Skunk Works

The final flight occurred two weeks later. This time our bird was tracked nineteen hundred miles into China and then disappeared from the screen. The reason was never determined. No other flights were attempted. The complex logistics surrounding each flight, involving recovery ships and rendezvous aircraft, cost a bloody fortune to stage. We were canceled in mid-1972.

And Kelly was bitter about it. “I’m not one to find scapegoats,” he told me at the time, “but one reason why we had failures over China is that the birds we used had been stored up at Beale Air Force Base for nine months before the missions were authorized. The blue-suiters had 160 people there assigned to this program. Each of them had a salary to justify and took our drone apart frequently after our final checkouts here, just to put it back together again. And by so doing, they screwed up the works. We should have had the Skunk Works doing complete field service and even fly the actual missions and launch those birds. I’m telling you, Ben, that would have made all the difference in the world.”

The end came in the form of a Defense Department telegram to Kelly on July 8, 1971, informing him that Tagboard had been canceled and ordering him to destroy all of its tooling. Still, we felt pride in the high degree of performance obtained for such a low cost.

On a February day fifteen years later, a CIA operative came to see me at the Skunk Works carrying a panel, which he plopped down on my desk. “Ben, do you recognize this?”

I grinned. “Sure I do. Where did you get it?”

The CIA guy laughed. “Believe it or not, I got it as a Christmas gift from a Soviet KGB agent. He told me this piece was found by a shepherd in Soviet Siberia.”

Actually, it was from the first D-21 mission into China in November 1969, when the drone flew off course into Soviet Siberia before running out of fuel.

The panel was from the drone’s engine mount. It was made from composite material loaded for radar absorption and looked as if it had been made just yesterday. The Russians mistakenly believed that this generation-old panel signified our current stealth technology. It was, in a way, a very nice tribute to our work on Tagboard.

13 THE SHIP THAT NEVER WAS

IN THE SPRING of 1978, while we were developing our model for the first stealth airplane, our project photographer stopped me in the hall to complain about defects in a new Polaroid camera we had recently purchased. “I’ve been taking instant view shots of the stealth model, and I’m getting very fuzzy pictures. I think I’ve got a defective lens,” he remarked. I slapped my head, knowing we had accidentally stumbled onto an exciting development. “Time out! There isn’t a damn thing wrong with your new camera,” I insisted. “Polaroid uses a sound echo device like sonar to focus, and you are getting fuzzy pictures because our stealthy coatings and shaping on that model are interfering with the sound echo.”

I was always on the prowl, looking for new ideas to expand or exploit technologies we were developing. A stealth airplane was our goal. But how about a stealthy submarine that would be undetectable on sonar? If we had avoided the sonar device built into a Polaroid camera, why couldn’t we avoid sonar returns against submarines or even surface ships specially treated and shaped to escape detection? I had a couple of our engineers buy a small model submarine, put faceted fairings on it, and test it in a sonic chamber. Even with such a crude test setup, we discovered that we had reduced the sonar return from that model sub by three orders of magnitude. In the engineering game, improving anything by a single order of magnitude—ten times better—is a very big deal, usually worth a nice bonus or at least a bottle of champagne. Three orders of magnitude is one thousand times better. That’s worth a fortune, a medal, or both, but is as rare an occurrence as an astronomer discovering a new constellation.