Skunk Works

Rockwell was already on the ropes because of the loss of the B-1, and if Northrop was forced to endure big layoffs and big losses with no project in sight to turn things around, the impact would devastate the aerospace business and create economic and political turmoil. Carter and the Democrats were standing in the middle of a thawing lake watching the ice crack all around them.

Because of stealth, we in the Skunk Works had actually prospered under the Democrats. In fact, during his final months in office before the Reagan team took over, Bill Perry was deeply concerned that we in the Skunk Works were overextended with stealth projects and were underestimating the demands involved on our facilities and workforce if we won the bomber competition. About two weeks before Reagan’s inauguration, Bill called me to offer guidance. “Ben,” he cautioned, “this project will be too big for you to handle in the usual Skunk Works way. The Air Force will want five bombers a month. You’ll need ten times the space and workforce. I just don’t think you can go it alone. Get yourself a partner and team up.”

His suggestion made sense, and I phoned Buzz Hello, who was head of Rockwell’s aircraft division, which had been decimated by the administration’s decision to cancel the B-1 and had thousands of square feet of empty floor space at its big assembly plant in Palmdale, about sixty miles from Burbank. I enjoyed pleasant relations with Hello, and using his giant facilities would save us a fortune. And he had on payroll a lot of skilled workers who had already been security cleared by working on the B-1. Hello was extremely receptive to my call and agreed to become my partner on the stealth bomber. Five minutes after I hung up, Hello received a call from Northrop’s CEO, Tom Jones, asking him to be Northrop’s partner on the same project. Jones was furious that I had beaten him to Rockwell and partnered with Boeing instead.

Teaming up was a great way to economize and cut financial risks, but it was also tricky. Today’s teammate was tomorrow’s competitor and there was a natural reluctance on both sides to share certain state-of-the-art technology or advanced production techniques. I took thirty of Buzz Hello’s bomber engineers and brought in Lockheed’s best program manager, Dick Heppe, to take charge for us, figuring that after we won the competition, Lockheed’s main plant would share a lot of the B-2’s production with Rockwell.

After Perry left, it didn’t take long for the project to change drastically. He was barely out the door when all the Air Force stealth programs were moved out of the Pentagon to Wright Field in Dayton, under General Al Slay, head of the Air Force Systems Command. Slay was a true believer in the new stealth technology, but he immediately changed the game plan. He was not at all interested in our original requirement for a medium-size bomber; he wanted a big bomber with expanded payload and weapons capability and a six-thousand-mile range. We rushed back to the drawing board to meet his demands.

The funding for the competition came out of a secret stash in the Air Force budget. A young colonel working in the Air Force “black program” office at the Pentagon, named Buz Carpenter, arbitrarily assigned the funding the code name Aurora. Somehow this name leaked out during congressional appropriations hearings, the media picked up the Aurora item in the budget, and the rumor surfaced that it was a top secret project assigned to the Skunk Works—to build America’s first hypersonic airplane. That story persists to this day even though Aurora was the code name for the B-2 competition funding. Although I expect few in the media to believe me, there is no code name for the hypersonic plane, because it simply does not exist.

Northrop’s design team and mine worked in total ignorance of what the other side was doing. But following basic laws of physics, they came up with strikingly similar designs—a flying-wing shape, a type that Jack Northrop, the company’s founder, pioneered in the 1940s. Unfortunately, he was not able to create aerodynamic stability in the age before sophisticated computerized avionics, so his flying wing never really got off the ground. Our designers and Northrop’s had no problem making our wings fly and concluded that this unusual boomerang shape afforded the lowest radar return head-on and provided the favorable lift-over-drag ratio necessary for fuel efficiency in long-range flight.

I had absolutely no idea that we and Northrop were designing the same basic airplane shape until Gene Fubini, head of the Defense Science Board, came to visit me at the Skunk Works and saw a model of our stealth bomber on my desk and gasped, “How in hell did you get a model of the Northrop stealth bomber?” When Fubini saw my amazed look, he knew he had spoken indiscreetly.