Skunk Works

By the time we were ready for full-scale testing in the early summer of 1985, the Navy was eager to subject our prototype to the most rigorous radar testing imaginable. Several of their radar experts claimed that there was no way we could duplicate the low radar cross section achieved by a thirty-foot model in a pool with a full-size prototype on the real ocean. We had heard those same skeptical predictions before from the Air Force over our stealth airplane, but in the wonderful world of stealth, once we had acquired the right shape, the size of an object really didn’t matter. The military had a tough time understanding that basic fact.

The barge, with Sea Shadow cocooned inside for secrecy, was towed from Sunnyvale in Northern California down to Long Beach to begin its tests in the dead of night, off Santa Cruz Island, where we had constructed a radar installation. We sailed our ship against the most advanced Navy hunter planes. To make certain that their radar detectors were functioning by the book, we placed submarine periscopes in the ocean at the nautical mile range where the plane’s onboard radar would first be expected to detect them. The radar worked predictably, picking up the radar signature of the periscope at the expected range. Then the airplanes flew on, seeking our ship. On one typical night of testing, the Navy sub-hunter airplanes made fifty-seven passes at us and detected the ship only twice—both times at a mile-and-a-half distance, so that we would have shot them down easily long before they spotted us. Several times, we actually provided the exact location to the pilots and they still could not pick us up on their radar.

These kinds of tests went on for nearly a year and often were conducted under the scrutiny of Soviet trawlers snooping in the open seas off the Channel Islands, about sixty miles southwest of Santa Barbara. To keep local fishing boats and any curious yachtsmen away, the Coast Guard leaked the word that they were escalating stop-and-search procedures against potential drug smugglers in the ship lanes we were using. Boat traffic miraculously vanished.

The tests began an hour after sunset and lasted until an hour before sunrise. Then Sea Shadow was docked inside the barge and tugged back to Long Beach. But the long, strenuous months of testing confirmed most of our original stealth predictions. 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.

By the time we solved this problem, however, the admirals who ran the surface fleet were displaying little enthusiasm for going any speed ahead. “Too radical a design,” they told me. “If the shape is so revolutionary and secret, how could we ever use it without hundreds of sailors seeing it? It’s just too far out.” There were sexier ways of spending naval appropriations than on a small secret ship that would win few political brownie points for any admiral who pushed for it. Although the Navy did apply our technology to lower the cross section of submarine periscopes and reduce the radar cross section of their new class of destroyers, we were drydocked before we had really got launched. So I held back: I had a design for a stealthy aircraft carrier that would show up on radar no bigger than a life raft, but I had already proven Kelly’s unwritten Rule Fifteen about dealing with the Navy. Why ignore it twice?

14 THE LONG GOODBYE

IN THE EARLY SUMMER of 1972, an executive of Northrop Aircraft Company, whom I’ll call Fred Lawrence, invited me to dinner and offered me a terrific job.

“Ben,” he said, “we are planning to build a lightweight single-engine fighter. We’ve never done a single-engine jet before, and we want you to set up a Skunk Works for us with you as our Kelly Johnson.”

“Why me?” I asked, truly amazed. I could think of three or four veterans of our Skunk Works who had a world of managerial and practical experience greater than my own. For openers, our vice president, Rus Daniell, had been a project manager before I was even hired at Lockheed, and on the basis of seniority would certainly appear to be more qualified than I was. I was then forty-seven years old, working as Kelly’s assistant chief engineer, in charge of aerodynamics and all the flight sciences. I had about forty-five people working for me and was earning sixty grand. I was doing dandy, without any real future aspirations.