, and it's an inside story of the peak years of Lockheed's now-famous secret development lab, which created the U2, SR-71, and Stealth Fighter. Although first published in 1994, it's still a totally gripping read, full of anecdotes of Cold War air battles and engineering heroics. Think "Soul of A New Machine" but about spy planes. I couldn't put it down.They also created the first reconnaissance UAV, a jet-powered Mach 3+ drone called the D-21 that was launched from a B52 and designed to overfly Russia or China, dropping its film canister by parachute to be recovered before self destructing. This was before GPS, so the drone used a sophisticated star-tracker for navigation. Although it flew five missions over China, problems with the film recovery process led it to be cancelled.
A couple cool tidbits: the big breakthrough on stealth was the discovery (from an obscure Russian scientific paper) that the radar signature of a flat object was the same (and small) regardless of its size. Thus the faceted shape of the Stealth Fighter, shown on the cover at right. The fact that computers in the 1970s could only calculate shapes with big polygons also contributed to its distinctive shape.
It's co-written by Ben Rich, the chief of the lab for much of that period. Highly recommended!
Here's the Publisher's Weekly description:
"Lockheed's Advanced Development Project has set standards for the aerospace industry for half a century. Under its presiding genius,
Clarence "Kelly" Johnson, the Skunk Works produced America's first jet
fighter, the world's most successful spy plane (U-2), the first
three-times-the-speed-of-sound surveillance aircraft and the F-117A
stealth fighter. Rich was Johnson's right-hand man and succeeded him as
director in 1975, retiring in 1990. In an entertaining style, the
authors describe Johnson's tyrannical managerial style, his thorny but
productive relationship with the Air Force and the stealth-technology
breakthrough that revolutionized military aviation. Writing with
freelancer Jonas, Rich also recounts Skunk Works' failures, including
experiments with liquid hydrogen as a propellant and spy-drone flights
over China's remote nuclear test facilities. He has much to say about
the Defense Department bureaucracy and warns, "Everyone in the defense
industry knows that bureaucratic regulations, controls, and paperwork
are at critical mass... and... in danger of destroying the entire
system." This is a significant book for those interested in aerospace
research and development."
Comments
The Pacific Coast Air Museum has one on display for those who'd like to see one in person. It's a pretty good little museum, just be prepared for the heat if you go in the summer. My wife and kids took me there during my B-Day last year and dispite it being 113 deg it was pretty cool.
These two books may also be of interest to this community. I must admit I have not finished reading them yet, so I can't give a complete review:
Wired for War by P.W. Singer
The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century
What happens when science fiction becomes battlefield reality?
http://wiredforwar.pwsinger.com/
Digital Apollo by David A. Mindell
Human and Machine in Spaceflight
http://web.mit.edu/digitalapollo/