F-117A Skunk Works, First Flight Chief Test Pilot, Hal Farley - FULL PROGRAM

my name is Harold Carlson Farley jr. and I was raised under the name of Carlson when my wife gets serious she calls me Carlson but everybody else calls me hell and I got that from the military as being Harold to hell skunkworks back in 1943 I believe it was the United States Air Force realized that the Germans were fielding a new jet airplane called the me-262 a twin-engine jet that that was capable of reaching our long-range bombers of the b-17s so they felt that they needed a jet airplane we needed a jet airplane for the Air Force and so they contacted Lockheed for the job I'm not sure exactly if what their motivation was to come to Lockheed but Kelly Johnson was a pretty well known airplane designer and had been instrumental in the p38 which was a first front line fighter in the end the war anyway they came and they said we need an airplane in five months a jet airplane in five months and Kelly Johnson who was a well thought of the young engineer who had a very strong personality and a great amount of leadership capability and very strong very strong man he he said I'll take on the job it has to be done by my rules he had 14 basic sets of rules I can't name all 14 of them but a two or three of them are important one he gets to select the very best people he has in the whole company number two he reports directly to the company president three nobody else interferes with the project at all it's his project and he's the boss and the rest of the people in the Scott works are workers anyway that of the rules that he set up for taking on that project and mmm it took the Air Force a month to deliver the proposal but in the meantime he'd already started working on the airplane knowing full well he was going to be doing it and they managed to deliver the airplane and in 143 days that comes out a bit shorter than five months four months in some days which was pretty phenomenal when you think about it and it was a pretty advanced airplane it was the xp80 and made his first flight in 1943 and the piloted controls was a fella by the name of Milo Burcham who was later killed in an accident that was how the skunkworks got its start and its reputation of being able to do a job quickly on time and under cost well the name skunkworks was from the little Abner comic strip were can't remember the character but he was up in the woods and he would brew up this Kickapoo joy juice some white lightning I guess and that smell bad and there was some odors that were in the hangar area of Burbank there and so one day one of the engineers answered the phone and and said the skunk works which was spelled sk o NK and everybody started calling skunk works but the creator of little Abner said no you can't use that name and went to court over I guess we probably conceded I don't remember there's any details of that but we changed from skunk works to skunk works and that's stuck and we've always had the emblem of a skunk on the tail of the airplanes the year I joined the skunk works was 1978 and the I joined by because I had been working with a fellow dr. ken Stewart he had a PhD in plasma physics and he and I had been working on a new head-up display for the f-14 I was working for Grumman at that time and me notes to me was also assigned to the head-up display for the new stealth fighter that was being developed at the skunk works I read in the newspaper in the Los Angeles Times a very short paragraph that said a pilot had been injured in the desert his name was Bill Park William Park and there was no details in that little thing that little clip and I always remember reading that and realizing or thinking that's very unusual there was there's something going on up in the desert that that they're not telling anything about but they had to say something about the accident it was my future boss who was in that accident and he needed a pilot because he had injured himself pretty bad he had asked some people around and kinstant recommended me he called me one day he was very abrupt on the telephone he said my name is Bill Park he said all right would you be interested in a job at Lockheed and I said why you have to tell me something about it well he said he sits at the skunk works you know the skunk works as a magic word among pilots and I was immediately interested when he said that I said yeah I would be nursing if you tell me something bad he said well I'll call you back and that was the end of that conversation for about three weeks I figured it went away and went and wasn't coming back but he did call me back and he said have you thought about it I said yeah yeah I said I would be interested and he he said our ID said I'd like for you to come down for an interview he said but I don't want you to come to the company I want you to come to my house and so I said okay he gave me the address and it was down in Westwood the house was on the golf course in in Westwood down in the high-rent district of LA and it was a gorgeous home and I mean it was it was a beautiful home and there was nobody there his wife went there she was somewhere else and he greeted me and I came in and and we had our chat and when I left I said man those guys must pay a lot of money it turns out that Bill and his wife were really good at real estate but that was how I got introduced to the skunkworks took about three months to get a clearance I had a secret clearance from grumman but this was secret special access required which is a couple of levels above secret to be able to access this program so I was placed in the penalty box they called it until the clearance came through and then when it would came through they then would could introduce me to what it was we were going to fly and and I remember Alan brown was one of the senior engineers and he took me into a room and that drawings were up on the on the wall regular blueprint drawings and he said what do you think of that and if you as you know it's a very unusual looking airplane and it's very highly swept angles and my first thought was the darn thing must be a reentry vehicle and had to be something like that and then he explained to me what it was for and there was to evade radar and I really didn't pick up on how important that was at the time I thought that was ok good its evade radar how well does it fly is that a real fighter can we shoot sing down with it you know otherwise what a pilot wants to do is be able to maneuver his airplane well and and it turns out the airplane is pretty you know low performance relatively speaking to the current day fighters and so that's how I was introduced to the airplane and then I was assigned to the weapon system to work on the displays with my old friend Ken from Grumman who was working down there at Lockheed and at grow at the same time well the first prototype was on the floor what was available was the wooden mock-up they had a complete wooden mock-up full-scale wooden mock-up that we're using to to do the wire runs and this is really crude you know manufacturing process quite a few years ago but they were using this wooden mock-up to to place displays in the cockpit to locate boxes and you know that see if they would fit and we also had offices right alongside that and we had people that were working on the displace and and and I was assigned to the to the cockpit at this place and we had two other pilots that were working on other aspects of the airplane as well with the engineers I think it was for two reasons one I had been a test pilot in industry for a number of years and the other fellows had come directly from the military it isn't that you can fly any better it's just that how do you deal with engineering and and and the company and I was I think better prepared to do that than the Air Force guys that were and another Navy guy that came in I think that was one of the reasons and the other reason is I worked like the devil well worked hard because I wanted to be the project pilot on it and I was selected that that's what I think was the reason in order to be able to be the project pilot and the first flight pilot on the competition for that is intense you want to be the guy that gets the job and and you work hard and that's that's that you work with engineering you work with and you and you're flying we are flying at the time we were flying airplanes like t-38s and so you're being evaluated by the boss and and also the customer it is something that I don't know how to describe it any other way it's an intense process the secrecy the classification of the program was at the same level as the Manhattan Project that was how how secret it was and it was very successful if you recall we spent many years working and actually having the airplane and operational readiness and not many people knew anything about it and so it was highly classified remotely developed a lot of time away from family we spent usually six day weeks and we would leave home and come back after Friday or Saturday night and then turn around and go back out Monday morning for well I guess probably the first year and a half was that we were separated that much my wife knew I was flying I mean that was my job but that was all I could tell her I couldn't tell her what I was flying where we were we had a special arrangement secure telephones so we could call home through the office fairly regularly and and not have to worry you know just to check in and see how everything's going as as the hot water heater broken down or whatever but yeah it was it was pretty strenuous on the family life people that I associated with knew that know that know about this cup works they know you're going to say I can't tell you there's nothing I can I can tell you about it I can't say I can say this the Air Force we're flying a sevens as a cover airplane they had a squadron of him at Nellis Air Force Base which were supposedly working on some advanced system and they were they were kind of secret but that's where the Air Force was they used the a7 as their cover story our cover story was just simply we just didn't talk about it the security that was established within the skunkworks the security or the classification culture of the skunkworks was developed by Kelly and again and and back to the little bit about that initial airplane that he built the xp80 that started this cop works one of the requirements was it had to be top-secret and one of the reasons for that is it keeps other people out that was one of the tools to keep other people from becoming involved with the program from becoming a bureaucracy so the skunkworks security is was established out of common sense for example if you put a guard out in front of a place somebody's going to know something's inside they didn't put any guards out if you put secret or confidential on it on a drawing of an airplane you're going to know it's a secret something's going on if somebody gets a hold of it they didn't they didn't but they didn't stamp any of the things classified at all they didn't have any guards outside they made it as as normal as possible so as to not attract attention they went so far way back when the satellites were first coming out and they took all the names off of the parking places because they could find out who was working there the enemy could find out who was working there the enemy being the cold war in Russia the skunkworks operated out of Burbank and has operated out of Burbank all the way back to the p-38 to the u2 to the sr-71 two f-117 all of them have been built there and down in beautiful downtown Burbank inside a big old world war two hangar the airplanes were assembled there then they were the wings were taken off of them and in the case of the f-117 they flew a c5 which is the Air Force's huge cargo airplane they'd fly it in in the middle of night and they would take the phone calls for the noise abatement because there's always somebody in the neighborhood didn't like the noise but it only happened every now and then so we kind of disregarded it but anyway they would make a box frame out of wood two by fours and drape a tarp over so it would not show any part of the shape of the airplane room whatsoever and they put it on wheels and they would wheel it out and put it in the c5 and then they would fly it off to where we would test the airplane and was reassembled and then tested at a remote location and that was done in fact back in the sr-71 days they didn't have a c5 a to transport that around so they developed a false front if you will for truck line Lockheed had a trucking company that was named some weird name and it was on the back of those trucks that they hauled the the sr-71 fuselage and wings to the to the test location the first flight was a success I'll say that because we took off and we landed but there were some problems that we encountered and some some things we discovered that needed to be fixed but let me go back just a little bit the airplane is unstable and pitch and yaw it can't be flown without the assistance of computers at the lower speeds it's about neutrally stable which is almost flyable one of the bits of information that goes to the computers to help fly that airplane is the air data that goes in the probes on the front of the airplane and the engineers were afraid that the vibration of those probes on takeoff and in turbulent air might send vibrations to the flight controls and cause them to oscillate and so therefore they did not want to use the air data on the initial takeoff so what we did was we put a bunch of lead in the front of the airplane and made it positively stable thinking that I could manage the airplane it was still not real stable but it was stable enough that we felt that I could fly the airplane satisfactory up to 10,000 feet and then turn on the air data information to the computer so that if it did cause a problem there would be plenty of room between me and the ground to get those things turned off again and bring the airplane back that was the plan and that's what we did we took off ballasted with lead in the nose so that it was slightly stable on takeoff which was fine the rotation and everything was good and pitch it was that the fact that the airplane started to yaw and it went out I believe it was six degrees to the left and then I tried the rudder to stop it and it didn't respond right away and then it slowly came back the other way and went out to around 12 or 13 degrees the other way and that's very uncomfortable in an airplane to feel like you're skidding sideways and so I realized that this this thing wasn't acting the way we expected to act based on the wind tunnel and simulation that we'd done actually I had three switches for pitch roll and yaw over the left hand console and the off switch I had had extended because that was the most critical one and I turned on the air data so that it would come to the through the probes and go to the flight control computer to help me fly the airplane and it did it worked fine there was no there were no vibrations or anything like that but they got turned on a lot quicker than we planned to do because we were going to go to 10,000 feet to turn them on based on that information we realized that the fins on the airplane the tail fins on the airplane were considerably too small the wind tunnel data I don't know how it was a mistake was made somehow I believe I heard that it they didn't take into full account the sting that the the pole that you put an airplane and a wind tunnel on contributes to stability and I'm not sure that's the case at any rate they came up with a figure that they were they said we were going to be more stable than we really were so the fins were too small and that was the big discovery on the on the first flight and we flew the airplane six more times in a very limited flight envelope while they were building a new set of fins 50 percent bigger that were put on the airplane and from that point on we had the proper amount of stability those that was the big thing learned on the airplane the minor problems that we occurred are not minor really we had overheat and the tail pipes because the tail pipes were rectangular and in the corners heat builds up and they reached they they were reaching limited temperatures and we also had the canopy unlock light that came on and that was of concern because if the canopy had come off you get a faceful of wind and it was marginal about whether you could land the airplane or not and the other thing was that we heard a big thump and that was the blow in doors which were spring-loaded and activated so that it gave enough air for the airplane on the ground enough air to the engines to run properly and then as you accelerated more air came in the inlets and then the doors with springload shut making the airplane stealthy because you can't have openings in the airplane and be stealthy and when they slammed shut there was two very pronounced thumps that I hadn't anticipated scared the heck out of me and but there was no indication in the control station nor on my instruments so we continued on with the flight the flight was only 15 minutes limited by the temperature in the tailpipe and that was that was basically the first flight I've never had a UFO sighting [Laughter] how we work together at the skunkworks and with our customer was absolutely critical to the success that that airplane the airplane was a huge success the program was a huge success in the world of flight tests in the last 30 40 50 years there's always been a aura of competition between the company pilots and the customer pilots Air Force pilot or the Navy pilot that's going to be getting the airplane ever since I started the testing business I was at Navy test pilot for a long time and then I became a civilian test pilot for Grumman flying at 14 in a-sixes and it was always us in them battle you know we felt like we could do it better as company pilots than they could it was it was just kind of I know testosterone ego whatever you want to call it it was always a scrap and and I learned from this experience that cooperation works a whole lot better than had adversarial relationships Kelly Johnson's one of his basic rules was we need to be allowed to test our product otherwise we will never be able to you know advance our products in the future so he felt like he needed a corporate knowledge in the in the form of pilot experience in the airplanes that he built and the Air Force has always felt that they wanted to do all the flying it's always been a compromise if you have a combined task force typically the company does fly the first flight of the airplane and does flutter and does structural and does all that stuff but the operational aspects are done by the customer which i think is a good way to do it but there's always a little bit of a conflict but we had a very unique individual in the Air Force a guy by the name of skip Anderson who was running the air force side of the test force he had a very unique way of calming US company pilots down he provided great leadership and he worked well with Ben rich the head of the skunk works and they got along great and we saw that and we all followed suit and I give skip a lot of credit for that we got along very well John Beasley was one of the Air Force guys and he was just one of the team we were all teammates one of the criteria for working at our remote location as you had to get along if anybody didn't get along you were out of there so teamwork and cooperation were fundamental to the success of the of the program what does it take to make a good test pilot I think one of the things is you the basic flying skills need to be above average I think that responsibility to the company and to the product are fundamental to being a good test pilot I think involvement with the design and development of the airplane is critical to being a good test pilot I think an engineering degree or advanced degree is in these this day and age the kids that go off to the test pilot schools like they arrived there with master's degrees and a lot of them go out way with PhDs you know they're they're way above me I only had a bachelor's degree but it's hard for me to say I'm telling you about what I think I am you know am I am an above average pilot yeah I am I can say that honestly am I one of those great stick and rudder guys like Bob Hoover who was a phenomenal pilot is a phenomenal pilot I'm not one of those but do I get involved with the project I do I get very involved with the project or did when I was working well first of all if I were talking to my grandson who they're all growing up my great grandsons I would say first thing is honesty be totally honest if you can't be honest then you're gonna tell somebody something that you did that you didn't do and I learned that really early in test piloting game several people had made a mistake it was a simple mistake they left a switch in the wrong place and if you took off an afterburner you were dumping fuel and it would light up and you'd leave this big long torch behind the airplane and I did that and I came back and I'd convinced myself that that switch was in the right place and then I didn't switch it but I did and so I was embarrassed by that I got caught with my hand in the cookie jar and that was my real lesson in in honesty you have to be honest as a test pilot you can't you know if you made a mistake man you got to tell them because otherwise they might blame it on the airplane or they might you know the manufacturing process may be changed or the engineering process I learned as I mentioned the last bit of discussion that to work with people you have to respect them you have to respect their ideas and you have to present yourself as they're co-equal honesty integrity care for other people you got to care for other people that's one thing I learned when I joined the church which was in during my career when I became a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of latter-day saints it was to care more about other people and that helped me a great deal and my relationships with my cohorts in the world of test piloting once a guy gets to be the chief test pilot it is normal for the chief test pilot to to go out and fly all the good stuff and that was the way it was at Grumman there was a man by the name of Corky Meyer for years was the chief test pilot and any time good he came up a first flight or a bonus flight you know we got extra pay if it was hazardous the lead guide the chief pilot wouldn't end up going out and do it there was a fellow there it worked at Grumman and I won't mention his name became the chief pilot and he did everything and the rest of us were doing the dog work and I said you know if I ever get to be chief pilot I'm gonna share the load a little bit and and those guys I got to be the first flight pilot there's two other guys I got we're very lucky that I got to be the first flight pilot in the f-117 because I said if I got to be chief pilot as I said I was I would just I would share and I had two guys working for me that were we were very close Dave Ferguson and Tom Morgan felt Dave was an Air Force guy tom was a Navy guy I went at same time for the f-22 to come along I had plans I was dreaming about sailing around the world and I thought and I was getting to be you know closer to 55 and so I I said I'm gonna do what I said I was going to do and I gave Dave Ferguson the project pilot job I was the chief pilot and director flight ops but he was the project pilot and would be fine the first flight on the f-22 the day he went out and flew that first flight I was out there watching it and I was saying man I wish I'd made and made that promise but I was very envious of the day he got to fly I would have been able to fly the airplane if I'd had just exercise my rights as the chief pilot and then the next airplane the f-35 that came along Tom Morgan felt got to fly the first slide so each one of us got a first flight and I'm kind of proud of that being a Mormon around a bunch of fighter pilots I was one of them you know if we went to the bar they'd order me a coke or 7up or whatever they were very good to me about that and John to John Beasley was there we we fit in just fine it was a good thing and I think being Mormon was very helpful to me and I was a brand-new Mormon as a matter of fact it was a convert shortly before I joined Lockheed and it helped me a great deal and dealing with other people we had t-38 talents we had a 7s we had F fours all of which we could fly anytime we wanted to and that was just that was like the astronauts had you know they had their planes were out there anytime you wanted to go fly you can go fly and it was good maintain proficiency it wasn't just a good deal and we did a lot of air-to-air stuff and we'd go out and fight each other that was very good for confidence and very good for proficiency flies like a small airplane it's a big airplane but it flies well flies flies small I enjoy the a4 the a4 is a little sports car you know it's got 270 degree per second roll rate put the stick over and you're through to 360 degree rolls about that quick and of course the f-117 which turns out to be we tailored the flight control system so well that it's very easy to fly I mean it feels just like a normal airplane and one of the best normal of the normal airplanes like an f-15 is very easy to fly very easy to land very easy to take off and excellent flying qualities the reason that the f-117 was retired was because of the f-22 the f-22 is a high-performance airplane it can do what the f-117 can do it carries its weapons internally it can deliver air-to-ground it can live deliver air-to-air can go supersonic it can cruise supersonic and it's it's aerodynamically shaped you notice it has curved surfaces and the f-117 has flat surfaces and the reason was when we design and built the f-117 the original program was not nearly as sophisticated as the programs that are using now to predict and develop stealth shapes and so we had to do with flat surfaces flat and angles so that's where they they differ that's just and the money required and then there's rumor around who was mentioned the other David by a friend of mine talking about Aviation Week had an article that they've seen an f-117 flying and that would really make me feel good

Channel: Harold Farley

Views: 360,783

Rating: 4.8607206 out of 5

Keywords: Hal Farley, Harold Farley, F 117, F-117, F-117A, Lockheed Martin, Skunk Works, Test Pilot, Chief Test Pilot, Aviation and Space Hall of Fame, Ivan C Kincheloe, Experimental Test Pilot, Mormon Test Pilot, Famous Mormon, Steath Fighter, Steath, Jet Fighter, Top Secret, Stealth Fighter Program, Octave Chanute Award, Area 51, First Flight, First Flight Chief Test Pilot, Story, Kelly Johnson, Ben Richens, Jon beasley, Stealth technology, Heads up display

Id: slYAVymZ99M

Length: 32min 7sec (1927 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 12 2017