Skunk Works is an officialpseudonym forLockheed Martin'sAdvanced Development Programs (ADP), the company's tactical research and development arm. It is responsible for a number of aircraft designs, highly classified development programs, and exotic aircraft platforms. Although locations for this group are typically classified, publicly-known locations have been reported onUnited States Air Force manufacturing bases:Plant 42 (Palmdale),Plant 4 (Fort Worth), andPlant 6 (Marietta).[1][2]
Skunk Works' history dates back to the originalLockheed Corporation and started with theP-38 Lightning in 1939 and theP-80 Shooting Star in 1943.[3][4] During this time, the egroup was calledLockheed Advanced Development Projects. Skunk Works engineers subsequently developed theU-2,SR-71 Blackbird,F-117 Nighthawk,F-22 Raptor, andF-35 Lightning II, the latter being used in theair forces of several countries.
The Skunk Works name was taken from the "Skonk Oil" factory in the comic stripLi'l Abner. The modern term "skunkworks" is widely used in American business, engineering, and technical fields to describe a group within an organization given a high degree of autonomy and unhampered by bureaucracy, with the task of working on advanced or secret projects.[5]
There are conflicting observations about the birth of Skunk Works. EngineerBen Rich sets the origin as June 1943 inBurbank, California.[6]Kelly Johnson has made contradictory statements, some agreeing with Rich, and others putting the origin earlier, in 1939.[7] The officialLockheed Skunk Works story states:
The Air Tactical Service Command (ATSC) of the Army Air Force met with Lockheed Aircraft Corporation to express its need for a jet fighter. A rapidly growing German jet threat gave Lockheed an opportunity to develop an airframe around the most powerful jet engine that the allied forces had access to, the BritishGoblin. Lockheed was chosen to develop the jet because of its past interest in jet development and its previous contracts with the Air Force. One month after the ATSC and Lockheed meeting, the young engineer Clarence L. "Kelly" Johnson and other associate engineers hand delivered the initialXP-80 proposal to the ATSC. Two days later the go-ahead was given to Lockheed to start development and the Skunk Works was born, with Kelly Johnson at the helm.The formal contract for the XP-80 did not arrive at Lockheed until October 16, 1943; some four months after work had already begun. This would prove to be a common practice within the Skunk Works. Many times a customer would come to the Skunk Works with a request and on a handshake the project would begin, with no contracts in place, no official submittal process. Kelly Johnson and his Skunk Works team designed and built the XP-80 in only 143 days, seven fewer than was required.[8]
Warren M. Bodie, journalist, historian, and Skunk Works engineer from 1977 to 1984, wrote that engineering independence, elitism and secrecy of the Skunk Works variety were demonstrated earlier when Lockheed was asked by LieutenantBenjamin S. Kelsey (later air force brigadier general) to build for theUnited States Army Air Corps a high speed, high altitudefighter to compete with German aircraft. In July 1938, while the rest of Lockheed was busy tooling up to buildHudson reconnaissance bombers to fill a British contract, a small group of engineers was assigned to fabricate the first prototype of what would become theP-38 Lightning. Kelly Johnson set them apart from the rest of the factory in a walled-off section of one building, off limits to all but those involved directly.[9] Secretly, a number of advanced features were being incorporated into the new fighter including a significant structural revolution in which the aluminum skin of the aircraft wasjoggled, fitted and flush-riveted, a design innovation not called for in the army's specification but one that would yield less aerodynamic drag and give greater strength with lower mass.
As a result, the XP-38 was the first 400-mph fighter in the world. The Lightning team was temporarily moved to the 3G Distillery, a former bourbon works where the first YP-38 (constructor's number 2202) was built.[3] Moving from the distillery to a larger building, the stench from a nearby plastic factory was so vile thatIrv Culver, one of the engineers, began answering the intra-Lockheed "house" phone "Skonk Works, inside man Culver speaking!"[10]
InAl Capp's comic stripLi'l Abner, Big Barnsmell's Skonk Works—spelled with an "o"—was whereKickapoo Joy Juice was brewed from skunks, old shoes, kerosene, anvils, and other strange ingredients. When the name leaked out, Lockheed ordered it changed to "Skunk Works" to avoid potential legal trouble over use of a copyrighted term. The term rapidly circulated throughout the aerospace community, and became a common nickname for research and development offices. The once informal nickname is now a registered trademark of Lockheed Martin.[10]
In November 1941, Kelsey gave the unofficial nod to Johnson and the P-38 team to engineer adrop tank system to extend range for the fighter, and they completed the initial research and development without a contract. When the Army Air Forces officially asked for a range extension solution it was ready.[11] The range modifications were performed in Lockheed's Building 304, starting with 100 P-38F models on April 15, 1942.[12] Some of the group of independent-minded engineers were later involved with the XP-80 project, the prototype of theP-80 Shooting Star.
Mary G. Ross, the firstNative American female engineer, began working at Lockheed in 1942 on the mathematics of compressibility inhigh-speed flight[13]—a problem first seriously encountered in the P-38.[14] In 1952, she was invited to join the Skunk Works team.[13]
In 1955, the Skunk Works received a contract from theCIA to build a spyplane known as theU-2 with the intention of flying over the Soviet Union and photographing sites of strategic interest. The U-2 was tested atGroom Lake in theNevada desert, and the Flight Test Engineer in charge wasJoseph F. Ware, Jr. The first overflight took place on July 41956. The U-2 ceased overflights whenFrancis Gary Powerswas shot down during a mission on May 1, 1960, while over Russia.
The Skunk Works had predicted that the U-2 would have a limited operational life over the Soviet Union. The CIA agreed. In late 1959, Skunk Works received a contract to build fiveA-12 aircraft at a cost of $96 million. Building aMach 3.0+ aircraft out oftitanium posed enormous difficulties, and the first flight did not occur until 1962. (Titanium supply was largely dominated by the Soviet Union, so the CIA used severalshell corporations to acquire source material.) Several years later, theU.S. Air Force became interested in the design, and it ordered theSR-71 Blackbird, a two-seater version of the A-12. This aircraft first flew in 1966 and remained in service until 1998.
TheD-21drone, similar in design to the Blackbird, was built to overfly theLop Nur nuclear test facility inChina. This drone was launched from the back of a specially modified A-12, known as M-21, of which there were two built. After a fatal mid-air collision on the fourth launch, the drones were re-built as D-21Bs, and launched with a rocket booster fromB-52s. Four operational missions were conducted over China, but the camera packages were never successfully recovered. Kelly Johnson headed the Skunk Works until 1975. He was succeeded by Ben Rich.
In 1976, the Skunk Works began production on a pair of stealth technology demonstrators for theU.S. Air Force namedHave Blue in Building 82 at Burbank. These scaled-down demonstrators, built in only 18 months, were a revolutionary step forward in aviation technology because of their extremely smallradar cross-section. After a series of successful test flights beginning in 1977, the Air force awarded Skunk Works the contract to build theF-117 stealth fighter on November 1, 1978.
During the entirety of theCold War, the Skunk Works was located in Burbank, California, on the eastern side ofBurbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport (34°12′03″N118°21′07″W / 34.200768°N 118.351826°W /34.200768; -118.351826). After 1989, Lockheed reorganized its operations and relocated the Skunk Works to Site 10 atU.S. Air Force Plant 42 inPalmdale, California, where it remains in operation today. Most of the old Skunk Works buildings in Burbank were demolished in the late 1990s to make room for parking lots. One main building still remains at 2777 Ontario Street in Burbank (near San Fernando Road), now used as an office building for digital film post-production and sound mixing. During the late 1990s when designing Pixar's building,Edwin Catmull andSteve Jobs visited a Skunk Works Building which influenced Jobs' design.[15] In 2009, the Skunk Works was inducted into theInternational Air & Space Hall of Fame at theSan Diego Air & Space Museum.[16]
Next generation optionally-crewedU-2 aircraft. During September 2015 the proposed aircraft was deemed to have developed into more of atactical reconnaissance aircraft, instead ofstrategic reconnaissance.[17]
The term "Skunk Works" came fromAl Capp'ssatirical,hillbillycomic stripLi’l Abner, which was immensely popular from 1935 through the 1950s.[8] In the comic, the "Skonk Works" was a dilapidated factory located on the remote outskirts ofDogpatch, in the backwoods ofKentucky. According to the strip, scores of locals were done in yearly by the toxic fumes of the concentrated "skonk oil", which was brewed and barreled daily by "Big Barnsmell" (known as the lonely "inside man" at the Skonk Works), by grinding deadskunks and worn shoes into a smolderingstill, for some mysterious, unspecified purpose.
In mid-1939[19] when Lockheed was expanding rapidly, the YP-38 project was moved a few blocks away to the newly purchased 3G Distillery, also known as Three G or GGG Distillery.[3] Lockheed took over the building but the sour smell of bourbon mash lingered, partly because the group of buildings continued to store barrels of aging whiskey.[20] The first YP-38 was built there before the team moved back to Lockheed's main factory a year later.[3][4] In 1964, Johnson toldLook magazine that the bourbon distillery was the first of five Lockheed skunk works locations.[7]
During the development of theP-80 Shooting Star, Johnson's engineering team was located adjacent to amalodorous plastics factory.[6] According to Ben Rich’s memoir, an engineer jokingly showed up to work one day wearing aCivil Defense gas mask. To comment on the smell and the secrecy the project entailed, another engineer,Irv Culver, referred to the facility as "Skonk Works". As the development was very secret, the employees were told to be careful even with how they answered phone calls. One day, when theDepartment of the Navy was trying to reach the Lockheed management for the P-80 project, the call was accidentally transferred to Culver’s desk. Culver answered the phone in his trademark fashion of the time, by picking up the phone and stating "Skonk Works, inside man Culver". "What?" replied the voice at the other end. "Skonk Works", Culver repeated. The name stuck. Culver later said at an interview conducted in 1993 that "when Kelly Johnson heard about the incident, he promptly fired me. It didn’t really matter, since he was firing me about twice a day anyways."[21][22][23][24]
At the request of the comic strip copyright holders, Lockheed changed the name of the advanced development company to "Skunk Works" in the 1960s. The name "Skunk Works" and the skunk design are now registered trademarks of the Lockheed Martin Corporation.[25] The company also holds several registrations of it with theUnited States Patent and Trademark Office. They have filed several challenges against registrants of domain names containing variations on the term under anti-cybersquatting policies, and have lost a case under the.uk domain name dispute resolution service against a company selling cannabis seeds and paraphernalia, which used the word "skunkworks" in its domain name (referring to "Skunk", the pungent smell of the cannabis flower). Lockheed Martin claimed the company registered the domain in order to disrupt its business and that consumer confusion might result. The respondent company argued that Lockheed "used its size, resources and financial position to employ 'bullyboy' tactics against [...] a very small company."[26]
In Australia, the trademark for use of the name "Skunkworks" is held by Perth-based television accessory manufacturer The Novita Group Pty Ltd. Lockheed Martin formally registered opposition to the application in 2006, however the Australian government's intellectual property authority,IP Australia, rejected the opposition, awarding Novita the trademark in 2008.[27][28]
At that time, Lockheed did not as yet have a formal engineering building, and so Johnson and his staff improvised a development plant using unoccupied corners in hangars and an old distillery. The results of this 'skunk works' approach was the legendary P-38 Lightning.
He calls his development plants 'skunk works'. There have been five of them – the first, an abandoned distillery.
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34°36′53″N118°07′07″W / 34.614734°N 118.118676°W /34.614734; -118.118676
