The Original Skunk Works – Nickolas Means | The Lead Developer UK 2017

[Music] [Applause] well thanks for the intro Marian as always it is a great privilege and pleasure to be on this stage I tweeted this morning that this is one of my favorite events of the year and it's because I'm with my tribe here we all do the same things day in and day out we fall we all fight with the same problems and so it's a real privilege to get to come back and to be invited back so thank you for that like Mary mentioned last year I gave a talk about a plane crash specifically this plane United flight 232 that crashed outside of Sioux City Iowa and in the intro to that talk I said that I was a student of plane crashes and that's true I am but it's not the whole truth I have been obsessed with aviation for as long as I can remember and my obsession with aviation started when I was eight or nine years old and my parents took me to Dyess Air Force Base in Abilene Texas there we go to see this group the United States Air Force Thunderbirds now if you've heard of the Blue Angels or the RAF red arrows it's the same sort of thing they're a demonstration team they fly in tight formations streaming smoke out the back feet across feet away from each other's wings and don't hit each other it's amazing to watch but as amazing as that was that wasn't really what captured my imagination that day instead it was standing nose to nose with this amazing machine the sr-71 blackbird now just looking at this thing you can tell how fast it wants to go it's got those razor-sharp leading edges you can't tell it from this angle but the engines are just about as big as the fuselage and there are two of them in this plane looking at it looking at the beauty that this machine represented started a lifelong obsession with aviation for me I went back to my elementary school librarian and asked her to pull every book she could find in the school library on the sr-71 and spent weeks devouring that information well my career has taken a decidedly non-aviation path like Mary mentioned I'm VP of engineering at move health and I work with an amazing team to change how we care for total joint replacement patients which is amazing and fun work but I'm still fascinated by airplanes and stories from the world of aviation sometimes I even find wisdom in these stories about how we practice our craft and how I lead my teams the story of United 232 is definitely one of those stories for me and this story today is another of a series of amazing planes built by an even more amazing organization now if you look at the tail of an sr-71 on display and I checked there is one in the UK is that the Imperial War Museum and Duxford if you look at the tail of this plane occasionally you'll see this cute little guy this little skunk logo and the reason that skunk is there is that the sr-71 was built by Lockheed Martin's advanced development programs division better known as the skunk works now companies throw around the phrase skunk works all time it generally is used to mean a small group cordoned off from the bureaucracy of the rest of the organization to get something really disruptive done in a hurry but Lockheed Martin's was the first the reason we call skunk works skunk works is because of Lockheed Martin and today I want to tell you the story of some of their most iconic planes and the engineers that built them and I'll tell you that story I have to start with this guy Clarence Kelly Johnson without him there would be no skunk works now Kelley as he liked to be called graduated from the University of Michigan in 1932 with a degree in aeronautical engineering if you think about the history of manned aviation we hadn't been flying very long in 1932 this was a brand-new program at the University of Michigan at this point until we graduated in 1932 and applied for his dream job at Lockheed who at that point was a company of about 12 folks and they told Kelly thanks but no thanks we really don't have room for a junior engineer on staff right now and so Kelly went back to the University of mission to get his master's degree in aeronautical engineering now because the pioneering nature of their program they had one of the first wind tunnels in the United States as well and it just so happened that while Kelly was there working on his master's degree they were under contract with Lockheed to test the model 10 Electra airplane now Kelly's professor was done reading leading this research but Kelly got to help with it Kelly's professor thought that the plane was great thought it was ready for production Kelly disagreed he made a strong case to his professor that the plane was actually pitch unstable in other words it would wobble up and down if it got in the right flight conditions but he couldn't convince this professor of that case and so off the research went back to Lockheed everything was a-ok and shortly thereafter Kelly graduated applied for work at Lockheed again this time he got hired but not as an aeronautical engineer he got hired as a tool designer making 83 bucks a month but he got his foot in the door of his dream organization so we went for it he hadn't been there very long when he found the opportunity to talk to Hall Hibbert the chief engineer at Lockheed and he made his case to Hall Hibbard that the Electra was unstable in certain flight conditions well Paul Hibbert thought about firing him on the spot for insubordination who was this young whippersnapper fresh out of school to tell him that this amazing plane who hauled Hibbert that haul Hibbert had designed by the light was Hall's plane who was this young whippersnapper to tell him that this plane was unstable especially when they were banking the future of the company but Kelly showed him the wind tunnel research showed him what he'd seen and sure enough Hall Hibbard saw exactly what Kelly saw and he agreed and as penance he made Kelly go and get the scale model out of storage shove it in the back of the station wagon and drive it to the University of Michigan put it back in the wind tunnel and figure out what was wrong so take a close look at the tail of this plane now here's a picture of the production model of the model 10 Electra notice it switched from a t-tail to an H tail on the back so you can see it again that H tail is the result of 73 Windtunnel iterations that Kelly took it through Moulton Electra went on to be a huge commercial success for Lockheed it was one of the iconic planes of early commercial aviation the problem was after this plane Lockheed didn't have much luck in the commercial aviation market they couldn't find any other hits and there were so many planes coming out of World War one that were converted in the passenger duty that there wasn't much of a market Lockheed might have gone belly-up were it not for the emergence of World War two Kelly Johnson actually designed one of the most iconic planes of World War two the p-38 lightning if you've been to an aviation museum that has any World War two aircraft at all they probably have one of these it's one of the most displayed aircraft in the world it's a great dog fighter it was the fastest thing in the skies it was one of the workhorses of the United States Air Force Arsenal during World War two it dominated the skies over Europe in World War two until the emergence of this plane the German Messerschmitt me-262 now this plane has the distinction of being the first jet fighter to be placed in active duty by any air force in the world it was the only thing in the sky that was faster than the p38 the Germans as it turned out had invested in jet propulsion far earlier than anybody else and had a huge lead the Americans hadn't even started working on a jet engine yet lucky for the Americans you Brits had beat us to the punch and you kindly offered to license our air force the de Havilland h1b goblin engine the Army Air Force had a meeting with Lockheed and asked if they would be interested in designing a plane around this engine the air force specifically proposed that Lockheed build a single prototype the reason for that is because the Havilland was literally hand assembling these jet engines off the assembly line and they only had one engine to give and not only that but the Air Force wanted it in a hundred and eighty days well most of Lockheed factories at this point looked like this full to the gills building p-38 lightning so Lockheed locky Executive Board didn't have a whole lot of interest in doing a one-off prototype plane and what an great investment for the company as far as they were concerned but Kelly Johnson and Hal Hibbert were both very interested in jet propulsion they both were very eager to build a jet plane and what's more Kelly had been bugging his superiors at Lockheed for a long time for an experimental aircraft division where he could take designers and fabricators and mechanics and have them work together without having to deal with all the bureaucracy of Lockheed under the theory that if he could do this they would be able to innovate faster so in part to make one of their their chief engineers happy and in part to shut him up Lockheed dumped this project in his lap and said here you go Kelly this is what you've been asking for you have six months to do it get after it the first problem Kelly had to solve was where to work it's like I said Mosul wok EADS factories looked like this so he the first thing that popped at his mind was probably what you would do as well he went out and rented a circus tent and he set it up next to an existing Factory in the Lockheed factory grounds he installed phones air conditioning desks everything you would need to make this an actual office this 10 the building he set it up next to was a plastics factory and apparently that plastics factory smelled terrible so they'd codenamed this plane the xp-80 and everybody everybody on the project was under strict orders not to talk about what they were doing they couldn't tell their spouses about it and they especially couldn't say anything related to the project when I answered the phone answer Irv Culver one of Kelly's staff engineers on the project referencing a comic that was populating the day took to answering the phone skunkworks Irv here Kelly didn't like it but everybody else at that skunk works did and started answering the phone the same way and the rest is lost to history so if you've ever called the division of your company a skunkworks you've called it that because Kelly Jonathan set up a tent next to a smelling plastics factory the contract for the the xp-80 was signed on June 24th 1943 starting 180 day clock the only concrete information they had to go on was the dimensions of this engine like I said they were hand assembling it and the engine was going to be ready about the same time as the plane so they built a mock-up and then started building a plane around the mock-up of this engine normally instead of going straight in on the plane they would have built a plywood mock-up of the entire plane first to make sure that all the parts fit together and that they've done everything just so but Kelly said you know we're in a hurry here we're only building one of these so just treat the plane as your mock up you're free to fabricate apart on the spot and put it on the plane not only that but he reduced the formality of the drawing approval process normally at Lockheed as you would expect from any physical engineering firm they would do reams of documentation before they would lay down a single rivet but Kelly said we don't need that here we're only building one plane we've got a small group of people we can all communicate about this so if you can draw something that communicates the meaning of what you need built that's not that's all the documentation we need and it worked by November the 13th they were done just a hundred and forty three days from when they started they had a complete aircraft the engine showed up across the Atlantic they took the plane apart crated it up loaded it on a flatbed truck and drove it 70 miles out to Muroc Air Force Base in the middle of the Mojave Desert now why did they do that well they didn't exactly have a lot of faith and how this experiment was going to go and shortly after New Year's the xp80 took flight for the first time and it flew like a dream the prototype you see here it would actually go on to be the first American built plane to fly over five hundred miles an hour and level flight not only that but this plane that skunkworks slapped together in 143 days they put the thing in production they built a ton of them it would go on to be the first jet deployed by the United States Air Force and it would be in service well into the 1980s it had over a 40 year life span per plane they slapped together in 143 days pretty impressive but military spending again decreased after the war we can have any money for new planes at that point we'd spent all of our money on World War two and the Pentagon thought that their current arsenal was good for everything that they needed to do they didn't have any particular niches that they need filled in their hangars but in last very long this picture is Winston Churchill on the left Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the middle and Joseph Stalin on the end this is part of the Alta conference which was the the post-war negotiations where they decided essentially the future of the continent of Europe and you might say there were some differences of opinion in this group and so it wasn't very long after the series of three conferences wrapped up that the US and the Soviet Union both started ramping up military spending like crazy we'd entered the Cold War and I wasn't just military spending that went through the roof reconnaissance activity went through the roof as well a good reason for that around 55% of the American population at this point thought that they were more likely to die in a thermonuclear war than of old age fear wasn't far off base the guiding principle of the Cold War was mutually assured disgust and destruction making sure that your weapons were as deadly to the other side so that if somebody decided to attack you could hit them back just as hard and so in order to maintain that very delicate balance each side needed to know what the other side was up to and they spent a lot of money trying to figure that out the CIA was desperate in particular for information on this place kapustin yar now if you've heard of area 51 in the United States this is roughly the Russian analogue to area 51 it's their primary missile defense or primary missile research and development facility the CIA had been banging the Air Force to do an overflight of Kapusta and yarn take pictures but the Air Force considered this over flight to be far too dangerous with their existing arsenal because of how heavily it was defended they've straight-up refused to do it finally the CIA lobbied enough and they used this plane of martin b57 canberra this plane is actually designed as a bomber and they basically went through and stripped this thing as far as they could got it as wide as they could where they could get it up to around 50,000 feet which was a really impressive feat to get a plane that high back in these days and it's what they used for reconnaissance because they didn't have any better answers at this point and so they took a shot at flying this thing over Kapusta new yarn they got their pictures but this plane limped back to base with more than 12 bullet holes in it I didn't do that again the CIA the CIA needed a different answer all right I'm going to take a breath that was great intelligence so intelligence indicated that Russian radar was essentially blind over about 65,000 feet couldn't see anything and so the CIA decided that what they needed was a plane that would fly 70,000 feet logically above Russian radar and they requested bids and given that they had no means of reconnaissance over Russia they were in a really big hurry to get this plane so Kelly Johnson company proposed a reworking of an existing design this plane the f-104 starfighter to that point this was the fastest plane that the US had ever been built it was capable of Mach 2 dashes and level flight but that's not what they needed here they needed two plane that could go relatively slow as long as it could go high so the plan was to ditch all of the weight that they could stretch the wings and changed the engine to something that would actually work at 70,000 feet because nobody had ever built an air-breathing plane that would fly that high because their proposal was based on an existing design and because skunkworks had proven their capability in building planes quickly with the p80 they went out over other manufacturers proposal the plane that they were building if you look close you can kind of see it the u2 the team started work on the project in November of 1954 the project was so secret that the initial funding for the u2 was actually a 1.1 million dollar check sent to Kelly Johnson's home address made out to see and Jay Engineering C&J being Clarence Johnson's initials they took the f-104 fuselage and they made it thinner they made it of wafer thin aluminum so thin in fact that when a worker accidentally bumped into this thing with the toolbox left a four inch long dent in the side of the fuselage now if you bump to a normal plane that's not going to happen you might scuff the finish but you're not going to leave a big old dent and so there were plenty of folks around skunk works that were really concerned on it this plane was actually going to be strong enough to fly hold together when it did nevertheless eight months later in July of 1955 they created it up and loaded it into the belly of the sea 124 cargo plane this time they took it out to a purpose-built airbase in the middle of the Nevada desert why the Nevada desert because there's a bunch of dried-out lake beds there so there's a lot of places to land this thing of something goes sideways this picture taken by Kelly Johnson himself is of the actual first flight on August the 4th just a hair over eight months from when the first metal was cut they hit their deadline a month after this first flight pilots were breaking altitude records almost daily in this plane by the time testing had ended the plane had been up to 70 4,500 feet and it is from 5,000 miles over a timespan of 10 hours on a single tank of gas exactly what they set out to build if I show both planes at the same time you can clearly see the family resemblance especially from the wing forward the big difference is that the f-104 has about a 22 foot wingspan and the u2 has about an 80 foot wingspan so there's about 60 feet of extra wing on the u2 despite that these two planes weighing exactly the same right at 14,000 pounds they'd cut significant weight from the already lightweight f-104 to get it up as high as they needed it to go but despite the ability to fly three miles higher than any other plane ever built to that point you choose remarkably simple weight was everything they figured out early on that every pound cost them about a foot of altitude so every design decision they made they talked about how much altitude it was going to cost them this wing weighs about four pounds per square foot typical of a jet engine of this era would be twelve pounds per square foot so it's a superlight weight the problem with that is it's not very rigid and so if you hit turbulence in a u2 the wings of the plane literally flap like a seagull not exactly the most reassuring thing to see as a pilot but the wings have never fallen off another way they cut weight was that the u2 was designed with tandem bicycle landing gear there's no wing gear in this thing now that's it's pretty common in a glider to see this and the reason they do it the glider is the same reason we did it here it's to cut weight but you normally wouldn't do that on jet aircraft the combined weight of that landing gear mechanism is right at 200 pounds as far as as I've read it's the lightest landing your ever deployed on a jet aircraft and I can tell you how this works but it's a lot easier to just show you and so here we are riding along in the chase car behind the u2 now the reason there's a chase car is because the pilot is in a bulky pressure suit and literally can't see the ground as they're landing so the chase car sitting or calling out altitudes to the pilot three feet two feet one foot contact and now the pilot is literally flying the plane down the runway it's trying to keep it balanced until he gets far enough down that he's finally bled off enough speed once that happens he'll oh so gently tip it over under the wing and then this crew hops out of a pickup and starts hanging on the wing of the plane trying to pull it off the ground what they're trying to do they have a landing gear that fits in a socket under the right wing they're trying to get that landing gear installed and you if you watch the way you can see how much it flexes as they do this they finally get it off the ground and get that Pogo landing gear under and then you can see it taxing in with the Pogo gear in place it actually takes off the same way those wheels just fall away as it lifts off and somebody runs out on the runway and picks them up what a great hack so every part of you - served only one purpose and that purpose was to get this payload to 70,000 feet over Russia safely this payload is currently housed in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC it's a high-resolution camera with a 36 inch focal length lens and it can resolve objects as small as two and a half feet across from 70,000 feet now at this point this is the highest resolution camera that has ever been built because that's what they cared about they hacked their way around the rest here's a modern variant of the u2 it has bigger wings it has more cargo capacity it could have made the wings more rigid so they didn't flap so bad but it didn't matter pilots love to say that this plane is the easiest thing in the world to fly between 60,000 feet and six inches well with all the cycles of revision they've had on this plane it would have been easy to add landing gear it didn't matter the pilot landed just fine they learned how to do it and they've never had a landing accident right after the u2 went into service they found a problem almost the first over flight over Russia the pilot looked down and noticed a MIG about 15,000 feet below on a few flights later there was a squadron of MiG's flying under trying to block the view and these makes with fire missiles to no end because there's no way the missiles we're going to get up as high as the u2 was but the CIA knew that it was just a matter of time they knew that Russia would figure out how to match their their move in the arms race and how to shoot this plane down they figured out they figured that they had somewhere between 18 months and two years of mission viability on this thing so as soon as they launched it into the service they put out four bids for the replacement the Air Force and the CIA needed that replacement right around 22 months when they thought that the mission viability for the you two would end they wanted a plane that would fly at a hundred thousand feet and go Mach two and so in response skunkworks had no idea if they could do this or not but they started a design study this is this is a one the first plane in the archangels series of design studies by the time we get to the 11th revision it's starting to look a little bit more familiar you probably know where I'm going but you're wrong this is not the sr-71 this is the Lockheed a12 and the technological leap that this plane represents is almost impossible to comprehend it's designed to fly five miles higher than the u2 at ninety thousand feet around around 27,000 meters it's designed to fly four times faster at Mach 3.25 exceeding the CIA spec by one point to five times the speed of sound now this is faster than the - capability of the f-104 remember it could go Mach 2 at - so a couple minutes the a12 was designed to cruise at Mach three point two five to go that speed four hours at a time the problem is that performing if those extremes meant that almost everything the skunkworks team knew about airplane design didn't apply like I said the CIA generously gave them 22 months to figure out how to build an airplane like this from scratch now typically if you wanted to build a plane that could go as high as possible you'd build out of aluminum because it's got a really high strength-to-weight ratio it's really light but it's really strong the only problem is aluminum loses its tensile strength around 300 degrees Fahrenheit 50 Celsius the a12 was expected to be 800 degrees Fahrenheit at the nose about 425 Celsius and at the engine cowlings it was expected to be 1,200 Fahrenheit so 650 Celsius so if you built this plane out of aluminum when you got it up to speed it would literally start melting and fold up on itself they considered stainless stainless would have held up to the heat just fine and we problem is stainless is heavy as heck and there's no way they would have gotten it to the opposite they needed to get it too so Henry combs the primary structural engineer on the project suggested that they consider titanium instead he had designed the engine exhausts on the f-104 starfighter need built them out of titanium to stand up to the afterburner heat there and he knew that it would stand up to the mission requirements of this plane it's just as strong as stainless but it's half the weight and it can withstand higher temperatures and pressures the problem was that nobody had ever worked with titanium at the whole airplane scale before nobody ever built anything that big out of titanium still Kelley's John Kelly Johnson's initial reaction was favorable he said that any material that can cut our gross weight by half is damn tempting even if it'll drive us nuts in the process and that my friends is foreshadowing so skunkworks ordered a test batch of titanium and when it showed up they realized that they had no idea how to extrude it they didn't know how to weld it they didn't know how to rivet it and they didn't know how to drill it the drill bits they used in the aluminum would literally shatter as soon as they tried to drill into titanium not only that but the only u.s. supplier cytanium in those days didn't have the capacity or the ability to produce the quality that they needed to build a full airplane out of titanium and so the folks at skunk works went to the CIA and said we'd really like to build this plane out of cytanium but we don't were to get it you're going to have to help us find a supply chain for this and so through a series of dummy companies and third parties the CIA set up a supply chain from the leading exporter of titanium of the day Soviet Union so the extreme operating environment of the sr-71 required adaptation everywhere in the plane early calculations indicated that at Mach 3 the plane would actually stretch two to three inches because of the friction heating from the air and so all of the systems on the plane had to cope with the heat and the stretching they built the control cables out of a material called L joy now L Jewell is commonly used in watch Springs because you can stretch it out and it doesn't lose its ability to rebound after hundreds of thousands of stretches the engine nozzles they built out of a rare rare alloy called hastelloy X and the reason they use that is because it could withstand the 3,400 degrees Fahrenheit around 1900 Celsius that the afterburners would produce when they burn for hours at a time off-the-shelf electronics wouldn't function because of the extreme temperatures neither would off-the-shelf oils hydraulic fluids greases you name it they came up with a custom fuel for this plane because when you build a plane that flies Mach 3 and gets hot the fuel things get hot as well and the last thing you want is a fuel thing to explode when you're flying at 90,000 feet the problem was the fuel they came up with had such a low flash point that you literally couldn't light the stuff and so they use this to light it that green flash you see there is triethyl boring Travel boring is really nasty stuff that when you expose it to the Earth's atmosphere it spontaneously combusts with this bright green flame so using a chemical that will spontaneously combust try to get this fuel to light that's how hard it is to lie propulsion actually was the biggest challenge that they faced in building this plane I mean nothing had ever gone this fast and certainly this fast that high and so Kelly Johnson handed the project off to his lead propulsion engineer a 32 year old guy named Ben rich Ben had designed the propulsion on the u2 as well so he knew a thing or two about designing high-altitude propulsion systems for jets they took the j58 turbofan engine that Pratt Whitney had designed for a supersonic fighter project that had been cancelled and started revising it to make it work in this plane pratt & whitney was willing to go to all kinds of lengths to make this engine work because they really wanted to recoup some of the investment that they had put into this engine before the project was cancelled and that was good because it took a lot of revision they had to revise the compressors inside to work at the super thin air at ninety thousand feet and to stand up to the heat produced by the afterburners but as much work as they did on the compressor itself the real innovation is the cone that you see there now this plane is cruising over Mach 3 that cone actually moves 26 inches into the engine nozzle and the massive compression that that cone produces is actually responsible for about 70 percent of the thrust this engine produces at altitude and speed a jet engines work by compression they take in taking a giant scoop of air in the front and compress it through a series of fan blades down to a tiny stream going very fast out the back if you think about what happens when you put your finger over the end of a water hose that's exactly how a jet engine works you're speeding up the material that's coming through the end of that opening and making go faster and farther at altitude like I said the cone contributes 70% of the thrust the afterburners contribute another 25% the engine itself the turbine turning inside is only contributing about 5% of the thrust when this plane is at altitude and speed and they were happy to get it there that was really efficient for an engine operating at 9,000 feet but as much innovation as there was in the Splane the things that they chose not to solve or just as interesting turns out that there's no fuel system sealant that existed that could work at the entire range of temperatures this plane operated at so the engineers kind of had to take their pick and what you see on the tarmac under the a12 there is not water that's fuel that is dripped out of the plane it would sit on the tarmac and drip fuel because it didn't matter it didn't affect anything they would just take off with it leaking fuel and then when it got up to altitude and speed the plane would heat up and stretch out and everything would seal off and it'd be all fine another problem they faced was how to start the engines I already talked about the triethyl brain but that's only half of the equation to get a jet engine to light and to be self-sustaining you have to get it turning first before you ignite the fuel they had to get the mass of j58 turbofan turning at 4500 rpm it takes a lot of energy to do that on a commercial jet airliner you'd have a starter engine that would turn the turbine before you light the fuel but on this plane as big as these turbines where that was an option it would cost him a ton of altitude to put a starter motor big enough to actually turn that turbine so this is the answer they came up with instead this is the AG 330 start cart better known to ground ground crews as the Buick and the reason they called it the Buick is because it's actually two Buick Wildcat v8 engines coupled together they physically coupled that to the starter shaft of the j58 turbofan crank these things up to full throttle get the turbine spinning and then light off the trial borane and then you've got a lid engine the crews said it sounded like a stock car race in the hangar every time they started this plane up but it didn't cost any altitude the plane also didn't produce an abundance of lift so it turns out you actually can't fill it with fuel on the ground because it won't be able to take off it's that close to not being able to fly at ground level so instead every time an sr-71 would take off immediately after takeoff it would have to hit a tanker and get a tank of gas because they just put enough fuel in it on the ground to get it off the ground into the tanker that's it I mean I would have leaked the rest out anyway so why bother there are only two things that mattered in building the a12 I needed to go very fast and I needed to do so very high five miles higher and four times faster than the youtubes on April 30th 1962 one year and 100% over-budget skunkworks gave the CIA what they wanted those pictures of the a12 first flight it drips fuel couldn't start its own engines without crazy chemicals in a couple of v8 racecar engines but it didn't matter the team had spent their time and money on the things that did matter the titanium construction the the radically new propulsion I hacked their way around the rest because of that relentless focused this thing went Mach three to at ninety thousand feet over some of the most hostile territories in the world after building 15 of the a12 for the CIA the Air Force took over the CIA's airborne reconnaissance operations and the Air Force requested a two-seat version of this plane they wanted a dedicated reconnaissance systems operator to be able to sit in the back seat and operate all the spy gear and they wanted twice the payload capacity so they could get more sensors up to altitude take more pictures that plane is a 12 spar more famous younger sibling the sr-71 it flew for 30 years and has the distinction of being the only u.s. military aircraft to have never been shot down despite over 3,500 sorties over hostile territory and hundreds of missiles launched at it and holds just about every speed and altitude record there is so for alpha tube it flew at 85,000 69 feet which is just just a hair shy of 26,000 meters we know the plane almost certainly went higher than this this is before the program was completely Declassified and it was over a known and established ahead of time course so that people who might be interested could be watching the flight pattern so we know that almost didn't almost certainly didn't take it to the extremes of its operating envelope but that's the official record for speed 2190 3.2 miles an hour now that's about Mach 3 3 we know for certain that it'll go faster than that because Brian shul and his books lend driver tells about outrunning a missile in Libya getting across the border and looking down and realizing he's pushed this plane just a hair over Mach 3 5 so we know it will go faster than that but that's still a ridiculously high number let me give you some context for that speed the muzzle velocity of a 22 caliber rifle bullet is 2046 miles an hour so at cruise speed cruise speed the sr-71 was literally faster than a speeding bullet in practical terms the sr-71 could do the New York to London run in an hour in 55 minutes on a good day with the wind at its back it took the Concorde 2 hours and 52 minutes to do that LA to Washington an hour and four minutes that's about a four and a half five hour commercial flight but my favorite the one that's the easiest to wrap your head around just how ridiculously fast this thing is in the middle of that Los Angeles to Washington run they tracked its speed from st. Louis to Cincinnati the Blackbird could do that in eight minutes in 32 seconds according to Google Maps if you do that in your car it's 5 hours and 16 minutes that's how much faster than us they're going it will probably hold these records forever with the advent of satellite photography and and drone aircraft we just don't have need for a plane that can perform at this extreme anymore well the sr-71 was Kelly Johnson's crowning achievement in 1975 Fiat Lockheed Martin's mandatory retirement age of 65 and he passed the reins to this man his protege Ben rich the same Ben rich that had designed the a12 propulsion system at 32 years of age and Ben took over skunk works that are really tumultuous time the us us appetite for defense spending was very low after Vietnam Lockheed attempted reentering the commercial aviation market this plane the l-1011 tristar was a massive failure that cost the company somewhere in the neighborhood of two billion dollars and those are 1975 dollars it's a lot of money and so rich had to find significant new work and quickly or he was going to have to start unloading his most expensive and most experienced people but the Cold War continued Leonid Brezhnev the Russian premier through much of the Cold War would still be in power in Russia for another eight years the USSR had invested somewhere around 300 billion rubles in developing radar and surface-to-air missiles like this sa v battery that were far more advanced than any of the u.s. attack capabilities and so to maintain the mutually assured destruction that had kept the tender balance of the Cold War in place for so many years the u.s. needed to develop something that could pierce these defenses and that was about the only thing the Department of Defense was willing to spend money on at this point but ideas were in short supply that is until Dennis ol Overholser a 36 year old mathematics and radar expert on the skunk work staff walked in and tossed this document under his desk now Pat quad talked this morning about the principle of information hiding and this is a fantastic example of that in this document the method of edge waves in the physical theory of diffraction had been published by cutter yo from 7th ist's of the Moscow Institute of radio engineering about 10 years before it came to over holsters attention the reason for that is because it had been several years before the military it even bothered translating it they read the title on tab that's useless Overholser however once he read through this thick document got to the end and saw formulas on the very last page that had some substance he saw a method for calculating the radar cross-section of both the edge and the surface of the wing and he thought he could use those formulas to come up with a pretty accurate number now to understand why this is such a big deal you need to know how they usually went about trying to minimize the radar signature of a plane that they'd stick it upside down on a pole on a radar range and shoot radar at it and see what it looked like on the radar now somebody that knew the math and science could make some reasonable inferences about what might affect radar observability but it was largely black magic there there wasn't a lot of science to doing it you just sort of developed by instinct stealth technology had long been batted around is the Boldin grail of military aviation technology but it was always written off as too difficult and too expensive to do effectively in o'them subs paper Overholser was convinced that he had the formulas that would let them predict observability ahead of time and empirically designed for it he convinced bin rich to let him spend some time building some software to do that a couple weeks later Dennis Overholser walked into bin rinses office and handed him a sketch of this the plane that quickly became known around the skunkworks offices as the hopeless diamond the reason they called it that is because everybody has come forward to knew there was no way in the world they would ever get this thing off the ground nonetheless been rich just to see if Denisova real sword actually figured anything out about radar technology or not went ahead and green liner to radar range test for this to see what it looked like so they put it up on the pole and then rich is sitting in the cab with the radar operator and the radar operator starts the tests and asks Ben to stick his head out and make sure that they've finished installing the plane on the pole can't see it planes there and as Ben rich has his head stuck out of the operator cab watching looking at this plane a crow lands right on the nose of the plane and the radar operator goes oh never mind I've got it Ben rich didn't have the heart to tell him that he was a pin a crow not the airplane and he knew at that point that they run to something really big about that time the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency the same DARPA that that invested in the early internet held a design competition for stealth aircraft five companies entered and they selected two winners from the first round Lockheed and Northrop and they gave you to them 1.5 million dollars to build a 38-foot scale replica of their design and they were going to test it on the military's most sensitive radar range at White Sands New Mexico and that's what you see in this picture is Lockheed 38 foot model the only problem is that the model is so good that all they were seeing on the radar was the pole now the Air Force had always assumed that this pole was invisible because the way radar works is the brightest thing is the thing you see on the screen and they'd never seen the pole before but it's because they'd always picked up more of a signature off of the aircraft on the pole self and so in order to conduct accurate tests Dennis Overholser just designed them a new poll that poll cost somewhere around five hundred thousand dollars but it was no longer visible on radar and so at this point they could faintly see the signature of the plane just barely these are with the US military's most advanced most powerful radars but they wanted to quantify exactly what the radar signature of this plane was and so they came up with a really unique way to do it they knew what a ball bearing looked like on radar and so they started gluing successively smaller ball bearings on the front of this plane they started with a 3-inch ball bearing which is a little bigger than this this is a 2-inch bearing so it went 3 inches 2 inches kept on going down and I kept seeing the ball bearings finally they're all run away from me finally when they got down to a 1/8 inch ball bearing which most of you probably won't be able to see it's smaller than a BB they could finally see the plane and not the ball bearing so the radar observability of this model is slightly bigger than this ball bearing I'm holding in my hand over holsters math worked so obviously Lockheed won the competition and the next step was to build an actual prototype to fly against a radar installation and see if it could actually do what the model did once they added things the model didn't have like engines and air intakes and landing gear and a pilot's head in the windshield things that would all be observable on radar potentially the Air Force wanted two prototypes in 14 months Air Force is always in a hurry about things and skunkworks agreed I'm sure enough right on time they had a plane ready to fly now this thing is a bucket of spare parts the flight control computer came out of the f-16 then the inertial navigation system out of the b-52 the seat also from the f-16 the heads-up display from the f-18 engines from the t2b buckeye trainer the only thing new about it is the skin you see on the exterior the biggest thing they had to solve were the aerodynamics they picked the s16 flight controller for a very specific reason and that's because the f-16 is actually unstable in the pitch axis of flight so as the f-16 is flying the flight computer is constantly calculating what it needs to do in order to keep the plane flying straight and level and it takes that and sums it with pilots inputs to the plane and that's how it decides what descended the control surfaces so it's doing a lot of correcting on the sub-second scale this plane some say one pitch just like the f16 but it's also unstable and roll and yaw all three flight dynamics axes this plane is unstable and so they took the code that the f-16 used for pitch correction and used it on all three axes of flight because of that the early test pilots nicknamed this thing the wobbling goblin because it took them a while to get it dialed in and it would literally wobbly as you flew it as it made not quite so correct Corrections but true to form they got it to fly this is actually the only photo I've been able to find of this thing in the air because most of the test flights were done at night they didn't want prying eyes to see this thing flying before they were actually had it in operation now they got it in the air they needed to see if it could live up to the promise of self eNOS and so they took it out to the Nevada desert and flew it against one of these the target acquisition radar from a hot missile battery this was the USA's most advanced missile battery at this point normally what you would expect to happen is this plane flew over you would expect the missiles from the missile battery to track the plane as it flew over in case you wanted to shoot it down that's how that's how it worked it just happened on Thomas Lee any time I saw a plane I started tracking so they have blue prototype flew right overhead missiles never moved the radar battery never saw this plane less than five years later the first f-117 stealth fighter detachment was operation a lot of Tonopah test range Airport part of the famous area 51 complex pilots were initially skeptical to fly it because I mean just look at it but once I got in the air they actually founded a lot of fun to fly it was a really responsive aircraft on the first night of Desert Storm a total of 22 of these flew into Baghdad and privately the Air Force expected to lose about 30% of them they actually didn't lose a single one of these the whole Operation Desert Storm never shot one down this whole plane is one big hack they need it to be on invisible on radar and they got very very close by basically not caring about the laws of aerodynamics at all and just hacking their way around the instability with the computer system the reason this plane is all flat surfaces is because computers in that day were not strong enough to calculate the radar observability of a curved surface so instead of overthinking it then assault over holes are just designed to point out a flat surfaces and call it a day Kelly Johnson was fond of saying that beautiful planes fly beautifully this plane with all of its flat surfaces and weird tail and strange diamond shape is certainly not beautiful in the conventional sense of the word but didn't matter it did what it needed to do so how in the world did they do it all of these amazing planes each of which was groundbreaking in some significant way and plenty of others we haven't even talked about these are just kind of the greatest hits well our story ends the same place it began back with Kelly Johnson and the p80 a scrappy team of at its peak 23 designers and 105 fabricators created the PA around a mocked up engine in 143 days and that plane flew for 40 years not much about Kelly's philosophy how skunkworks built planes changed over the years even when he passed the reins on to Ben rich and the reason for that is because he codified this in what's still held up in Lockheed Martin culture as Kelly's rules you can look them up on Lockheed site later if you wanna if you want to read them but I'll just share a few of my favorites the first is use a small number of good people Kelly's actual quote on this is the number of people having any connection with the project must be restricted in an almost vicious manner use a small number of good people then the 25 percent compared to the so called normal systems now to give some context for that quote at its peak there were 75 engineers working on the design of the a12 Boeing used more than 10,000 engineers to design the triple 7 and that was with the aid of CAD software Kelly and his team are still drawing all their diagrams by hand Kelly hired smart people in this organization and trusted them to do good work one of my favorite example illustrations of this is Peter Drucker tells the story of a young infantry captain in Vietnam a reporter asked this infantry captain how in the fog of war he maintained command of his troops and this young infantry commander said around here I'm only the guy who's responsible if these men don't know what to do when they run into an enemy in the jungle I'm too far away to tell them my job is to make sure they know what they do depends on the situation which only they can judge this is how all of our teams operate rather we acknowledge it or not your team are constantly making decisions as they assess problems and as they write code you can either trust your team to make good decisions or you can try to smother them with process and micromanagement try to have a hand in every decision that they make but good leaders hire smart people and trust them to make good decisions on code that trust can't be hands-off right good leaders also have to focus on enabling their team to make good decisions by making sure they have good context and understand the overall goals of both their work and the business as a whole your team's going to be making decisions your job as a leader is to make sure that they have the context and the information they need to make the right decisions so one of things Kelly did so well another one fellas rules a very simple drawing and release system with great flexibility for making changes must be provided sound familiar I mentioned earlier the lightweight drawing system that Kelly put in place for the p80 this actually became one of those rules on an ongoing basis skunkworks never used the same rigorous documentation practices at the rest of Lockheed used he kept the process to the minimum necessary to get his team the required context this teams did lightweight drawings because they didn't need anything more than that they they collaborated closely together now this lightweight process wouldn't have were at the main Lockheed plant they produced a far higher volume of planes with lower skilled workers they needed the context and the documentation to the job right but in a small team like most of us work on you don't need all that context in all that structure Sara Mae is one of my favorite voices on this kind of stuff and she had a great tweet a while back team pathology is always either hanging on the processes suited to a smaller team or early adopting processes suited to a larger team you need enough process so that everyone has the context they need but not so much that people turn off their brains and wait to be told what to do process is there to serve you not for you to serve the process and this is what Kelly got so right there's no way all of this innovation could have come out of the brain of one man Kelly didn't have all of that in his head no matter how smart he was but the processes he put in place allowed his teams to set the right priorities and to make the right compromises when they made decisions one of my favorite rules there shall be but one object to get a good airplane built on time what made a good airplane delivered the value that the customer needed it hit the key specs and it compromised on the things that weren't so essential in order to do so Kelly was a pragmatist every decision he made was around how deliver the most value in the shortest amount of time for his customer while bringing out the best in his people and because of the freedom and trust he gave his teams and because of how clearly he laid out the goals for each project they were able to deliver some of the most amazing planes ever built the u2 landed on terrible landing gear because they came the team decided it was worth it to save the weight in favor of altitude it's a good compromise driven by the goals of this airplane the sr-71 is the fastest plane ever built couldn't even start its own engines sat on the tarmac dripping fuel because those things just didn't matter in the scope of the mission of this plane the team spent all of their time trying to figure out how to build a plane out of titanium and then get it to go Mach 3 at 90 thousand feet and I didn't sweat the rest of the stuff the f-117 violates almost every law of aerodynamic design but they worked around that to make it invisible on radar it bucks conventional wisdom in almost every way possible because of the trust that been read put and Dennis Overholser Kelly's and later Ben's teams had unprecedented input into what they were building they had incredible freedom and trust from their leaders you gotta find ways to give your team that trust and that freedom you have to push as many decisions and as much responsibilities down to them as you can because they have the information they're going to make better decisions than you almost every time as long as you've done your job of giving them the larger business context you got to make sure that you've identified and are clearly and consistently communicating that business context the two or three most important things that your team needs to be working on so that your team can make good decisions and if you do that you have to remember that sometimes good decisions will turn out to be the wrong ones so you have to build a culture of healthy learning not finger pointing for this to work you have to take the time to build and refine a process that works for your team and give them enough context but gives them plenty of freedom to do their best work and if you do these things there's no telling what you and your team will be able to do together thank you [Applause]

Channel: LeadDev

Views: 1,360,248

Rating: 4.8196769 out of 5

Keywords: skunk works, skunk works documentary, nickolas means, nick means skunkworks, the original skunk works, tech lead, lead developer, lead dev, the lead developer, nick means, The Original Skunk Works – Nickolas Means, The Lead Developer UK 2017, white october events

Id: pL3Yzjk5R4M

Length: 53min 9sec (3189 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 05 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/she-who]

what goes around comes back around

[u/Allnewsisfakenews]

Confirmed by Pawn Stars

[u/Landlubber77]

Obligatory SR-71 speed check story, now in video form!