#419 Kelly Johnson: Skunk Works

19:32I was doing what I wanted to do since I was 12 years old. Okay, so now I want to go back to the beginning of the book. Let's get into more of the biography and like the life story of Clara Johnson. Like how, what were the circumstances that caused this person to become the best in his field?

19:45Kelly Johnson:And why was he perfectly suited for the profession that he picked? So he is the seventh in a family of nine children. And he describes his childhood this way. We were very poor. His father would work in construction. He says, my father could lay 2000 bricks in a day. My mother, in addition to raising nine kids, had to take in clothing and wash clothes for the wealthier people in town. And of course, as you can imagine, being a poor family with nine kids, they put the kids to work too. So he starts working from like seven years old. And he would pick up and deliver laundry. And he would do it in his wagon when there wasn't snow on the ground.

20:20And when there was snow on the ground, he would do it in a sled. He was ferociously curious and loved to learn. And so much so that he's going to be made fun of by other kids in his class. He said, school was always interesting to me. I was always eager to go and I would show up early and be first in line to enter the building. And he describes the way he was raised. Our parents were stern but not severe.

20:41Kelly Johnson:Serious in manner but considerate of us children. I was never struck by either of them. We children were expected to show responsibility. I had access to my father's tools and a workshop from the time I was 7 or 8 years old. I could use any of his tools so long as I didn't break or lose them and I always put them back in their place. Some of my earliest lessons in construction were in watching my father build toys for me. He was a proficient carpenter and mason, an all-around craftsman. My respects for tools and machinery I learned early in life from his example. He taught me a great deal about construction.

21:16It was to be very useful to me. Our parents instilled a love of learning in us children.

21:21Kelly Johnson:He talks about the fact that he learned from his father. He says, next to my father, I credit Andrew Carnegie with being the most important influence on my early life. Why? He's growing up in this poor community in Michigan. I think it's called Ish Femming. And he says Carnegie had donated these libraries as he had in many other small towns whose natural resources had helped build his fortune. So in this little town that he's living in, in this very rural area, it's where Carnegie got a lot of his iron ore to build his steel company. And the way that Kelly Johnson describes this, this gift to the community from Carnegie is excellent.

21:56He returned an even richer resource. I went to the library almost every day. It opened a whole new world to me. And so he actually credits a work of fiction for inspiring him down the path that he chose for his career, something he does his entire life. And he's reading these books on Tom Swift. He said, Tom Swift was a very highly skilled designer, engineer, pilot, and operator of many kinds of locomotion and an adventurous young man. It became my goal to be just like Tom. So he's reading all these fictions and then he picks up all these books on aircraft and reads every single one. And as a result of this reading that came because of a gift from Andrew Carnegie, he says, I was 12 years old when I decided I would

22:38Kelly Johnson:be an aircraft designer. My whole life from that time was aimed at preparing for that goal. I continued to read everything I could get my hands on about aviation. My enthusiasm for the subject spilled over. And so when he's 10 years old, he has to learn a trade. He has to go to work. He decides to learn the trade of lathing. And by the time he's 12 years old, he's contributing$7 every week for room and board. So again, think about how poor you have to be if you're charging your 12-year-old son for room and board. And he says, from that point on, from 12 years on, I was self-supporting. The way he described himself was an impoverished but high-spirited and determined boy.

23:20And so through high school and college, he says, I was always talking about aviation. In junior college, I was able to take engineering courses for the first time. I studied physics, mathematics, and calculus. He will talk about as an old man still being in love with all these subjects. He had to work his way through high school and college. He says, in the summers, I worked for the Buick Motor Car Company, swinging fenders on the production line and repairing motors. I would be so dirty and oily after a day's work that I was not allowed to sit down on the streetcar going home. I was reading and studying all the time.

23:50and this is when he realizes to pursue his goal of being in aeronautical engineering, he has got to learn all these other fields of engineering first. So he says in those days you had to study civil engineering, chemical engineering, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, that then leading you to the study of aeronautical engineering. He says it was an excellent curriculum because it provided a very good basic education in everything it took to design and build an airplane. And you see he's very entrepreneurial in two different ways. One, he's always trying to find the people with minds worth examining.

24:20And so he builds these relationships with a bunch of his professors at the time. Some of the ideas that he got from his professors he'd used his entire life. One of them was the fact that you just have to keep an open mind. You never know which idea is actually going to work. And so his professor would repeat over and over again, do not automatically write anything off. Anything. Do not automatically write anything off. Anything. And the second thing is he's working in the wind tunnel. He's doing wind tunnel testing. And he realizes that the wind tunnel is not in use most of the time. So he asked his professor, can I rent the wind tunnel when it's not needed by the university and get some jobs on my own?

24:53And so he starts renting out the wind tunnel to car companies at the time and making a bunch of money. And then one thing he has in his personality is he's learning a lot from them, but he's constantly questioning. He wants to be correct. And so he says, respectful though I was of the great experience and knowledge of my professors, I was not so deferential that I would not argue back if I disagreed. And I did. I bring this up because this is really important because this helps him establish respect and a good reputation when he gets to Lockheed. Because it's one of the first things, it might be the first thing he does when he gets hired.

25:21So he's describing the kind of focus and intensity he had. Most of the time I was working or studying, I completed three years of university work in two. There was little time to play. I knew I had to work hard to become a good engineer and I enjoyed it. I didn't have time for romance either and I deliberately avoided any entanglement. There would be no detours from my goal. And real quick before we get back into this, I need to tell you about Vanta. Vanta, Vanta, Vanta. Vanta helps your company prove you're secure so more customers will use your product or service. You can think of Vanta as your always-on AI-powered security expert who scales with you.

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27:46Lockheed is a tiny company at this point, and it is in dire financial straits.

27:51Kelly Johnson:So he says we get to Lockheed and the company had just been purchased from receivers by a small group of aviation enthusiasts for$40 ,000. The company was in the process of being reorganized. They were already a big name as designer and builder of fast plywood aircraft. They're building wooden planes. There was no jobs for engineers yet. So he talks to the chief engineer at Lockheed. And the chief engineer tells him, hey, look, something's going to come out of this. Why don't you go back to school and then come out again next year? By then, we should have something for you. So Kelly Johnson goes back to the University of Michigan for a year of graduate study.

28:26Now, remember all that time he spent in the wind tunnel. That becomes really important because then he goes back the next year and he gets a job. He's hired at Lockheed in 1933. They have no availability, no open openings in engineering. So he's hired to do tool design.

28:39Kelly Johnson:And the first thing he does is tell the two lead designers that their plane is unstable. And I love this response. So he goes, when I announced at Lockheed that the new airplane, the first designed by the reorganized company and the one on which its hopes for the future were based was not a good design and it was actually unstable, they were somewhat shaken. It is not the conventional way for a young person to begin employment. It was, in fact, very presumptuous of me to criticize my professors and experienced designers. And so one of the engineers was this guy named Hibbard. Hibbard himself was a fine engineer with a degree in aeronautics from MIT.

29:11Kelly Johnson:And he wanted to get some, quote, new young blood, fresh out of school with new ideas, into the engineering department, as he explained. And then this is what Hibbard says about Kelly Johnson. He looked so young, I was almost afraid that he couldn't read or write. We got some fresh new ideas, believe me. When he told me that the new airplane that we just sent in was no good and it was unstable in all directions, I was a little bit taken aback. And I wasn't so sure that we should have hired the guy. But then I thought better of it. And his response was excellent. This is what he did. Kelly, you've criticized the wind tunnel report on the design.

29:41Kelly Johnson:Why don't you go back and see if you can do any better with the airplane? So he goes back to the University of Michigan, takes the plane into the wind tunnel. It says it took 72 tunnel runs before I found the answer to the problem. This leads Lockheed to promote Kelly to engineer. I remember when he said that if you're going to engineer and design something, you have to be with the pilots testing it in the actual aircraft that you're designing. It's almost right away in his career when he understands how important it is. So he's always writing with this test pilot named Eddie Allen. This is, I can't describe this book to you.

30:13I highly recommend obviously you read it, but we are the beneficiaries to the work. Like how safe is air travel now? It's the safest form of travel for any humans, right? And yet so many people are dying or being injured as they're trying to figure out how to create and design safe airplanes, first for the military and then obviously for all forms of business and leisure travel that we use it today.

30:33Kelly Johnson:And so he's – Kelly Johnson is with this guy named Eddie Allen who's a test pilot. He says he's an excellent teacher. And so he is serving as a flight test engineer. And remember, these are brand new planes that they're making. And so you go up in the plane that you just designed and you're with the pilot. And the pilot is doing, it's like they're diving the plane. It says dive tests, stalls, spins, everything. They have to test what this plane can do. Could you imagine being in the seat? And this is how Kelly describes this. It was an excellent indoctrination to the art, skill, science, adventure.

31:05Kelly Johnson:All that goes into flight testing. He taught me what it was all about, what was important, what to record. And he was unflappable. And as a result of this, this is the philosophy that Kelly built and spread and used. I have a philosophy that those who design aircraft should also fly them. The engineer knows where the quarter inch bolts may be marginal, where the flaps are likely to, what the flaps are likely to do or not do. I've shared the concern of the pilot. That's so important. So our purpose is like putting us with the customer, right? I've shared the concern of the pilot. I've shared the concern of the customer.

31:36Kelly Johnson:I figured I needed to have the hell scared out of me once a year in order to keep a proper balance and viewpoint on designing new aircraft. Now it gets into where I would say he deviates from Elon, where early in his career, Kelly did not consider other people's reactions. And so one of his mentors had to take him out and talk about this over and over again. And he says, you've got to learn to live in the world with all these other people. And the sooner you learn that, the better off you're going to be. And so he says, my mentor taught me that it's much better to lead people, not to drive them.

32:07Drive yourself if you must, but not anybody else. And so then in the late 30s, he comes up with this philosophy for living. And again, the way I would say about Kelly is just very practical. He said, we're just trying to apply common sense to really tough problems. Kind of does that to the art of living. And so he has this, I guess he likes lists a lot. So he has this five-point list of his philosophy of living. So number one, belief in God. When you're in a difficult situation, ill or in danger, and wonder if you're going to make it through to the next morning, your faith is one of the most important thoughts that will sustain you.

32:40Number two, health. Without it, one cannot be truly happy. It certainly has been important in my life. And there's a devastating story in the book where his first wife gets diagnosed with cancer relatively young. And so he sees when health is taken away from you and what happens to your life. Number three, purpose. We must have a purpose in life, doing something we want to do and doing it well. This will provide the necessities, security, money, and the rewards of other sorts. Number four, a wife or husband who loves and understands you. Number five, respect of the people for whom you work and who work for you.

33:14That sums up my philosophy of living. So after a few years of being hired, he's promoted to be chief research engineer for Lockheed. This happens in 1938. This is very important because World War II teaches them the importance of designing and then mass producing aircraft, which they had never done before the war. And many of these stories that he tells around this time is the importance of speed, of just watching how fast they move. So officials from Britain are coming to the United States to see if Lockheed and other manufacturers can build what they need to fight the Germans. and Kelly Johnson is notified of this visit just five days before the British officials get there.

33:53They're looking for an aircraft that can destroy submarines. So within five days, they build a prototype. Then the visit happens. The British suggest some changes and Kelly writes, we incorporated what changes we could over the weekend and called them on Monday for another inspection. So that visit was on a Friday. They worked through the entire weekend. They make the changes and say, come back on Monday. They were so impressed that this little company had the gumption to address their problem that they invited us to England to talk to their technical people.

34:20Kelly Johnson:They immediately go to England. They have this meeting and they get another series of updates of what the British are looking for. And so Kelly says it was a three day holiday weekend. I worked a solid 72 hours on this redesign, not taking any time for sleep, just catnapping briefly when absolutely necessary. I was a rumpled figure. When I finally fell into

34:59And then he talks about anytime you're working on the frontier, you're trying to invent something new. You have to stay on top. You have to be constantly learning and stay on top of the new technology. And this goes back to the fact that he just loves learning and loves being a student. And so he says it was and is important for an engineer to keep up with advancing technology.

35:15Kelly Johnson:Studying still held for me the same fascination that it had when I discovered the Carnegie Library. On one vacation in those early years, I reworked all the problems in Fred Weeks' classic book, Aircraft Propeller Design. On another vacation, I reworked every problem in Dr. Clyde E. Love's Differential and Integral Calculus. I was determined not to lose my capability in mathematics, and I enjoyed both those vacations. For many years after I began my work at Lockheed, I would attend a Wednesday afternoon seminar conducted by the eminent scientists and engineers at Caltech. And then there's several sections of the book where it's just like these few sentences I'm going to read to you where you realize like the process is in many cases like an absence of process.

35:57So they have a failure. A part fails. They find it as fast as possible. They fix it as fast as possible. And then they test it as fast as possible. And again, this is an absence of process.

36:06Kelly Johnson:So he says, well, we had located our trouble and we were ready to fly. No committee inspections, no review. In those days, when we were ready to fly, we flew. Next day, first flight. And so even when there was these other organizations that would inhibit his ability to move quickly, he would find ways around it. So NACA, which is the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which is a precursor to NASA, had a wind tunnel that Kelly Johnson would need to use because he needed wind speeds over 300 miles per hour, which his wind tunnel could not do. And they tell him no. So he says our own wind tunnel could not achieve the required high speeds above 300 miles per hour.

36:40NACA officials protested every time they had approached such speeds in their tunnel,

36:44Kelly Johnson:the model had thrashed around so violently they feared it would cause damage to their tunnel. And that was a risk they did not want to take. So Kelly goes over their head to General Arnold, who was the head of the Army Air Forces at the time. And he sends NACA a message. So this is the message that NACA got directly from General Arnold. Put that airplane in the tunnel and run the test for Kelly. Find out what's wrong with my airplane. To hell with the tunnel. If it blows up, call me. And then he goes back to this idea of the people making the decisions have to suffer the consequences. And so they're developing this plane.

37:18And Kelly says, we need to add a dive flap to the plane. And that would require more expense and more effort. And so there's actually a lieutenant named Lieutenant Kelsey who doubted the need for such things. And so the response is, okay, we'll take the plane up and you test it yourself and you tell me.

37:32Kelly Johnson:And so he put the plane in a dive and soon encountered compressibility effects so extreme that he could not reach the dive flap switch. When the tail broke off and he was descending to low altitude at very high speed, he bailed out and broke a leg. He then became a believer in the dive flap. And so as you can imagine, in any field where you're a pioneer, the work that you're doing is becoming more and more valuable. You're going to run into all these strong personalities and these strong characters. And so he tells hilarious stories, which were probably not hilarious at the time, probably scary at the time, of Howard Hughes hiring them to build airplanes for TWA.

38:08And Hughes wasn't just an owner and the largest stockholder. He was also an avid pilot. He was obsessed with aviation. He was also completely reckless. I think he crashed a plane, what, three or four times? And so Kelly in the book tells the story of they're trying to deliver some of the first units to Howard Hughes. They obviously have to have the customer test it. So Kelly's in the cockpit with Howard Hughes and one of Kelly's pilots. And Howard is trying to just jump to the very end, which we'll see here. Our normal procedure in checking out a new pilot in an airplane was to go through the maneuvers carefully, then have the student follow through on the controls from the co-pilot seat,

38:43Kelly Johnson:which is what Howard Hughes was supposed to do. We had just taken off when Hughes said to Milo, who's the pilot, why don't you show me how this thing stalls? So Milo lowered the flaps and gear, put on a moderate amount of power, pulled the airplane up, and stalled it. Hughes turned to the pilot and said, hell, that's no way to stall. Let me do it. So the pilot turns the controls over to him. So Milo turns the controls over to Howard Hughes. I was standing between them in the cockpit. Howard reached up, grabbed all four throttles, and applied takeoff power with the flaps full down. Hughes then proceeded to pull back the control all the way as far as it would go to stall the airplane.

39:17Kelly Johnson:Never before, nor since, have I seen an airspeed indicator read zero in the air. But that's the speed we reached. Zero. At that point, I was floating against the ceiling, yelling, up flaps, up flaps. I was afraid that we'd break the flaps since we got into a very steep angle. I was very much concerned with Howard's idea of how to stall a plane. And so he says, Milo, take this thing home, meaning take the controls away from Howard Hughes. Hughes turned and looked at me as though I had stabbed him. I repeated, Milo, take this thing home. There was no question about who was running the airplane program.

39:57Kelly Johnson:Milo got in the pilot seat and we flew home. Hughes was livid with rage. I had given him the ultimate insult for a pilot, indicating essentially that he couldn't fly competently. And so there's a bunch of stories about just the reckless nature of Howard Hughes. I'll just tell you one more because I thought this was interesting. On a flight as he was approaching Denver, Hughes encountered a big thunderstorm. Instead of flying around it or over it, he plowed right through it. Unfortunately, the passengers had not been warned of turbulence and several were not strapped in their seats and were injured.

40:29And so we're about a decade into his career until he asks his bosses, hey, the way we're doing things isn't working. Let me try an experiment. Let me set up a separate unit. This is, of course, Skunk Works. And so the pitch was, let me set up an experimental department where the designers and shop artisans could work together closely in development of airplanes without the delays and complications of intermediate departments to handle administration, purchasing, and all other support functions. I wanted a direct relationship between design engineer and mechanic and manufacturing. I decided to handle this new project just that way.

41:04And this is when they build the shop out of old wooden boxes and a circus tent. And he says, somehow I got together 23 engineers counting myself. I simply stole them from around the factory. I wanted people whose work I knew. And then he went about eliminating all these complications that you see in a big company. We had our own purchasing department and every function we needed to operate independently of the main plant. In the strict secrecy of wartime and simply for efficiency and to avoid distraction, we allowed no one who wasn't working on the project to wander in and out. He wants to drastically accelerate how fast they move.

41:37So let's say they're supposed to deliver the aircraft in 180 days. They have a giant number. And it says we counted off the contract days on a big scoreboard.

41:45Kelly Johnson:We had scheduled to work on the basis of a 10-hour day, six-day week. No one worked on Sunday. We had to enforce that rule because even with the sickness rate during the last few weeks as high as 50 % daily, it was mid-winter and we had poor facilities in which to work and almost no heating. We could not afford to lose even one of our small supervisory staff to illness. On day 143, the plane was accepted by the Army Air Corps and ready for flight. We had beaten the schedule of 180 days. That is the XP-80. As you can imagine, they're on the very cutting edge and the frontier of aircraft design and manufacturing.

42:21There is a lot of accidents. There's a lot of people losing their life. And this is where redundancy in his systems, he says, just became mania with me. With everything we build, we make sure that we can relight, restart, and keep flying. And he talks about the planning and how spending a few days actually saves a ton of money. So he says, every time we release an engineering drawing to our manufacturing director to build a part for our experimental airplane, we also released it to a group of production engineers with these instructions.

42:47Kelly Johnson:Find every alternative way of making this, ruling out adverse effect on drag, maintenance, or cost. You can affect all of these characteristics favorably. When we finished building the prototype, we had a thick report on how to build a production model. We sat down for three days with that book to choose the best way to build the airplane from every point of view. On this particular project, it saved$10 ,000 to$20 ,000 for every airplane built. The total production worldwide was 2 ,500 aircraft. He is constantly hounding on costs. He says this over and over again. Costs must be considered. Aircraft are getting to be so expensive, they are hardly worth it for what they can do.

43:27Kelly Johnson:With the price of a fighter aircraft now running more than$30 million per plane with all the equipment, not including pilot costs, I can foresee the day when the fighter pilot will be on the ground flying an unmanned fighter with a missile in it. It's almost like he's predicting drones, but he's writing this in 1985. I think this can be done remotely at a great savings in aircraft costs and of course, great savings in manpower to say nothing of the greater safety for the pilot. This is worth considering. And he talks about the kind of people you have to recruit. These are obviously mission driven people, people obsessed with aeronautics and people are willing, willing to just make unbelievable personal sacrifices.

44:08Kelly Johnson:So he says in Skunk Works, We never had trouble getting workmen to go wherever we needed them because they knew wherever it is, the work will be exciting and challenging. They cannot, of course, take their families with them for security reasons, but they can return home once a year. Think about that. Once a year on long assignments. That's an incredible level of sacrifice. And Kelly had personal sacrifices, including threats on his personal safety. This is during the Cold War with Russia. He's the one that designed the U-2. The U-2 spy plane is being flown all over Russia and taking all these photographs.

44:43Kelly Johnson:It flies at like 70 to 80 ,000 feet and it's used for reconnaissance. So eventually the Russians are able to shoot one down and then they take pictures of an aircraft they shot down and publish it in the media. Now they actually did shoot down a U-2, but the pictures they published were not of the U-2. And so the CIA contacts Kelly and they want him to speak out about it. It says, the CIA wanted me to provoke and insult the Russians into revealing more about the incidents. So I challenged them publicly. Hell no, I was quoted in the press. That's no you too. It was about that time that it was suggested to me by security people that I not go to work and come home by the same route or establish regular patterns of movement.

45:23Kelly Johnson:And for a few years during this and other secret aircraft developments, I slept with an automatic pistol close by. And so it is during LBJ's presidency that the Skunk Works and Johnson, Kelly Johnson, that is, create the SR-71 Blackbird that flies at three times the speed of sound. It is the most advanced aircraft in the world at the time and still the fastest. And this is where he goes in where it's like, OK, not only are we having to invent new products, we have to invent the manufacturing methods to invent the new product. Everything about the aircraft had to be invented. So he says aircraft operating at those speeds and altitudes, it's at 80 ,000 feet in case I didn't already say that, aircraft operating at those speeds and altitudes would require development of special fuels, structural materials, manufacturing tools and techniques, hydraulic fluid, fuel tank sealants, paints, plastics, wiring and connecting plugs, as well as basic aircraft and engine design.

46:22Everything about the aircraft had to be invented. Everything. And during the design and creation of the SR-71, he says,

46:30Kelly Johnson:I reverted to my old axiom. Keep it simple, stupid. The more complexity, the more potential for problems. And then he has a great advice on how to handle talent. It's difficult to get an old-time machinist to change his ways. He wants to discover on his own how to do something. So in Skunk Works, we put them in the experimental shop under the engineer's direction and made them a party to developing the data. That always is a good tactic. Like involve the employee in the whole program as much as possible to arouse his interest and inspire his best performance. Now, he's so dedicated to his job.

47:06He actually has to find a way to take himself away from work. So he actually loves to be a rancher. He loves being outdoors. He likes riding horses. He likes racing cattle. And I think this one sentence gives you a summary of how important it was to him. He says it was life-saving escape from the pressures of work. and these pressures are so intense that he's got these reoccurring ulcers. They debilitate him. At one point, they cut away part, like half of his stomach. And so anytime he has a big problem, he's under a lot of stress at work, these ulcers come.

47:35Kelly Johnson:He says, with more responsibility came more ulcers. Whenever one of our aircraft had an accident, particularly a fatal accident, I would develop a stomach ulcer in about 24 hours. And then right around this time, they find out that his first wife has cancer. She's going to die relatively young. And I think this paragraph will give you an idea of just how horrendous this experience had to be. It was a devastating blow for both of us. After two operations, we both knew that she would not overcome the deadly disease. She suffered a severe depression during which she attempted to put herself to sleep permanently with pills so that she would not be a burden to me.

48:10Fortunately, this happened at the ranch on a day when I returned earlier than expected from working in the fields. I was able to rush her to the hospital and she kept going for another few years. She died in December 1969. Much as I love my work and always have, perhaps more than most people, I always believe life should be shared to be really meaningful. And he really means it. The last chapter is called A Good Life. And I think his perspective is a perfect way to end a book, a career, and a life. My work has always been exciting to me and still is.

48:43Kelly Johnson:Very serious study, while demanding, always has been a joy. I literally love aerodynamics, mathematics, physics, machinery, all of the tools of my trade. I consider myself very fortunate to have lived my professional life doing exactly what I always wanted to do. The final chapter of my life is not yet written, but if God should call me tonight, I will have had more than my share of it all. Poverty and wealth, struggle and success, obscurity and recognition, sickness and strength, sorrow and joy, happiness and love. More than my share.