Kelly Johnson and Lockheed Story

we knew that in overflying Russia for four years that they were making important advances and radar and missiles and so in 1958 two years before Gary Powers was shot down but we decided we'd try to make a follow-on airplane which became finally the sr-71 to fly higher and four times as fast so that's the connection between the grandfather type and the sr-71 everyone called him Kelly and as he reminisced that day about the genesis of his Mach 3 masterpiece he could have just as easily reflected back on a time when aircraft designers were striving for 200 miles per hour a time when he landed his first job fledgling lockheed aircraft company in 1932 was law group led by robert e grosse had purchased lockheed out of bankruptcy for $40,000 and staked the company's future on the development of an all-metal twin-engine transport models of the design were sent to the University of Michigan where a young graduate student named Clarence L Johnson conducted Windtunnel tests although his faculty advisors gave the design of passing grade he wasn't much impressed nap tree had been hired on as a tool designer at Lockheed in August of 1933 he let chief design engineer Hall Hobart know about it among other things that he'd be directionally unstable especially with one engine out a rather presumptuous a certainly unconventional wave about twenty three-year-old to start his career the new company but it was only a hint of what would follow the son of Swedish immigrants he'd been nicknamed Kelly by classmates because of his quick temper stubborn tenacity and unwillingness to back down from a fight even against overwhelming odds instead of reminding the outspoken young man of his place Hibbert suggested he go back to the window and see if he could improve the design after 72 test wounds he came up with the solution unconventionally twin tail arrangement soon to become a lockheed trademark and the model 10 Electra became the foundation block EADS future growth as various models of the airplane helped revolutionize commercial air transport in the 1930s with his work on the design Kelly Johnson became the sixth member of an engineering department in an industry which then couldn't afford specialists working often simultaneously as an aerodynamicist stress analysts wait Windtunnel and flight test engineer he also put in long hours out in the shop getting hands-on production experience learning firsthand the importance of designing produce ability into an airplane it was a real-world education in all phases of design and development that within a decade couldn't be duplicated and the lessons learned became guideposts for the rest of his career he flew for example his flight test engineer on all models of the Electra and worked for some of the most notable figures in aviation such as Amelia Earhart out of this experience came his lifelong conviction that the designer had to be able to test his own airplane as he later commented I decided at an early date that unless I had held scared out of me once a year I wouldn't have the proper balance to really design new airplanes of any type Kelly Johnson could logged more than 2300 hours as a flight test engineer the versatile Electra spawned two major developments one was the XC 35 a modified model 10 which in 1937 first demonstrated the practical feasibility of transforming the entire fuselage into a pressurized cabin to permit comfortable high altitude flight Johnson was Lockheed flight test engineer on this project gaining first-hand experience with the problems of pressurization and more important with the tremendous possibilities pioneered by this aircraft possibilities to which he and Hall Hibbard began to give serious consideration meanwhile the model 14 electron incorporated a number of Johnson innovations such as the first practical application of Fowler flaps which both increased the wings lifting surface and served to permit slower shorter distance landings an achievement which won him in the 1937 Lawrence Sperry award in 1938 the high speed and innovative features of the model 14 attracted British interest in its potential as an anti-submarine patrol plane but the requirements necessitated a major redesign Johnson worked around the clock for three days and transformed the model 14 into the Hudson bomber the British ordered an initial batch of 250 aircraft at that time the largest production order ever received by an American company but there would be many more mm to the RAF alone out of a total production run of nearly 3,000 airplanes the Hudson but Lockheed into the big time but even as production was gearing up Kelley Johnson and his colleagues were well into other much more ambitious designs the success of the pressurized XC 35 and the recognition that the next generation of air transports would be much larger higher speed transoceanic aircraft inspired johnson gibbered and a small design team to lay out the now classic lines of the model 49 constellation in 1939 using his soon-to-be legendary powers of persuasion he convinced Lockheed to build its own win team a decision that paid for itself many times over during the development of this design as all aerodynamic problems will overcome early on and not one external change had to be made to the actual aircraft Hibbard was so impressed by johnson's wizard green that he swore he could see air commercial development of the legendary connie would be delayed by the war and at first flew as the Army Air Forces c69 this however provided time to refine the airplane so that at war's end Lockheed was postured to capture a lion's share of the commercial market the various models of the elegant Connie would continue to grace the world's Airways into the late 1950s at the time he laid down the basic design of the constellation Johnson was already well into another path-breaking project in early 1937 responding to an Air Corps requirement for a high-altitude interceptor capable of 360 miles per hour Johnson and Hobart hastily conceived some possible configurations depicted here in one of Kelly's rough sketches as Johnson observed many times in design you're forced to develop unusual solutions to unusual problems their decision to go with an unconventional twin boom configuration was dictated by another axiom design features are the creatures of necessity the twin booms evolve is a logical development of engine the cells which had to be extended housed liquid-cooled engines turbo superchargers radiators main landing gear it seemed logical them to simply extend in the cells into proves which could carry the empennage their novel approach produced a winning designs when the ex p38 was finally rolled out in January of 1939 it's sleek lines bespoke speed and when lieutenant Ben Kelsey took it up for its maiden flight it delivered it impressing 403 miles per hour far exceeding the requirements thus begin the saga the p-38 lightning the first American aircraft able to fly at such speeds it offered dazzling performance and a host of new problems for us appealed over at the dives at high altitudes that could hit speeds approaching 500 miles per hour in this region the aircraft began to violently shake and nosed over into increasingly steeper angles and control forces became so heavy pilots couldn't pull out tragically some never recovered Kelly Johnson wasn't taken by surprise although many insisted it was tail flutter he immediately recognized it as the then little understood phenomenon of compressibility at 500 miles per hour localized airflow over certain parts of the aircraft was reaching supersonic velocity this produced shockwaves serious problems the p38 was the first aircraft to encounter this and so little was actually known about it that Johnson launched exhaustive Windtunnel studies and an accelerated dye of test program headed by chief test pilot Milo Burke after more than two years he finally identified the problem shock stall on the wing which reduced lift and increased drag thereby inducing the nose down tuck typically he was quick to devise a cleverly simple remedy a dive flap mounted to the main wing spar that wing deployed generated a positive pressure field immediately restoring lift and a nose off pitching moment flown on every battle funds the p38 excelled in combat christening the fourth tail devil by Germans the versatile fighter combining speed and load carrying capability proved adaptable to a wide array of combat roles and its long legs made it ideal for the vast reaches of the Pacific Werth destroyed more enemy aircraft to any other allied fight impressive no it was Kelly Johnson was never satisfied of it he'd longed for seeing the inherent limitations of prop-driven aircraft and though unaware of developments in Germany and England where turbo jets had already been successfully developed he decided that cops had to go as he and hobart became the first in this country to seriously pursue the possibilities of turbo jet propulsion when in 1939 the asked Nathan price to design an experimental turbojet power plant design of the L 1000 gone underway in 1940 and by 1942 price had come up with a truly advanced design a high compression ratio twin spool axial flow power plant promising an extraordinary 50 100 pounds of thrust meanwhile Johnson and the young engineer named Willis Hawkins got a design team that came up with the L 133 a truly radical twin engines stainless steel aircraft featuring thin wings and canard surfaces and projected to achieve 625 miles per hour at 50,000 feet but surprising and Johnson submitted a proposal for development of the engine and airframe in March 1942 the Army Air Forces showed little interest although launched long after his effort top secret development of an American turbojet fighter powered by a British Whittle engine was by then already under way the Bell XP 59 aid first flew at Muroc Army Air Force Base on California's high desert in October of 1942 but it proved to be underpowered overweight and scarcely optimized for jet flight and early on the Army Air Forces decided that it wouldn't meet frontline fighter requirements though Bell didn't get notice and the testing continued on June 10th 1943 a bell engineer in Iraq reported back that Johnson had been permitted to examine the still top-secret XP 59a and he wondered what he was up to unbeknownst to Bell the Army Air Force had already asked Lockheed to submit a proposal for a simpler single-engine jet fighter brought around a 3,000 pound thrust Halford h1 engine which would be capable of front-line service Johnson took in a lot that day but he'd already been wrestling with jet propulsion for the three years and he already had a suitable design well in hand when he made his proposal at Wright Field on June 18th he made the astounding promise that he'd deliver an aircraft within just a hundred and eighty days getting immediate approval he was cautioned that the utmost secrecy was required Lockheed was already swamped in terms of manpower tooling and facilities with wartime contracts but this was a blessing in disguise an opportunity to implement an idea he'd been pestering Robert Gross about three years let him round up a small group of talented people designers engineers and shop men put them under one roof where they could all work closely together and give him complete authority over everything from procurement to flight tests with no other options Rose said go ahead stealing people from around the plant just 28 engineers including himself and 105 shop men he also built a small facility out of discarded shipping crates using a circus tent for a roof on June 19th he laid down the principles under which the project would operate in one and a half pages now preserved and old photostats informed the basis for how we try to operate over the next 30 years he'd be responsible for all decisions paperwork and red tape would be cut to the minimum each engineer would be designer shop contact parts chaser and mechanic and each would remain within a stone's throw of the shop at all times there'd be but one object to get a good airplane till on time the daily log indicates that two days later he laid out the horizontal structure of the organization no pyramidal multi-tiered layers of management each project engineer and the shop foreman would report directly to him and in fact he'd be looking over everyone's shoulder he wanted information direct from the man doing the work and if they had question that get decisions immediately on the spot he'd promised the airplane in 180 days as would become his custom he gave his men 150 the clock started ticking on June 23rd forcefully reminded that simplicity is the key note of good design the designers jumped into their work but this was a new kind of operation and instead of moving from stage to stage the schedule demanded an extraordinary degree of concurrency with finish detailed design still many weeks away the mock-up was starting on June 30th and completed by July 17th by then milling and fabrication of parts and the construction of Jake's to assemble a prototype was already well underway and by July 31st the bulkheads were going into the jigs and section by section the airframe started coming together throughout this period however the design process continued as concurrent Windtunnel tests revealed problems the wing and the engineer inlets were the biggest headaches he'd gambled on the wing laminar flow airfoil that had never before been tested on an airplane and of course nobody had any experience with inless Johnson was willing to accept mistakes in such an accelerated and risky venture as long as they were reported promptly typically he never asked why but what are you going to do to fix it the project was so secret that his group didn't even have a name the whole setup reminded one of his design engineers Irv Culver of the mysterious place were hairless Joel one of Al Capps cartoon characters in the lab nur ground-up skunks old shoes and other unsavory ingredients to brew a potent concoction called Kickapoo joy juice so inspired he answered the phone one day skunk works inside man Carver's though Johnson wasn't amused his organization suddenly had a name that stuck remarkably the completed aircraft arrived at Muroc on November 14th just a hundred and forty three days after stardom but when the engine was run up three days later there was a terrific role as the Inlet ducts collapsed sending debris into the engine and cracking the impeller it took six weeks to get a new engine but on January 3rd 1944 while a burcham successfully completed the taxi tests and five days later the chill of the morning on January 8 Johnson white coveralls overcoat and stocking cap worked intently with his crew preparing for the first flight as over a hundred skunkworks employees stood atop a hill looking long he wanted everyone who'd worked on the airplane they now call Louisville be on hand he told virtually just flyer Milo find out if she's a lady or a witch 9:15 he took off but only five minutes later is taxiing back report that the landing gear had been retracted and that the booster Dale alone was felt too sensitive while the gear problem is being fixed Johnson assured him that the control sensitivity was normal and at 10 o'clock he took off again and this time but on a dazzling 20-minute display attaining a top speed of 490 miles per hour reporting a roll rate of 360 degrees for seconds back on the ground he was able to report that lulubelle was indeed a lady the xp-80 ultimately became the first American aircraft to exceed 500 miles per hour but this was only the beginning for months Johnson had been working on a larger more advanced version with a 4,000 pound thrust General Electric I 40 engine promising much greater speed he promised the XP a da in just a hundred and fifty days and delivered it in a hundred and thirty-two but as Tony LeVier taxied in after the first flight on June 10th he'd had a few surprises cetera gravity miscalculations had caused porpoising a faulty pressurization valve had channeled 325 degree engine bleed air into the cockpit malfunctioning flaps but the airplane into violent roles only his superb flying skills allowed him to bring it back and Johnson was so grateful he doubled levears bonus a gesture pointing up the special relationship between men and indeed between Kelly Johnson and all of his test pilots unlike so many of his peers Johnson both understood and appreciated what his pilots did he flew with them whenever possible shared their concerns always listened and then acted on the recommendations the ex PA DA's problems were quickly remedied and it went on to become the prototype for America's first operational jet fighter though it wouldn't enter combat in World War two the p80 shooting star would deliver awesome performance in January of 1946 for example Colonel William Counsell completed the first nonstop transcontinental jet flight covering twenty four hundred and fifty miles in the record four hours and 13 minutes an average speed of 580 miles per hour in June of 1947 flying a specially modified patr Colonel Albert Boyd completed four runs over a speed force of year-long averaging 623 miles per hour and reclaiming the world speed record for the United States for the first time 24 years and over Korea November of 1952 ting star but down a MIG 15 in history's first all jet combat and amply confirming Johnson's methods and his insistence on simplicity the p80 would give birth to a number of progeny shrewd Lee sensing the need for a jet trainer Johnson gambled 1 million dollars of Lockheed money on the development of an f-80c airframe is with two-seat configuration which after its first flight March 1948 was transformed into the classic t-33 an airplane affectionately called the t-bird which will serve as the standard jet trainer for legions and student pilots around the world in the next three decades in response to an urgent Air Force requirement for an interim all-weather intercept the t-33 in turn served as the basis for three different models of the f-94 starfire which filled a critical void while newer designs specifically tailored to that role remained under developments in the early 1950s not done yet the now vintage design would realize its final incarnation as the t2 v1 c star an advanced naval eyes version of the t-33 all of the iterations of the p8 e design were still yet to come however as in 1946 he started design work to meet an Air Force requirement for a new penetration escort fighter early on he explored the possibility of applying new concepts a delta wing even in flight variable wing sweep and then discarded both some of the more than 60 concepts he'd examine and reject when the xf-90 finally rolled out three years later it was the victim of ever-changing and conflicting requirements from a time to climb of 35,000 feet in 10 minutes to 50,000 in 5 900 mile range to 1500 and then back to 600 and finally ground attack capability and a high-speed high-altitude design this prompted him to build a brawny airframe over 30,000 pounds fully loaded and stressed 13 G's when Tony levere took off on its first official flight we had to use rocket assist because the pair of small three thousand pound thrust g34 ones still lacked after loading capability the usual post-flight congratulations and festivities belied the fact that johnson knew he was facing terrible odds but the same pair of inadequate engines as their principal rival the mcdonnell xf-88 and half again is heavy because the 88 hadn't been beefed up for ground attack johnson's airplane was bound to suffer performance wise was overweight and underpowered and even when after burning was finally added boosting combined thrust up to more than eight thousand pounds its top speed and level flight was only six hundred and sixty eight miles per hour slower than existing operation in the 86 s could achieve one distinction however when in april 1950 levira pushed over into a steep dive and it became the first lockheed airplane to exceed the speed of sound but performance no better than the xf- the mcdonnell entry won the competition but neither design went into production the whole ordeal taught Johnson never again to take on a job unless the requirements were both well-defined and firm even though a failure the xf-90 went on to demonstrate that he certainly knew how to build a rugged airframe as in April of 1952 it survived the first of a series of atomic blasts suffering only twenty hours worth of repair work meanwhile Johnson was completing work on a much more unconventional airplane designed to meet a Navy requirement for a vertical takeoff and landing or VTOL fighter the xf v1 was supposed to claw its way straight up by means of huge contro tating coughs driven by a twin turbine power plant providing more power than the airplanes weights engine development lagged however and after test pilot herman fish salmon first lifted off from the lake bed and what was now called edwards air force base december 1953 the underpowered v1 continued to rely on his makeshift landing gear for all takeoffs and landings once a loft however salmon was able to demonstrate that it could make satisfactory transitions from horizontal the vertical flight and that it could hover in the vertical attitude but lacking the promised power explaining in his words and it's awful hard to fly an airplane looking over your shoulder salmon wasn't eager to attempt vertical liftoff or touch tablets neither was Johnson believing in designers shouldn't be afraid to fly his own airplane at the integrity recommend cancellation of the whole project by that time however he already had a much more promising design on the ramp at Edwards when Tony LaVere first saw it he asked incredulously where the wings were but those tiny blade thin wings and everything else about the X f-104 were actually the product of years of careful thought effort and Johnson's determination this time to employ his skunkworks methods back in 1947 he'd modified a p80 with wingtip mounted ramjets and with fish salmon at the controls it became the first piloted aircraft to fly on ramjet pollen alone these tests supported the major skunk works type of effort to explore a whole new realm at a time when missile and guidance system technologies were still in their infancy Johnson's team had to design a pilotless Mach 3 testbed to further explore ramjet technology the x7 was the product of their efforts and its tiny thin slightly tapered wings Johnson's solution to the problems of high Mach flight had been thoroughly tested on rockets and with scale models the x7 first flew in April 1951 and went on to a remarkable career watch from a b-29 boosted to high-speed powerful rockets and then flying on various Ram Jets under test it ultimately exceeded Mach 4 and climbed well above 100,000 feet thus those small thin wings were already more than just a theory when Johnson visited the Korean battlefront in 1951 still smarting from the xf-90 he'd gone there to talk to the ultimate customers combat pilots about what they wanted to hit a fighter to a man it was higher speed more altitude and less complexity intent on giving them just that he made an unsolicited proposal to build a fighter for which no requirement yet existed when he promised Mach to 60,000 feet in a simple light weight fighter Colonel Bruce Holloway stepped into the next room and within two hours returned with a short one and a half page list of requirements this time the firm straightforward requirement Johnson returned to his favorite skunkworks mode of operation and less than a year later February of 1954 when we were vir lifted the xf 104 from the lakebed for its first flight don´t configured with a much lower thrust engine and the powerful j79 scheduled for the production model the xf 104 was still faster than any other fighter in the world but johnson had produced more than just a dazzling four formally fanatical about costs introduced ability while design of the prototypes is stoned away he'd set up a small group of Engineers to find the cheapest and most efficient way to produce each part of the production air forming an innovation which he result in savings of about $12,000 per aircraft and millions for his customers when the press finally got to see the f-104 they called it the missile with a management and they weren't far off the mark the first mach 2 operational aircraft in the world it would go on to shatter every significant record on the books ninety-one thousand feet fourteen hundred miles per hour in May of 1958 making it the first aircraft ever to hold both the world altitude and speed marks simultaneously three time to climb records later that year and in 1959 it became the first airplane taking off on its own power ever to climb above a hundred thousand feet as Captain George Jordan zoomed up over 103 thousand feet this kind of performance clinched the 1958 Collier trophy for Johnson while the Starfighter was capturing headlines with record-breaking performances another much more exotic Johnson design was unbeknownst to all but a few almost daily cruising in level flight at altitudes far beyond any official records it had been born of the massive arms build-up of the early 50s when US intelligence agencies urgently needed confirmation of reports of major Soviet advances and intercontinental range bombers and ballistic missiles the decision to proceed with overflights led to a design competition for a reconnaissance aircraft capable of 70,000 feet the lockheed hadn't been invited to participate johnson had caught wind of it hastily submitted a proposal to build in CL 282 essentially a modified f-104 with a wide span I aspect ratio wing it would last out through the barrel x16 Kelly Johnson wasn't about to quit over the years he'd gotten to know a lot of people in high places and he developed consummate lobbying skills with a revised design and promising an airplane with in just eight months he got the go-ahead to produce 20 aircraft twenty-two million dollars the project codenamed aqua tone was directed by the CIA's Richard Bissell who found the skunk works streamlined informal method of getting things done much to his liking secrecy limited access to a mere handful of CIA and Air Force personnel which was fine with Johnson because it freed him from a lot of needless paperwork and interference the urgency of the project also freed him from what he regarded as the tyranny of technical specifications his customers simply wanted an airplane that could do the job and all he had to do was deliver on time while the article as it was called was a relatively conventional design the extreme altitudes at which it was supposed to operate imposed severe demands forced to ruthlessly cut weight he reduced structural components to the minimum and designed delicate glider like wings spanning 80 feet and weighing less than four pounds per square foot the fragile airframe was designed to route a special high-altitude version of the j57 engine virtually hand-built to an extremely high tolerances and originally producing ten thousand five hundred pounds of thrust when the disassembled aircraft was unloaded from a c-124 at a remote desert test site in July of 1955 Johnson had met yet another seemingly impossible deadline after reassembly was rolled out into daylight for the first time and painstakingly prepared for its taxi tests on August first as he had so many times in the past Tony levere climbed into the cockpit during his third run that day he suddenly noticed that he was more than 30 feet off the ground coming down hard the tires blew and brakes failed caught fire reporting afterwards he explained that at 70 knots I became aware of being airborne which left me with utter amazement as I had no intentions whatsoever of flying those fragile wings had more than enough lift he completed the first real flight four days later and on the subsequent flight reported that the aircraft climbed toward the heavens like a homesick angel to conceal its true purpose the angel has given the misleading official designation you tuned and a cover story was released to the effect that he was being developed as a high-altitude research vehicle for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics while it would perform this role admirably tests focused on preparing a YouTube for its real mission carries 700 pounds of high-resolution camera equipment up to altitudes then beyond any air defense capabilities and in July 1956 just 11 months after first flight it commenced its clandestine operational career climbing to well above 70,000 feet as fuel wound off you to successfully completed flights over denied areas and brought back the first hard data on the status of Soviet military preparedness and the true extent of its intercontinental ballistic missile program called the dragon lady by its pilots because it reminded them of the beautiful mysterious and sometimes treacherous character in the Terry and the Pirates cartoon strip it flew with virtual impunity for years until that day May of 1960 that's Gary Powers shot down by a surface-to-air missile while deep penetration of Soviet airspace came to a halt the u2 continued to overfly hot spots around the world such as 1962 and to confirm the existence of missile launch sites in Cuba it would also continue to perform an incredibly wide array of extremely high altitude research missions [Music] hello Johnson had reason to be proud of his angel the Scott works had finally been formally established as Lockheed advance development projects and on this its first production program he'd refunded two million dollars in the original twenty two million dollar contract and built an additional six airplanes out of spare parts surely one of the best bargains and defense procurement history that pride was rekindled with in 1981 larger more sophisticated tr1 who rolled out years after YouTube production at Indy it was the first time the Air Force had ever put an aircraft back into production and it remains to this day highest flying single-engine aircraft in the world back in December of 1956 the skunk works is remarkable performance on the u2 had convinced Lockheed to give Johnson the job of designing and developing prototypes for a small military jet transport dollars were scarce competition keen and he'd only have eight months to do the job being on time had always been one of his cardinal rules and in just 241 days he delivered the jet star he'd actually been working on designs for a large jet transport since 1944 this trim little craft was actually a scaled-down version of the l1 93 the innovative 1953 design which the airline's had feared too risky to support Johnson who continued to put in long hours as a flight test engineer on this project was out to prove them wrong and he was more than pleased with results a top speed of over 600 miles per hour a peak altitude of 52,000 feet and with wing tanks range of over 3,000 miles the jet star easily won the competition and though only a limited number went into military service as c1 40s ultimately more than 200 were produced and a great many of them remained in service this day [Music] the Jets pilot was a pleasant diversion as he worked on another much tougher project even as development of the u2 was still underway he projected that air defenses would catch up with it within two years and he'd initiated a remarkable series of design studies for liquid hydrogen fueled supersonic successor capable of climbing above 90 thousand feet performance varied from mach 2.5 and range of 2,200 miles to mach 4 and 9,000 miles because of the extremely low volumetric density of liquid hydrogen however a latter speed and range capability could only be achieved by building an airframe twice the size of the b-52 that was far too costly and that's a much smaller design at the lower end of the performance spectrum went into development as the CL of 400 in 1956 though the CL 400 proved the technical feasibility of a liquid hydrogen powered aircraft Johnson was dissatisfied with its short range and convinced that the problems of producing and transporting fuel around the world were insurmountable refusing to build an airplane he didn't believe in he recommended cancellation of the project in 1957 but he had an ace up his sleeve as concurrent with the liquid hydrogen studies he'd also examined the potential of another advanced design using jet fuel which had some loss in altitude promised Mach 3 crews and 4,000 mile range it was the genesis of his most spectacular creation given approval to proceed in April of 1958 Johnson began a series of design studies unveiled publicly here for the first time for what he initially called the u3 and then the Archangel because it would soar much higher than the u2 he explored various means by which you could get the vehicle to altitudes as high as a hundred and fifty thousand feet employing a variety or even a combination of rocket ram jet and turbo jet power plants at one point he looked at the use of balloons to lift it to which rocket boost phase and then at using a modified view to to tow a ramjet vehicle to sixty thousand feet for engine ignition he even considered a multi staged vehicle and one with inflatable wings and M finish and throughout he was challenged by the urgent need to reduce radar cross-section the first time stealth after be designed into the airplane the intense design gestation process was completed in just 16 months when he presented his twelfth concept the CIA and Air Force in August 1959 he got to go ahead when the stunningly beautiful a 12 was finally rolled out for its initial tests in April 1962 it wasn't some fantastic multi-staged aberration he wasn't honest airplane but nothing like it had ever been built before ironically codenamed oxcart and designed for sustained mach 3.2 crews at altitudes between 75 and 95 thousand feet it posed by far the greatest challenge of Johnson's career has everything from structural materials to hydraulic fluid and fuels had to be invented from scratch for example because of the intense heat that sustained Mach 3 speeds averaging more than 550 degrees on the surface of the airplane Johnson employed a titanium alloy for more than 90 percent of the airframe but no one had ever before attempted to process such quantities of the extremely hard and brittle metal to the purity and strength levels required and thus new forging and milling processes had to be invented perfected when the thin titanium skin not a wing panel shriveled up during heating tests Johnson separated the panels from the wing spars with extrusions and put the now-famous corrugations in the skin when heated thereafter the corrugations merely deepened a few thousandths of an inch and on cooling returned to their original shape a common-sense solution to a difficult problem there were literally thousands of such problems to overcome and as always Johnson stayed on top of all of them looking over people's shoulders and asking lots of questions always the best way in his view to get people to solve problems and he continued to amaze everyone with for example on-the-spot predictions of skin temperatures which after hours of calculation they find were within one or two degrees of the exact figure the whole effort completed an absolute secrecy with an incredibly small group of people was all the more remarkable because it was done without the benefit of computers as Johnson later recalled but when you think back to 1958 when the basic design worked on the prototypes for this airplane it's been designed and built we had to make use of the Michigan computer which is a 12-inch slide rule and did its job quite well all of this prodigious effort was about to come to fruition but on April 25th 1962 preparations for high-speed taxi and an initial brief liftoff were completed but as Lou shocks sped down the runway he encountered nose wheel steering problems and had to kick in heavy right rudder then as Johnson wrote in his log the aircraft got off the ground and there was an immediate change of rudder angle this set up lateral oscillations which were horrible the sea chuck was lucky to get the airplane back on the ground the problem was fixed posthaste and the next day he completed the first unofficial flight with the gear down [Music] on April 30th Johnson was back with an entourage of VIPs for the official first flight looking like he didn't have a care in the world he offered a few last words of encouragement and advice before shock taxi down and from there everything went flawlessly [Music] 59 minutes later Jacques was back on the ground welcomed by an elated Kelly Johnson in the small awestruck assembly just witnessed something very special limited by interim j75 engines the hol didn't begin to realize its full potential until after the pratt whitney j58 for which it is designed finally arrived in january 1963 30 2,500 pounds of thrust the turbo ramjet j58 was every bit as exotic as the airplane itself in combination with an extremely complex inlet and exhaust ejector system it operated as a normal afterburning turbojet up to speeds of about 1600 miles per hour and then shifted excitement largely by passing the compressor and becoming essentially a ramjet with the inland actually providing most of the thrust at Mach 3 cruise when a two-seat trainer became available in early 1963 Johnson true to his convictions about flying his own aircraft jumped into the rear cockpit and taking control after climb out he'd fly supersonic the first time in his life during the course of the test program a pair of airframes were modified for a highly unconventional mission 1964 the skunk works build a small 42 foot long airframe with the very same materials used on the a12 designed to warm fly areas deemed too risky through air crews the d-21 drone would ride piggyback top and a 12-4 lock three launches 80,000 feet and powered by a ramjet originally developed for the x7 program it would be even faster than the a12 the finished article was mounted to its mothership now designated M 12 December 1964 and on December 20 seconds' an unusual pair taxi for the first time in flight tests got underway after takeoff from launch missions the m12 climbed to a rendezvous at the kc-135 to refuel and then percieve it onto the predetermined launch points where the backseater monitor the system's initiate launch procedures while there were several successful tests who is always a very risky business at best Carrie Johnson personally canceled this program after a fatal mid-air collision in 1966 by then however he already had two other very successful oxcart progeny off the ground the first was the yf-12a prototype for a proposed high-speed interceptor it was this aircraft which went on public display when in 1964 President Lyndon Johnson announced the existence of the a11 and it subsequently put on a dazzling show as a May 1965 claim no less than nine world records including the top speed of more than 2,000 miles per hour and a sustained altitude of over 80,000 feet without in any way taxing its full potential yf-12 was equipped with an advanced ASG 18 doppler radar system and configured to carry three aimed 47 missiles internally the missiles have never before been launched within the yf-12 speed and altitude regime the aircraft and its systems scored a reported 90 percent kill rate even against drones flying head on down on the deck at distances of 120 miles of more the Air Force is impressed enough to order 93 the big fighters into production for the air defense command but budgetary constraints ultimately resulted in their cancellation and shortly thereafter the a12 was also removed from service leaving only the Air Force's sr-71 which took over its reconnaissance mission though everything about it and its activities would remain cloaked and a heavy shroud of secrecy this was the aircraft that everyone came to know as the Blackbird solid coat of black paint which seemed drab - it's a lure and mystery actually had a very practical purpose that we do skin temperatures by about 75 degrees it's clean elegant lines and the smooth contours of its blended wing body shape give the impression that an artist had sculpted it into a rare a work of art in aircraft design however more than any other field form follows function and here again every line every detail of the airplane exists only to serve some practical purpose the Chinese for example which extend from the wing to the nose and float gracefully up into the fuselage actually satisfied a number of requirements so dynamically they reduce drag and added lift while also enhancing stability of the aircraft the sr-71 s mission was long-range reconnaissance and its fuselage was essentially a big fuel tank thus the chines also served to house at sophisticated cameras and sensors finally the sloping contours extending up from the Chinese enhance the airplane survivability by reducing its radar cross-section thus while an artist might envy its striking beauty an engineer would only marvel at the logical genius of its design that genius was recognized when 1964 Kelly Johnson became the first person ever to be awarded a second Collier trophy the sr-71 would go on to claim every speed and altitude record in the books and then repeatedly extend its own records and to the public had always remained Kelly Johnson's history's record-breaking Blackbird the crews who flew it never had another name for it brought its long operational career he remained invincible and incredibly effective and to it's Cruz who was habu dark skinned pit viper a deadly bite and though it was finally retired from Air Force service in 1990 Kelly Johnson's locked three masterpiece is still charting the future its crews still looking up toward the blue black void of space flying exotic research missions from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration retired in 1975 Kelly Johnson had been on the cutting edge would advance from 200 to more than 2,000 miles per hour he'd been involved in the design of 44 different airplanes many of them among the classics of aviation history and at the time he was still looking very much into the future he'd gotten the skunkworks into a project which would bear fruit to the f-117 a the world's first true stealth aircraft legacy which would leave its mark on the future it's kind of a run and a lowly creature known primarily for its odiferous emanations had for the time he retired become a universal symbol for excellence what was his secret well he had a remarkable capacity to take a complex problem reduce it to its simplest components and then take the most direct and sensible approach to its solution always a maverick he was smart enough and tough enough not to follow the committee rule with conventional wisdom this gave him remarkable freedom with that freedom came a tremendous burden of responsibility finally and most importantly he understood himself well enough to realize that with a few good people you can do remarkable things Kelly Johnson's most important legacy wasn't what he did but the REA he did it [Music] you

Channel: The Film Gate

Views: 97,176

Rating: 4.873467 out of 5

Keywords: Aircraft, Aviation, Planes, Stock Footage, Kelly Johnson, Lockheed, history, edwards, u2, sr-71, engineer, P-80, F-104, Speed record, XF-90, Speed of sound, Vtol, Edwards AFB, Lockheed XFV, Test Pilots, Herman Richard Salmon, Fish, skunkworks, XF-104, Capt. Joe Jordan

Id: bukQbeaP_Cw

Length: 55min 35sec (3335 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 18 2020