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2024-Apr-10

If you have been reading the blog posts here, especially the last few dozen, you could see a common theme among the books being read and critiqued here. This has already been addressed (probably around the review of the DARPA book by Annie Jacobsen a month or so ago) and it will be addressed again. My reading tastes are unchanged since the dawn of my reading habit. It could be summarized as ‘boys with toys’. The toys in today’s case are super fast or super hard to detect airplanes.

Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed by Ben Rich and Leo Jano is a straight up awesome oral biography of the creation of the coolest looking airplanes of my childhood. Let me qualify that last accolade, I was not a young pilot in the slightest. I was just some kid ogling pictures of jet fighters that I found in picture books. I put the F-16 on the same pedestal as Hakeem Ollajuwan. I myself did not see myself being a star center of the Houston Rockets that brought the team to the 1994 NBA finals, nor the avionics engineer of the F-117, but I could respect the delivery of both.

Sports memoirs are often boring to me. How many ways can you retell a story about some athlete training for a physical accomplishment and the outcome of the accomplishment? Especially in book form. I do not enjoy reading long passages describing physical actions, events, and outcomes. I feel that sort of subject is better addressed visually. So a critique on some sports biography chronicling how the Rockets capitalized on Jordan being out of the NBA for a few years in the mid 1990s is not likely to be seen here. Maybe a documentary.

Although a book about the mystery about why Jordan was ‘voluntarily’ absent from the NBA for a few years. I’ve heard some very nefarious rumors as to why and those sound like ripe material for my kind of book.

Reading about physical descriptions in a slow studied manner, such as describing the design and engineering process for super advanced airplanes gives me a stronger grasp on what is being described through text words. Sometimes his book had tiny engineering or (I guess?) avionics terms when describing just what got improved from one jet engine to the next I do not understand. Sometimes I take the time to look them up online so I can find a picture that makes sense of all the words thrown together to describe what the diagram shows me instantly. I think there was an aphorism to that effect...

What we have here are my words describing the wonderfully crafted collection of mostly Ben Rich’s personal thoughts on the projects he participated in as an engineer, VP, or head of the original, capital S, Skunkworks at the Lockheed corporation. Leo Jano gets an ‘and’ credit in author’s position, so I will assume he is a solid professional writer who punched up Ben’s words and maybe the additional contributors to the book, which include former US secretaries of defense or Directors of Central Intelligence, and a long cast of test pilots.

The paired illustration that I came up with for this blog post is a P-38 lightning with some very ill advised placement of a jet engine. I really made only two changes to the design of the airframe to accommodate jets providing thrust behind the main body rather than propellers pulling from the front of the two pontoons attached to the main body. I had intentions to find ways to make this airplane look more ‘dieselpunk’ but I already found the design of this WW2 era fighter plane much more science fiction looking than its contemporaries, even the ones to be produced in the later years of the war.

The P-38 Lightning is the unofficial first product of the super secret and advanced airplane workshop owned by Lokheed Martin: The Skunkworks. My first brush with the very words ‘skunkworks’ was as a city upgrade in one of the Civilization video game iterations. The city upgrade provided some sort of benefit to producing units from tech levels above the player’s current level. After that, the word became synonymous to me as ‘super science lab’. I also vaguely recall referring to Super-Science in these blog posts.

This book was a much more close look at the super science being funded by the US Department of Defense that got a top level view in The Pentagon’s Brain. The actual words of the people involved were given, rather than compiled into an author’s voice composed from source interviews. The gravity of the situation came through the words more easily with several people contributing first person narratives about the same premise: building advanced and expensive warplanes, or sometimes spy planes.

Ben Rich provides at least half of the words and does so in a somewhat non sequential manner. This editorial choice had me believing this book would be hundreds of pages just about the development and usage of the first stealth plane, the F-117. The first act ends with listing the acclaim and feats the plane had accrued, followed by a straight chronological run through to the end describing Rich’s career at the Skunkworks, followed by an epilogue guessing what the twentieth century might hold for the industry he worked in for decades.

What this book did offer besides the more personal takes about the fighter jet’s place in the military industrial complex of the twentieth century (the book was published in 1995) is a defense of how spending is performed for risky bets on very, very advanced technology. I used ‘very’ twice because the leaps in technology in this book’s case are changes in magnitude. I came away feeling Ben Rich was not selling a lemon when he documented how his organization would go about designing new planes and then having the US government buy it from them. Or that he made a case the the return on research investment in the private world at the time was less than what his shop was giving to their customers, who was mostly the a US federal department.

The author also goes on to blame the large part of the bloat that had come with every advancing year of the Skunkworks developing weapons of war was due to government mandated oversight into every decision, rather than an increase of profits for the defense contractor building the actual planes. The impetus for creating new types of planes also had shifted from originating from a private developer bringing new ideas to the client had also shifted to only joint efforts between the armed services and the big defense contracting firms. No longer was the independent streak that Kelly Johnson’s brand of independent management and design welcome in the more regimented, yet more costly, of an increasingly bloated and bureaucratic military industrial complex.
The epilogue makes warnings about the shrinking variety among the playing field of war/spy plane development. The contractor left that can handle the budgeting of over $1 billion dollar planes are now just a handful. The last year of Ben Rich’s career, the 1990s, only had a dozen or so new planes acquired by the US military. In the first decades of his career, the 1950s, there were over five hundred new planes.

Drones are the obvious answer to fill the gap of the incredibly expensive manned flight platforms that were developed by the Skunkworks throughout the last century. This author does mention the flirtations that came from pre-modern efforts for automated flying units came from Vietnam and Gulf War 1 era efforts on their part.

The author also does make a personal look into his life colliding with his somewhat private boss, Kelly Johnson. In the latter years of the Skunkworks creator’s life, Johnson’s wife died. He privately confided to Ben Rich that he worried he could not survive without a woman, namely a wife, to handle every aspect of his life that was not the workplace. He then married his much younger secretary, who then tragically died only a few years later. This second wife arranged for her cousin to assume the mantle of Kelly Johnson’s caretaker/wife. This was not an invalid, this was just a man in his Golden Years. I found it amusing, to put it charitably, to see a champion in the golden era of US airplane development being handled like a child when it came to anything domestic. He was described as a real tough guy in the company and among the generals that were his client’s point of contact. I suppose that compensates for the infantile home life.

Although I appreciate the oral biography format that includes several authors, I confess I found the writing style of the pilots to be almost the same as Ben Rich’s. This had me going back pages often to reconfirm who’s words I was reading. Every now and then I got the impression Ben Rich was not just a great manager of airplane production, but also an ace pilot. I suppose Leo Janus had a hand in most contributors to the book.

I also have a complaint about having all the photos appended at the end, as if it were some appendix! Well it was, when the book was published on paper. This is an ebook. I would have liked it if the photos were near the abstract engineering talk about valves, or valve covers.