starfighter—pure speed and altitude—and the airplane’s development through rocket-tested razor-thin wings, new GE J-79 engines, and a worldwide production consortium became both a technical triumph and a cautionary example of how procurement politics and cost growth erode strategic advantage.

• Korean War pilots unanimously demanded speed and altitude above all else—their enemy had a ‘High-Altitude Charlie’ at 50,000 feet directing MiGs while U.S. fighters could not reach him—so Johnson designed the F-104 Starfighter around this single requirement, testing 50 wing models on instrumented rockets at up to 1,500 mph because no available wind tunnel reached Mach 2.
  • General Partridge immediately stopped rocket firings in Korea for one morning and redirected 460 rockets to the Skunk Works for wing testing—creating chaos at Burbank until they could be moved to Edwards AFB for safe firing.
  • The F-104 became the first operational aircraft to sustain Mach 2 in level flight and in 1958 set world records at 91,243 feet altitude and 1,404 mph speed, winning the Collier Trophy.
• The F-104’s afterburner eyelid failure—which caused near-total thrust loss under certain conditions—killed seven pilots before the fix was implemented, a delay that ‘still sticks in my craw’; Tony LeVier survived the first cannon-firing test when an explosion blew a fuel cell hole and forced a dead-stick landing without flap power.
  • LeVier, faced with a smoke-filled cockpit 50 miles from base and a subsequent engine failure on approach, made a perfect dead-stick landing he had mentally rehearsed from performance data, describing the flare as gentle ’like a Piper Cub.’
  • Test pilot Herman ‘Fish’ Salmon volunteered sodium pentothal interrogation by Lockheed’s medical director to reconstruct a pressure-suit blowout accident precisely enough to identify and fix the gun-gas explosion cause.
• Johnson’s unsolicited proposal for the X-27/X-29 lightweight fighter—which he argued could be developed directly into production without double prototyping at fraction the F-15’s cost—was killed not by technical merit but by Lockheed’s 1971 financial crisis, which made the Air Force unwilling to risk the contract; the resulting F-16, developed through double prototyping by General Dynamics, appeared ten years later at nearly three times the projected cost.
  • Senator Stuart Symington summoned Lockheed chairman Dan Haughton and Johnson to announce the F-15 contract would go to McDonnell regardless, with instructions that Johnson was to give no more argument; Johnson did not personally promise compliance.
  • “Johnson’s principle: ‘If the military would spend one or two percent of the cost of developing an experimental airplane in planning production at the same time, it would come back in savings many, many times over.’” —Kelly Johnson

Working with “Spooks”

The U-2’s development under CIA direction from 1953—designed to overfly the Soviet Union above 70,000 feet with a range better than 4,000 miles—was completed under strict secrecy with 50 people, returned $2 million to the government as a cost overrun refund, and operated successfully for four years until Francis Gary Powers was shot down in 1960; Johnson’s public challenge of Soviet disinformation about the wreckage forced them to display the real aircraft.

• Johnson’s proposal for the U-2 was turned down by the Air Force as too optimistic—they doubted any engine could operate at the proposed altitude—but reached Trevor Gardner, the brilliant Assistant Secretary of the Air Force, who subjected Johnson to a three-day grilling by scientists before approving the program under CIA direction with a go-ahead to build 20 aircraft with spares for roughly $22 million and fly in eight months.
  • “General Putt’s endorsement at the Washington meeting: ‘He has proven it three times already—on the F-80, F-80A, and F-104.’” —Donald Putt
  • Security was so extreme that CIA progress payments were mailed to Johnson’s Encino home address—two checks totaling $1,256,000 arrived in his mailbox, prompting him to open a special bank account.
• The U-2 test base in Nevada was established on nuclear proving ground land added to the AEC territory by presidential action for complete security; the first flight was an accidental one when Tony LeVier’s taxi test became airborne because the airplane was so light it flew at idle power, and landing proved more difficult than flying—requiring six attempts before Johnson talked him down.
  • Johnson and Dorsey Kammerer laid out the first runway by compass and surveying equipment, kicking aside 50-caliber shell casings from previous target practice.
  • The unofficial first flight was August 4, 1955; ten minutes after the first official flight on August 8, the dry lakebed flooded with two inches of rain—nearly the entire average annual rainfall had fallen in two preceding weeks.
• When Powers was shot down in 1960, Johnson publicly challenged Soviet disinformation—‘Hell, no, that’s no U-2’—provoking the Russians to put the real aircraft on display in Moscow; from Carl Mydans’s Life magazine photos Johnson determined the horizontal tail had been destroyed first, causing the wings to fail in downbending as the aircraft inverted at speed, confirming Powers’s account of the SA-2 hit.
  • Johnson’s analysis: the U-2’s highly cambered wing produces such high pitching moment that without a tail surface the aircraft immediately goes over on its back; in severe cases the wings break off in downbending within seconds.
  • “After Powers’s exchange in 1962 Johnson concluded from detailed questioning: ‘I will gladly contribute to a fund for decorating this officer for the fine job he did under the most difficult circumstances.’” —Kelly Johnson
• The U-2’s legacy extended far beyond reconnaissance: later versions operated from carriers, achieved 98 percent dispatch-within-15-minutes maintenance readiness in Southeast Asian jungle conditions, relayed military communications for 27 hours over three days during the Mayaguez crisis, and evolved through the U-2R and TR-1 variants that remain in service, while Johnson believed nothing would fly higher subsonically.
  • “The TR-1 tactical reconnaissance version was renamed on the spot by General David Jones specifically to remove the ‘Spy Plane’ stigma: ‘We have to get the U-2 name off the plane. We’ll call it the TR-1, tactical reconnaissance one.’” —David C. Jones
  • Both TR-1 and ER-2, the latest U-2 versions, are 40 percent larger than the original with 103-foot wingspan; the ER-2 for NASA Earth resources research has interchangeable noses for varying missions.

Blackbirds Fly Stealthily—Three Times the Speed of Sound

The Blackbird series—A-12, YF-12, SR-71, and D-21 drone—required inventing everything from structural materials and fuel to hydraulic fluid and electrical wiring to sustain Mach 3.2 cruise, and its development cost Johnson $50 in promised awards to anyone who found anything easy to do; the program’s cancellation decisions by McNamara’s team left the U.S. without a high-altitude interceptor for decades against threats like the Russian Backfire bomber.

• Sustaining Mach 3.2 at 80,000+ feet required inventing structural materials, special fuel, hydraulic fluid, fuel tank sealants, paints, plastics, and electrical wiring from scratch—titanium became the primary structural material after stainless steel’s superior high-temperature properties were outweighed by the impossibility of building it with Skunk Works methods.
  • The first titanium wing section wrinkled ’like an old dishrag’ in the heat box; the solution was to divorce skin panels from spars and add corrugations and dimples that deepened rather than buckled when heated—earning Johnson the accusation of making a ‘Mach 3 Ford Trimotor.’
  • Spotwelds on summer-built wing panels failed early while winter-built panels lasted indefinitely; investigation traced the difference to chlorine added to Burbank’s water supply in summer to control algae, which was contaminating the titanium during panel washing.
• The Pratt & Whitney J-58 engine ‘shifts’ from conventional jet to ramjet cycle at high Mach numbers, bypassing the compressor so that faster flight produces more thrust—but developing the air inlet spike that compresses incoming 800°F air 50-to-one without flow separation took years and early flights suffered frequent engine blowouts dropping from 16,000 pounds of thrust to 16,000 pounds of drag in a fraction of a second.
  • Johnson joked to Pratt & Whitney that their engine provided only 17 percent of the aircraft’s thrust in flight, with the inlet duct and ejector contributing the rest—though none of it would exist without that vital 17 percent.
  • The solution to blowouts was an automatic rudder control that within 0.15 seconds could sense which engine had blown and kick in 9 degrees of rudder with hydraulic steering, allowing level flight to continue.
• McNamara’s team killed production of 93 YF-12B interceptors for Air Defense Command despite three congressional appropriations of $90 million and a better-than-90-percent hit rate in live firings—deciding the threat didn’t exist—and then ordered the $70 million tooling scrapped at 7.5 cents per pound; the Russian Backfire bomber that subsequently appeared could outrun every American fighter including the F-15.
  • General Agan stated publicly that with his outmoded F-102s and F-106s and no adequate radar network, he could not protect Air Force One crossing from Washington to Los Angeles.
  • The Concorde commercial transport and the Russian Backfire bomber are both in the Mach 2 category; U.S. fighters have supersonic range of only 50-100 miles before exhausting fuel, while the YF-12A sustained Mach 3-plus.
• The SR-71, heavier than earlier Blackbirds with more fuel and improved instrumentation, has set multiple world records including a 1974 transatlantic crossing in 1 hour 54 minutes and a 1976 closed-circuit speed of 2,086 mph; by the early 1980s it had made over 18,000 aerial refuelings and can cover 5,463 statute miles nonstop.
  • On April 27, 1971, an SR-71 flew 15,000 miles in 10.5 hours above 80,000 feet, winning the Mackay Trophy ‘for the most meritorious flight of the year’ and the Harmon International Trophy.
  • The D-21, the fourth Blackbird—an unmanned drone flying higher, faster, and farther than all others—remained classified until news photographs showed examples in storage at Davis-Monthan AFB.

In Sickness and in Health

Johnson’s decades-long battle with duodenal ulcers—triggered by the stress of aircraft accidents and demanding workloads—ran parallel to his ascent through Lockheed management from chief research engineer to VP and Skunk Works director, and when he finally chose in 1959 to abandon corporate engineering for direct Skunk Works leadership, the timing coincided with the Oxcart program’s demands and his own physical limits.

• Johnson developed new ulcers within 24 hours of each fatal aircraft accident under his responsibility, and during the war was working simultaneously on as many as six aircraft programs while making monthly Washington trips—a punishing schedule that by 1955 required doctors to mandate a complete rest and prolonged reduced activity.
  • An ulcer developing over the Constellation grounding resolved when Johnson found the cause himself—scorched aluminum wiring at a fitting where insulation was inadequate—a solution requiring only 15 minutes to re-engineer.
  • By 1970, 30 years of recurring ulcers had created so much scar tissue that Johnson no longer felt pain; X-rays showed the stomach outlet ‘about as big as a lead pencil,’ requiring removal of half the stomach.
• Johnson’s 1959 decision to abandon the corporate vice president role traveling to all Lockheed divisions and return to full-time Skunk Works leadership was driven by his fundamental incompatibility with advisory authority—‘This business of suggesting is not my modus operandi’—and proved perfectly timed for the Oxcart program’s demands.
  • As VP for Research and Development from 1956, Johnson had no direct authority over divisions he visited—only suggestions—which he considered his worst period of corporate contribution.
  • “Three times offered a company presidency at Lockheed, Johnson declined each time: ‘To me, there was no better job within the corporation than head of Advanced Development Projects—the Skunk Works.’” —Kelly Johnson
• Althea Johnson died of cancer in December 1969 after years of suffering during which she endured three operations and attempted to end her own life with pills to avoid being a burden; before dying she endowed a chair in Johnson’s name at Cal Tech, and her ashes were scattered over Santa Barbara Bay from a small airplane Johnson piloted.
  • During Althea’s final illness, Dr. Lowell Ford stayed overnight at the house after full workdays—monitoring Johnson’s own angina attacks as well as providing care for Althea.
  • Star Lane Ranch in the Santa Ynez Valley—which they bought in 1963 after selling Lindero when taxes rose 1,000 percent following the Colorado River Aqueduct’s arrival—became Althea’s beloved final home.

It’s No Secret

The Skunk Works’ 14 operating rules—essentially formalizations of Johnson’s philosophy that small teams with direct authority, minimal paperwork, and vendor accountability outperform large bureaucratic organizations—proved transferable when rigorously applied, as demonstrated by the Agena-D satellite reliability improvement from 13.6 to 96.2 percent in nine months, but failed when the Army’s Cheyenne helicopter program could not maintain the single-authority structure the method requires.

• The core Skunk Works management insight is that small teams of outstanding people with direct authority and minimal paperwork outperform large groups—the XP-80 used 23 engineers, the JetStar 37, the U-2 50, and the enormously more complex SR-71 only 135—because the method prevents the committee consensus that eliminates both catastrophic failures and brilliant solutions.
  • Johnson’s standing quarter-bet against anyone differing with him is not about money but about giving employees the distinction of beating the boss—a standing incentive that has lost him a few quarters.
  • Security regulations created painful human costs: an excellent engineer could become unemployable in secret work by marrying someone with a relative holding unacceptable political views—Johnson had to say goodbye to good friends for this reason.
• Applied to the Agena-D satellite program, Skunk Works methods improved launch reliability from 13.6 percent to 96.2 percent in nine months against an 18-month schedule, by returning inspection responsibility to vendors, cutting quality control from 1,206 to 69 people, reducing tooling costs from $2,000,000 to $150,000, and creating drawings in a day instead of a month.
  • At Baird Atomic Company, Lockheed had 40 inspectors and coordinators overseeing 35 Baird workers building the horizon sensor; Johnson called Walter Baird personally to return responsibility to the vendor.
  • Rand Corporation documented this application of Skunk Works techniques in a publicly available report; the project engineer, Fred O’Green, later became chairman of Litton Industries.
• The Army’s Cheyenne helicopter program failed to sustain Skunk Works discipline because it could not maintain the single-customer counterpart required: 145 Army personnel were involved versus the maximum of six CIA/Air Force representatives across the entire U-2 and SR-71 programs, and the purchasing department alone grew larger than Johnson’s entire seven-project engineering staff within six months.
  • Johnson challenged designer Jack Real to configure the Cheyenne so it could be serviced with any six simple tools—a design simplicity challenge more than an arbitrary requirement.
  • The Army cancelled the program when a rotor shed parts in a whirl-mode failure; Johnson believed the cause was identified and fixable, and that the funds later spent on a lesser helicopter could have procured 450 Cheyennes.
• Johnson’s 14 rules for the Skunk Works—codified when the Army formally asked him to brief competing contractors bidding a Division Air Defense gun program—require the contractor manager to report to a division president or higher, a small military counterpart office, restriction of participants to 10-25 percent of normal staffing, minimal reports, monthly cost reviews, and pay-for-performance not based on headcount.
  • “Rule 9 specifically mandates that the contractor must test the final product in flight: ‘When the day comes, if ever, when we do not have responsibility and authority to test the airplanes as we design them, then from that day on our design ability diminishes.’” —Kelly Johnson
  • Rule 14 requires pay-not-based-on-headcount to prevent the universal incentive of hiring more people to justify larger salaries and more authority.

Farewell, Sweetheart

Johnson’s decade-long marriage to his administrative assistant Maryellen Meade—marked by her progressive blindness, kidney failure, amputations, and ultimate death in 1980 after five major operations in a single year—prompted him to fund a hospital hospice for families of critical patients and, within a month of Maryellen’s burial, to marry Nancy Horrigan, who had been their companion through the ordeal.

• Maryellen’s diabetes-driven cascade of complications—progressive blindness despite hundreds of laser treatments, kidney failure, a transplant requiring years of rejection treatment, and ultimately leg amputation—represented a decade of medical crisis that Johnson managed personally, including administering multiple daily insulin injections calibrated by an electronic blood sugar monitor he purchased.
  • Maryellen underwent five major operations in one year; her sister donated both a kidney and later part of her pancreas, the latter being rejected within two weeks.
  • In 1975, Johnson took partial retirement to accompany Maryellen to medical appointments, seeing three to seven doctors weekly at peak periods.
• Johnson funded a hospice at St. Joseph’s Medical Center in Burbank specifically to provide sleeping rooms and basic facilities for family members of hospitalized patients—a direct response to his own experience of having loved ones in intensive care without any place for accompanying family to rest or stay.
  • The planned facility had about 20 simply-appointed rooms with telephone and bathing facilities, intended to be operational by the mid-1980s.
  • Maryellen died in Encino on October 13, 1980; Johnson proposed to Nancy Horrigan one month later, explaining ‘I had done my mourning for Maryellen through the last years of suffering with her.’

Defending Ourselves

Johnson argues that U.S. defense policy is dangerously misconfigured—selling critical technology to Russia, canceling superior interceptors based on flawed threat assessments, failing to build titanium processing infrastructure, and preparing to refight the last war—while the real future of warfare lies in satellites, lasers, particle weapons, and unmanned systems that make the manned bomber increasingly unjustifiable.

• U.S. technology transfer to the Soviet Union has directly undermined national security: concrete hardness testers, gear-shaping equipment that made U.S. submarines quiet, ball-bearing grinding machines improving missile accuracy by a factor of eight to ten, and power switching gear capable of generating the nanosecond pulses needed for charged-particle weapons were all sold to Russia.
  • The Air Force received an award for the size of a C-5 cargo load of switching gear delivered to Russia—gear that could transfer tremendous power in nanoseconds, fundamental to magnetohydrodynamic weapons Russia was then developing.
  • Johnson protested the proposed sale of three Lockheed L-1011 transports to Russia, which would have provided complete drawings and manuals including the world’s only advanced automatic blind-landing system potentially useful for all-weather bombers.
• Russian submarines represent a serious naval threat the U.S. is poorly positioned to address: they are bigger, faster (50 mph vs. U.S. speeds), deeper-diving, and more numerous than American submarines, with titanium hulls that resist magnetic detection—and Russia can build them because they have the large forging presses the U.S. lacks.
  • Johnson’s crusade for a 250,000-ton forging press—five times larger than any in the U.S.—is motivated both by submarine hull production and by the waste of machining away 90 percent of rough titanium forgings for SR-71 nacelle rings.
  • ASW aircraft originated with the Hudson in WWII, when an RAF plane captured the first submarine; Lockheed has since built more ASW aircraft than all other companies combined, including the carrier-based S-3A.
• Johnson’s operations analysis of bomber penetration into Soviet territory—comparing subsonic low-altitude and Mach 3 high-altitude approaches—concluded that loss rates of 35 percent for the former versus much higher survivability for the latter still fail to answer the fundamental question: why send a man at all when missile accuracy makes the bomber redundant, except possibly for reconnaissance.
  • “Johnson: ‘If we can get the accuracy we expect from intercontinental missiles, I see little reason for sending a man on the attack mission. A familiar argument is that the bomber can be recalled. Well, the missile can be blown up en route with a radio signal.’” —Kelly Johnson
  • The D-21 drone—the fourth Blackbird—flies higher, faster, and farther than the manned versions, representing Johnson’s conclusion that ‘as our equipment becomes smarter, more powerful, more sophisticated, I wonder about the need always for a man in it.’

Technology and Tomorrow

Johnson forecasts that by 2000, space-based laser and charged-particle weapons will be the primary defense against nuclear missiles, stealth technology will define aerial warfare, and commercial aviation will see no dramatic changes beyond second-generation jets—while warning that the U.S. SST was wisely cancelled given fuel economics, and the crop duster may ultimately matter more to more people than any military aircraft.

• Space-based laser weapons—required because atmospheric absorption cripples ground-based systems—will provide the first practical defense against nuclear missiles by 2000, operated from roughly two dozen satellites that can switch between hundreds of targets in their launch and boost phases, but the guidance technology requires the world’s best computer systems and the U.S. must protect those satellites from Russian particle weapons.
  • Charged-particle weapons—essentially magnetohydrodynamic generators creating electron flow at temperatures of hundreds of millions of degrees for nanoseconds—represent the other major weapons development, with Russia reportedly four to five times more active in the field than the U.S.
  • The switching gear sold to Russia enables the power-transfer capability fundamental to charged-particle weapons generation—a technology export Johnson considers among the most damaging to U.S. security.
• Stealth technology—which Johnson introduced on the Blackbirds and which depends on incorporating low-radar-cross-section design from the very first three-view drawing—will define future aerial warfare, but its spread through the industry via highly-paid retired Skunk Works employees accepting consultant positions at competitors reflects the inevitable commercial diffusion of breakthrough technology.
  • ‘Stealth’ must be designed into the airplane from the beginning to be effective—attempts to retrofit it to the U-2 after the aircraft was already in operation got nowhere.
  • Recent retirees from the Skunk Works and certain key agencies were commanding up to 60 percent salary premiums plus stock options and bonuses at competitors, all sharing the common thread of having worked on Stealth technology.
• The supersonic transport was wisely not developed in the 1960s because it would have hit the fuel crisis head-on; the Lockheed SST proposal—essentially a three-times scale of the SR-71 with narrow fuselage—lost to Boeing, whose design at cancellation still lacked transatlantic range by 700 miles, though Johnson proposes mid-air refueling could make the Concorde viable today.
  • Johnson proposes that the Concorde could take off lightly fueled from Los Angeles, refuel over Hudson’s Bay from an obsolete tanker, and fly nonstop to London without the noisy afterburner needed for a fully-fueled takeoff—acknowledging this is unlikely to happen.
  • The hypersonic transport is even less viable commercially: 37 percent of flight distance would be spent accelerating to cruise speed and 30 percent cruising, leaving little payload-carrying efficiency relative to fuel consumed.
• Johnson’s unexpected conclusion is that the most important airplane for humanity’s future is not a bomber or transport but the crop duster—essential for feeding a growing world population, maintaining ecology, fighting fires, seeding fields, and potentially spraying to accelerate radiation diminution after nuclear events.
  • The crop duster represents Johnson’s belief that aviation’s greatest contribution may be to peaceful purposes rather than the military and commercial applications that defined his career.
  • Johnson’s personal clean bomb concept—a 2,500-pound tool-steel shape dropped from an SR-71 that would hit sea level above Mach 3 and penetrate 33 feet of reinforced concrete or sink a capital ship without explosives—represents the offensive military corollary: precise lethality without the destructive byproducts of conventional weapons.

A Good Life

Johnson’s closing chapter uses the annual Star Lane cattle branding roundup—with its 70-year-old ropers, barbecue under ancient oaks, and poker games—to frame a life that has come full circle from the boy in Ishpeming who found beauty in iron ore trains and his forest hideaway, now expressed in the same elements ‘just a lot fancier and more of them.’

• Star Lane Ranch provides Johnson the same essential satisfactions as his Ishpeming boyhood—outdoor work, machinery maintenance, animal companionship, and a personal library—but at a scale reflecting his success: 2,000 acres, 300 head of Herefords, a 40-by-120-foot fully-equipped shop, and seven wells with windmills he painted yellow ’like daisies.’
  • Johnson designed the ranch shop with a 22-foot gabled roof stressed to 6,000-pound hoisting loads, wind doors rated to 140 mph, and earthquake bracing at one-quarter unit of gravity—applying the same engineering rigor to farm infrastructure as to aircraft.
  • He keeps all six tractors, four trucks, hay baler, and farm equipment running himself, estimating this cuts ranch operating expenses roughly in half.
• Johnson’s intellectual recreation during lap swimming—posing himself Jules Verne survival problems like manufacturing an airplane from raw ore on an island with only ranch tools—reveals that his engineering imagination never separated from play, just as his boyhood fantasizing as Tom Swift never separated from his professional ambitions.
  • Johnson’s two real-world heroes are Charles Kettering of GM Research, whose electric automobile starter he admired for following invention through to practicality, and Thomas Edison, whose tenacity in pursuing goals and fearlessness about criticism Johnson explicitly models.
  • He concludes that if called tonight he will have had more than his share of poverty and wealth, struggle and success, sorrow and joy—a summation that returns to the tone of the boy carrying laundry down back alleys in Ishpeming who vowed to return by the best streets.