Kelly’s motto was “Be quick, be quiet, be on time.”
He just couldn’t see the logic. So I told him the story of the kid who proudly tells his father that he saved a quarter by running alongside a bus rather than taking it. The father slapped the kid on the head for not running next to a taxi and saving a buck fifty. Alain didn’t get it.
“Don’t try to ape me,” Kelly had advised me. “Don’t try to take credit for the airplanes I built. Go build your own. And don’t build an airplane you don’t really believe in. Don’t prostitute yourself or the reputation of the Skunk Works. Do what’s right by sticking to your convictions and you’ll do okay.”
basics of fundamental aerodynamics were tossed aside in deference to a new technology understood only by witches and mathematical gnomes.
I was informed by a telegram from the Air Force chief of staff that Have Blue was now classified “Top Secret—Special Access Required.” That security classification was rare—clamped only on such sensitive programs as the Manhattan Project,
The management approach we evolved was unique and marvelous. Once a month, I’d meet with Dr. Perry at the Pentagon and inform him about decisions we required from him as Under Secretary of Defense. Sometimes he agreed, sometimes not, but we never had delays or time wasted with goddam useless meetings. Because we were so highly classified, the bureaucracy was cut out and that made a tremendous difference.
Kelly evolved his own unorthodox security methods, which worked beautifully in the early days of the 1950s. We never stamped a security classification on any paperwork. That way, nobody was curious to read it.
security’s dragnet poked and prodded into every nook and cranny of our operation. Keith Beswick, head of our flight test operations, designed a coffee mug for his crew with a clever logo showing the nose of Have Blue peeking from one end of a big cloud with a skunk’s tail sticking out the back end. Because of the picture of the airplane’s nose, security classified the mugs as top secret. Beswick and his people had to lock them away in a safe between coffee breaks.
howled to the winds. Our accounting office was becoming apoplectic.
Boeing, in Seattle, was reaping the biggest bonanza in its history during the first years of the 1980s, filling orders from the major airlines to invest in the next generation of 727s, 737s, and 747s. One airliner a day was rolling out of the huge Boeing complex.
I might be cleared for top secret, but I was also on a government contract and that meant conforming to all sorts of mandatory guidelines and stiff regulations. Kelly had operated in a paradise of innocence, long before EPA, OSHA, EEOC, or affirmative action and minority hiring policies became the laws of our land. I was forced by law to buy two percent of my materials from minority or disadvantaged businesses, but many of them couldn’t meet my security requirements. I also had to address EEOC requirements on equal employment opportunity and comply with other laws that required hiring a certain number of the disabled. Burbank was in a high-Latino community and I was challenged as to why I didn’t employ any Latino engineers. “Because they didn’t go to engineering school” was my only reply. If I didn’t comply I could lose my contract, its high priority notwithstanding.
We had barely any experience working with new exotic materials being used for the airplane’s outer skin. The radar-absorbing ferrite sheeting and paints required special precautions for the workers. OSHA demanded sixty-five different masks and dozens of types of work shoes on stealth alone. I was told by OSHA that no worker with a beard was allowed to use a mask while spray coating. Imagine if I told a union rep that the Skunk Works would not hire bearded employees—they’d have hung me in effigy.
we were very careful how we used hazardous materials, but because of proprietary considerations I could not reveal in public the composition of our materials, which our competitors would be as eager to discover as the Kremlin. In desperation I called the Secretary of the Air Force to get those OSHA inspectors off my back. I was told, that’s too hot for us to tackle, thank you very much.
This inspector came out and nickel-and-dimed me into a total of two million bucks in fines for no fewer than seven thousand OSHA violations.
Toward the end of the stealth project I had nearly forty auditors living with me inside our plant, watching every move we made on all security and contract matters. The chief auditor came to me during a plant visit and said, “Mr. Rich, let’s get something straight: I don’t give a damn if you turn out scrap. It’s far more important that you turn out the forms we require.”
The rule of thumb in the aerospace business was the more you build, the better you get at it. Our view was that efficiency was mostly the result of quality training, careful inspection, supervision, and high worker motivation.
I climbed into my airplane shortly after midnight. Frankly, I don’t think you could have driven a needle up my sphincter using a sledgehammer
I graduated from Berkeley in mechanical engineering in 1949, in the top twenty in a class of three thousand, and decided to go on for my master’s at UCLA, specializing in both aerothermodynamics and dating sorority girls.
One day, one of the engineers showed up for work wearing a civil defense gas mask as a gag, and a designer named Irv Culver picked up a ringing phone and announced, “Skonk Works.” Kelly overheard him and chewed out Irv for ridicule: “Culver, you’re fired,” Kelly roared. “Get your ass out of my tent.” Kelly fired guys all the time without meaning it. Irv Culver showed up for work the next day and Kelly never said a word.
Once that guy made up his mind to do something he was as relentless as a bowling ball heading toward a ten-pin strike. With his chili-pepper temperament, he was poison to any bureaucrat, a disaster to ass-coverers, excuse-makers, or fault-finders.
I quickly learned that Kelly had blind spots about certain people that could never be changed. For instance, I observed that he was particularly harsh in his dealings with a couple of engineers whom I considered to be extraordinarily good, and in my youthful naivete it never dawned on me that there might have been jealousy at play.
The CIA was so desperate to buy time for these Soviet overflights that Bissell got Kelly to sequester four of our test flight engineers and have them write a bogus flight manual for a U-2 twice as heavy as ours and with a maximum altitude of only fifty thousand feet that carried only scientific weather gear in its bay. The manual included phony instrument panel photos with altered markings for speed, altitude, and load factor limits. Four copies were produced and then artificially aged with grease, coffee stains, and cigarette burns. How or if the agency got them into Soviet hands only Mr. B knew, and he never told.
Ironically, the two governments, in their abiding hostility, were collaborating to keep these flights secret from the public. Because if they were ever revealed, the Russians would have to present us with an ultimatum and admit that they were impotent in stopping these flights over their territory. It must have been terribly upsetting inside the Kremlin knowing that the enemy could overfly with impunity.
“I want answers, not excuses about why we can’t do this,” Kelly told me and shoved me out the door.
Kelly surrounded himself only with the kind of can-do guys that made American aerospace technology preeminent.
Kelly surrounded himself only with the kind of can-do guys that made American aerospace technology preeminent. To him, the word “impossible” was a gross insult.
We would even be forced to manufacture our own titanium screws and rivets. By the time the project ended, we had manufactured on our own thirteen million separate parts.
In order to fly at ninety thousand feet I had to be checked out in the pressure suit in an altitude chamber, in case we lost cabin pressure or I was forced to eject in an emergency. The chances that I would experience such calamities were near zero since I would have already dropped dead from fright.
At the highest levels, the Navy brass was equally unenthusiastic about the small number of stealth ships they would need to defend carrier task forces. Too few to do anyone’s career much good in terms of power or prestige. The carrier task force people didn’t like the stealth ship because it reminded everyone how vulnerable their hulking ships really were.
One of the biggest problems we had to overcome was our own extreme invisibility! The ocean waves showed up on radar like a string of tracer bullets. And if the ship was totally invisible, it looked like a blank spot—like a hole in the doughnut—that was a dead giveaway. In the stealth business, you tried like the devil not to be quieter than the background noise, because that was like a trumpet-blast warning to the enemy.
The curse of operating inside a top secret world is that very few in the aerospace industry knew you even existed.
He backed me even though he insisted that it would be a complete waste of my time. “I’ll teach you all you need to know about running a company in one afternoon, and we’ll both go home early to boot.
You don’t need Harvard to teach you that it’s more important to listen than to talk.
even a timely wrong decision is better than no decision.
don’t half-heartedly wound problems—kill them dead.
“Ben, if I teach you anything, it’s this: don’t build an airplane you don’t believe in. Don’t prostitute yourself for bucks.”
In the mere act of trying to please him and live up to his expectations, I became twice the man I otherwise would have been. Like all the rest of us at the Skunk Works, I ran my heart out just to keep up with him.
Do the virtuous get their just rewards? The short answer is not if they’re dealing with the Pentagon on a regular basis.
Their stealth guru was a bearded maverick named John Cashen, a shrewd and tough competitor, who once told me over a few friendly beers that if he had a choice between going to bed with the world’s most beautiful woman or beating the Skunk Works out of a contract, he would not hesitate for a second knowing which to choose. “I’d rather screw Ben Rich any time,” John chuckled.
When we began testing our stealth fighter, the combined Lockheed and Air Force personnel involved totaled 240 persons. There are more than two thousand Air Force auditors, engineers, and official kibitzers crawling all over that troubled B-2 assembly building in Palmdale. What are they doing? Compiling one million sheets of paper every day—reports and data that no one in the bureaucracy has either the time or the interest to read.
The Drug Enforcement Agency has 1,200 enforcement agents out in the field fighting the drug trafficking problem. The DOD employs 27,000 auditors.
We don’t need to be ruthless to save costs, but why build the luxury model when the Chevy would do just as well? Build it right the first time, but don’t build it to last forever.
This same sort of Skunk Works’ cost-reduction thinking could extend to airplane tires arid other parts. Why, for example, must tires last for one thousand landings? If we mass-produced them at somewhat lower standards, we could throw away airplane tires after ten landings and still save money.
General Electric’s jet engine plant at Evendale, Ohio, sells its engines to the commercial airlines for 20 percent less than to the Air Force. Price gouging? No. But the Air Force insists on having three hundred inspectors working the production line for its engines.
The commercial airlines have no outside inspectors slowing down production and escalating costs. Instead, the airline industry relies entirely on GE’s engine warranty, a guarantee that the engine will function properly or GE will be required to pay a penalty as well as all costs for replacement, repairs, and time lost. Why can’t the Air Force operate with similar guarantees
For instance, two Air Force SR-71 Blackbirds based in England throughout the 1970s used Skunk Works maintenance. We had on hand a thirty-five-man crew. By contrast, two Air Force Blackbirds based at Kadena on Okinawa relied on only blue-suiter ground crews, which totaled six hundred personnel. Contractors can cross-train and keep personnel on site for years, whereas the military rotates people every three years, and valuable experience is lost.
Another frustrating example was the stubborn insistence of the Air Force to have its insignia painted on the wings and fuselage of the SR-71 Blackbird, even though no one would ever see it at eighty-five thousand feet; finding a way to keep the enamel from burning off under the enormous surface temperatures and maintain its true red, white, and blue colors took our chief chemist, Mel George, weeks of experimentation and cost the government thousands of unnecessary dollars. After we succeeded, the Air Force decided that the white on the emblem against the all-black fuselage was too easy to spot from the ground, so we repainted it pink. Air Force regulations also forced us to certify that the Blackbird could pass the Arizona road-dust test!
An Air Force general in procurement at the Pentagon once confided to me that his office handled thirty-three million pieces of paper every month—over one million per day. He admitted that there was no way his large office staff could begin to handle that kind of paper volume, much less read it.
General Dynamics is forced by regulations to store ninety-two thousand boxes of data for their F-16 fighter program alone. They pay. rent on a fifty-thousand-square-foot warehouse, pay the salaries of employees to maintain, guard, and store these unread and useless boxes, and send the bill to the Air Force and you and me.
There is so much unnecessary red tape that by one estimate only 45 percent of a procurement budget actually is spent producing the hardware.
Nevertheless, excessive government regulation is the penalty we now pay for years of overpromising and lax management in aerospace. At the heart of the defense industry problem was a recognition that if we bid unrealistically low to get a project, the government would willingly make up the difference down the line by supplying additional funding to meet increasing production costs. And it would do so without penalties.
We believe that trouble-free relationships with old suppliers will ultimately keep the price of our products lower than if we were to periodically put their contracts up for the lowest bid.
What was secret in 1964 often is probably not even worth knowing about in 1994.
Under existing laws if a company actually brings in a project at considerably less cost than called for in the original contract, it faces formidable fines and penalties for overbidding the project. Not much motivation to save time and money, is there?
The lesson is that there is no substitute for astute managerial skills on any project. In the absence of effective managers, complex projects unravel.
Leaders are natural born; managers must be trained.
We made every shop worker who designed or handled a part responsible for quality control. Any worker—not just a supervisor or a manager—could send back a part that didn’t meet his or her standards.