Original subtitles

Blitz: When you have a super-secretive base

in the middle of the desert,

there is more than meets the eye.

Jacobsen: These incredibly nerdy engineers are really James Bond.

Petraeus: Skunk Works originally started out

as a highly secret bunch of revolutionary thinkers.

Mullin: Skunk Works was hidden within

the Lockheed California company.

Justice: The Skunk Works created these incredible flying machines

that fundamentally changed history.

Trimble: Area 51 was created for the U-2.

That was the aircraft that discovered

the missile sites on Cuba.

That's when the Cuban Missile Crisis started.

Gilliland Jr.: The Blackbird is probably the most popular airplane.

People like the fastest, the highest,

and it helped end the Cold War.

Law: In the Gulf War,

the Nighthawk changed combat aircraft permanently.

Justice: The Skunk Works created airplanes

that changed world history.

Jacobsen: These guys are really

at the nexus of mystery, intrigue.

Secrets are built in into the American military.

Narrator: For years, I had to live in the shadows.

See, that's what we did back then.

I led a top-secret organization called the Skunk Works.

Funny name, I know.

I'll get to that later.

My men made the airplanes that kept America safe.

I'm Kelly Johnson, and for years,

I was more than happy that very few knew my name.

He's a figure in American military history

that more people should know, but the CIA

and the United States government did not want the public

to know his name.

People weren't supposed to know about Kelly Johnson.

Narrator: As head of Skunk Works,

I wrote near daily in a logbook,

making a record of my thoughts, plans, and ideas.

It was my personal journal,

hidden from the public until now.

Westwick: These mythical logbooks, I've seen pages out of them.

They're kind of the holy grail of aerospace historians

because here is a detailed log of one of the iconic

aircraft designers of the 20th century.

But I've never seen a full round of them

because I think a lot of them are still classified.

Narrator: The Skunk Works is a concentration

of a few good people solving problems far in advance

and at a fraction of the cost of other groups

in the aircraft industry.

Almost all of what we did was classified.

We designed our first spy plane during a very different time

in American history, when America was in the Cold War.

The origins of the Cold War manifested in the late 1940s,

early 1950s.

The first big blowup was in 1949.

The Soviets explode their first atomic bomb.

All of a sudden, America and the Soviets

have this nuclear capability.

This arms race ensues.

They were boasting and bragging

that they had missiles being pumped out like sausages.

They had bombers.

Painter: And everybody is scared that,

"Oh, my God, they've got so many bombers.

They're going to fly over the North Pole,

and they're going to bomb the United States

into, you know, Never Never Land."

Lockheed Jr. And it was simply a fact of life.

There was a possibility that the threats and the desire

expressed for world domination by the Soviet Union

could turn into a nuclear conflict.

It was implicit in all of the air drills

that we did as children in grade school.

The American government was desperate to find out

how strong the Soviets were, and it was very difficult

to get information out of the Soviet Union.

They were a closed society.

The CIA could not get any human spies on the ground

in the Soviet Union.

I mean, it was called the Iron Curtain

for a real reason, you know?

It was impenetrable.

Cappuccio: What Eisenhower was impressed with was data.

"I need to see what they're doing.

I have to see that data. I have to..."

And it has to be of a quality that says,

"That is a tank and not a 2-ton truck.

That is a missile and not a pipe."

And the President authorized these incredibly nerdy engineers

to create this spy plane that can fly high enough

to be out of the line of fire of Soviet surface-to-air missiles.

Narrator: The year was 1955.

Previously, Skunk Works had designed

two successful jet fighters for the government,

the Shooting Star and the Starfighter.

Planes could soar to 50,000 feet.

We needed an airplane that could go 70,000 feet,

out of range of them Russian missiles.

And from that height, we needed to capture images

as tiny as my typewriter.

That was the first reconnaissance aircraft

built from the ground up, capturing secrets in the sky.

We called it the U-2.

Powers Jr. Up until the U-2,

there was no reconnaissance aircraft.

It was a modified bomber with a camera.

The U-2 was the first plane to be specifically designed

to fly over foreign countries

to take pictures to gather intelligence

for review here by the United States.

With the U-2, you wanted high altitude.

That was going to be the way you survived.

Well, if you want high altitude,

then you got to have light weight,

so you do severe things.

Like, on the U-2, you have one main landing gear

in the middle of the fuselage on the bottom.

You don't have two or more landing gears.

Jacobsen: This was a plane that had to be so incredibly light

to get up to 70,000 feet.

I mean, the skin on the aircraft was something like

0.02 inches.

Painter: In the camera system, they actually had

two 9-inch reels of film, and they counter-rotated

so that the weight between the two reels was always the same.

It was that critical on that aircraft

to keep the weight in balance.

Narrator: Everything we did had to be secretive,

even within our own parent company, Lockheed.

During the 1950s,

it was one of the top airplane manufacturers in the world.

Skunk Works was a subdivision,

yet very few within the company knew what we were doing.

Mullin: Skunk Works was physically in Burbank,

and it was hidden within the Lockheed California company.

I had been with Lockheed well over 20 years,

and I knew very little about the Skunk Works.

Justice: The Skunk Works itself was a secret for a long time.

When I hired in, I was not allowed to tell people

I worked for the Skunk Works.

Law: When I first went to Lockheed, I didn't know a thing about it,

and everybody that was there says,

"If you're a good engineer, maybe you'll get to go over

to the Skunk Works some day."

As it turned out, when I did go over to the Skunk Works,

it was a different world.

Number one, you would not talk about your work to anybody,

including your wife.

They could fire you if you told somebody

you worked for the Skunk Works.

Cappuccio: The second thing is, you had to be investigated

to make sure you were an honest, loyal, trustworthy citizen.

The fact that there was an organized approach

by the Soviets to have spies here was a fact of life.

There were, undoubtedly, hostile agents that were trying

to steal the intellectual property, as we would say today,

or understand what it is that was being developed.

Simple things like,

"Watch the guy on the Xerox machine.

Make sure he only replaces the cartridge,

not put a camera in it."

Law: Russians and Chinese had ships out in the water,

and they could tap your phone calls,

and, you know, everything was just getting to the point

where you couldn't trust anybody,

so they started giving lie-detector tests.

"Has anybody contacted you on this?

Has anybody asked you this?"

Another thing everyone was afraid of was a honeypot,

and the honeypot is literally like a female paramour,

a Russian spy who would try to seduce

a male worker at the Skunk Works and try and then,

in pillow talk, get this information from them.

The environment that created the U-2, they wanted to truly

protect the fact that the airplane

was even in development.

Kelly had money delivered to his house,

the payments for the contract.

They set up front companies to buy equipment,

anything they could do to mask the fact

that an airplane was in development.

Narrator: We needed a place to build the U-2,

somewhere completely off the grid,

not the kind of place you could find on a map.

Jacobsen: They have to find a base that is so secret

that no one will know what they're doing,

so Kelly Johnson and the CIA's Richard Bissell

start flying over the American west,

and where do they wind up?

Inside the middle of the Nevada Test Site

where the Atomic Energy Commission

just so happens to be setting off nuclear bombs.

I mean, I'm talking mushroom cloud and all

outside of Las Vegas, Nevada.

It's impossible to imagine now, but this was going on

in the 1950s, and they think to themselves,

"No one is going to follow us here."

So, they partition off a segment of the Nevada Test Site

specifically for this aircraft,

and the reason it's chosen in particular

is because it's an old, dry lake bed,

and it's extraordinarily flat,

and that's what they need for a sort of natural runway.

And it's called Groom Lake,

and now we know Groom Lake to be Area 51.

Petraeus: Well, Area 51, of course, in the 1950s,

this is so isolated.

A lot of activity could be conducted there

without folks seeing it.

Narrator: Base location has been decided as Site II,

for which the government will accept my proposed name

of "Paradise Ranch."

Justice: The Paradise Ranch name was given to it

to try to make it sound better.

There is just nothing there, and in the days of the U-2,

it's a few trailers that are set up,

so you can imagine there wasn't really a lot of

air-conditioning or anything.

This is rough working conditions.

Jacobsen: One of the lead physicists out there told me

one of his most acute memories

was looking across the way and being like, "What is that?"

and realizing that it was a coyote chasing a rabbit,

but they were both walking.

Painter: One of the little not-so-good features was

Yucca Flats was still detonating

nuclear weapons, so every once in a while,

everybody had to get out of town,

and they'd have to wait two or three weeks,

and they'd go back in with the Geiger counters

and make sure it was safe, and they'd go back to work.

Jacobsen: You can imagine how glamorous it must seem,

but if you go back in time to 1955,

the reality of the situation was that it was a bunch

of engineers, test pilots, and CIA officers.

It was an extremely tiny project in terms of need to know.

There was the President, and there was only 200 people

working out at Area 51 to get this U-2 aloft.

And then, back in the old days, we flew up there from Burbank,

and the first time you went up to the test site,

you had to sit in a part of the airplane

with the windows blocked

so that you couldn't see where you were going,

but once you got up there and filled out your paperwork

to get the badge that you had to have

when you were on the site,

then you could sit in any part of the airplane

where there was a window.

It was fun.

I hate to say this, but we got to fly over the craters

that were in the ground up in north of Las Vegas

where they were doing all the atomic tests.

You could see these big cavities and things.

The U-2 was pushing the boundaries

of what we knew how to do,

but this was absolutely critical.

This was at a time where --

And we knew the Soviets were working

on these nuclear weapons.

There was even reports

that they had a nuclear-powered bomber,

but we didn't have any way to verify.

We didn't have satellites then.

Narrator: We worked night and day

perfecting the U-2 at Area 51.

Sleep -- that was just something we all dreamt about.

Airplane essentially completed.

Terrifically long hours.

Everybody almost dead.

We did everything we could to keep the U-2 top-secret,

but there were times civilians spotted

the plane soaring in the sky.

Luckily, the reports coming in were sightings

of unidentified flying objects.

Man: I'm getting some reports from the tower, radio tower,

and several radar sites about the UFO.

During the testing of the U-2, people saw these "UFOs,"

and 50% of all sightings in the '50s and '60s

were because of Skunk Works aircraft.

The CIA had a whole bureau to deal with U-2/UFO sightings

because it was such a common thing to have happen

whereby someone would see something up in the sky

that was completely inexplicable.

I mean, the U-2 -- the wings are so long in it,

it almost looks like a flying cross,

and people just couldn't comprehend

what could fly up that high.

Justice: You know, imagine that you're a commercial airliner pilot

and you're up at about 38,000 or 40,000 feet.

You're pretty high.

You know that military jets go to about 50,000 feet.

And then you see something way above you.

It is way above 50,000 feet.

So now you see this very light-colored thing

at twice your altitude.

What conclusion are you going to draw?

After one year's investigation,

I believe that the flying saucers seen by veteran airline

and Air Force pilots are objects from another planet.

Narrator: At Area 51, we did have creatures

that seemed more than human, but they weren't space men.

They were our test pilots.

These men were a different breed of beings,

and testing our machines was a test of their own mettle.

If you go back and you say,

when these airplanes were designed

and you look at the tool sets to design them,

most of them were done with simple slide rules,

so there was a fair amount of uncertainty.

Justice: And we're talking, you know, the mid-1950s here.

You know, I mean, the technology was still very crude.

Flying at that altitude, you're above most of the atmosphere.

The air is extremely thin, and getting a jet engine

to run up there is very difficult.

Keeping the pilot alive is very difficult.

Trimble: The aircraft is flying at 70,000 feet.

Once you get above 63,000, 64,000 feet,

if your body was exposed to the air pressure

at that altitude,

the blood inside your body would begin to boil.

The human body is not designed to be exposed

to air pressure that low, so you have to wear

a pressurized space suit just to survive.

Jacobsen: It took three flight surgeons to help you

into the suit to make sure there were no rips,

that the zipper went up the right way,

and then you sat and you re-breathed

pure oxygen for two hours.

Man: High flights without free breathing would result

in nitrogen bubbles forming in the blood,

the painful and often fatal bends encountered

by deep-sea divers.

Jacobsen: What these pilots had to go through

before they even got into the plane,

it's just extraordinary to think about.

That's American history.

Petraeus: They're right on the edge of what their

physical capacity is and, of course,

what their aircraft's capacity is.

This is a very rare breed

and a very special group of Americans.

Painter: You're essentially flying in what some pilots

refer to as coffin's corner.

You have about 10 knots of air speed

from stall to going Mach 1,

so at either end, the plane is non-flyable.

Doing a high rate of bank turn at that altitude,

you can't do that, either, because the wingspan is so long.

The inside wing is stalling, and the outside wing is going Mach.

So the pilots who flew these airplanes

had to be extremely gifted pilots.

Powers Jr.: You had to have the aptitude

to fly this type of a mission and to keep quiet about it.

Pilots were breaking the high-altitude record every day,

yet they couldn't tell anybody about it.

Gilliland Jr.: Why does a guy like that get into a plane

that's never been flown before, with the possibility of death?

Not everybody goes to work each day

with a high possibility of being killed at the end of the day.

Morgenfeld: I think most of us aren't

quite that emotional about it.

Crashes can be useful in sort of a perverse way,

in that, "Hey, we just found out something that's wrong."

Oh, boy, there have been so many of the guys

that I know that have died.

Hell, I just can't even...

It's hard to talk about those people that have died.

We did the best we could, and something

that we couldn't possibly take into account happened.

And the reason we concentrate on it so much

is because these people's lives

and their family's lives are on the line in our hands.

Kelly was beyond devastated.

He would cry.

I mean, these guys are your friends.

Narrator: Whenever one of our planes went down,

I'd get a bad stomach ulcer.

If you go into Kelly's logs, you can tell that he took

his responsibility very, very hard.

He suffered from stress.

Just a few months before they delivered the U-2,

he had a complete physical breakdown

that almost killed him.

Narrator: I just want to help the U.S., my people, and others.

The sacrifices of these test pilots can't be in vain.

And they weren't.

Within the first year of operation, it dispelled

the missile gap and the bomber gap.

Because of the U-2 flights and the photographic

reconnaissance imagery they brought home,

America was able to prove and show internally

that the Soviets were boasting about the missiles they had.

They were not as far advanced as we thought they were

or as they were bragging about.

Narrator: We thought the Red's radar couldn't detect us,

but we were wrong.

Justice: The very first overflight of the Soviet Union

was tracked on its full length, and that surprised the CIA

and it surprised the American government.

That was a bad thing.

It meant that the Soviet radars were way better

than we thought they were.

Brown: They could pick the U-2 up, and they couldn't reach it,

and it became obvious almost as soon as the U-2 was designed

that it was going to become obsolete as soon as the Soviets

had adequate surface-to-air weapons.

In 1955, the Soviets only had one type of a missile, SA1,

Surface-to-Air Missile 1.

It could reach an altitude of 60,000 feet,

but U-2s were flying at 70,000 feet,

so for four years, they were out of harm's way.

May 1st of 1960, my father is briefed that, upon this mission,

there are certain targets he should overfly,

that they're trying to get information.

One of the targets, over Sverdlovsk,

was to film an SA2 base, a new, improved missile base

that a previous mission had uncovered.

The goal of this particular flight May 1st

was to find out if the Soviets were getting ready

to put operational the missile base they had discovered.

And my father found out firsthand

that it was operational.

Reporter: A United States Air Force plane shot down

on Russian soil, reportedly an ultra-secret

high-altitude reconnaissance craft.

As the Soviet launches its most belligerent

anti-American propaganda barrage in recent years.

Jacobsen: And it all went back to these engineers, you know,

with the pencils in their pocket.

The Skunk Works are really at the nexus of history.

At issue was nuclear war.

Narrator: We lost airplane flown by Francis G. Powers.

There was an immediate Russian reaction,

and they claimed they shot down the airplane by missile.

The political implications of the flight were extremely major.

Justice: The aftermath of Powers being shot down

was really interesting because he didn't report in

or land when he was supposed to, so now you have

the U.S. decision-makers wondering what happened.

They picked up some of the radio reports

that maybe something had happened to him,

but they didn't have confirmation,

so now you had this silence as each other waited

to see what the other one was going to do.

The Soviets were playing a game.

They were trying to trap the Americans,

so they intentionally released this fake photo

to see what the Americans would do.

This photograph showed a pile of wreckage, plane wreckage,

in a field with kids and farmers around it.

Kelly Johnson takes one look at this photo and says,

"The rivets are not lined up correctly for a U-2,"

and that, "The fuel intake and the jet intake isn't correct.

That's not my plane."

Narrator: So I was given the job of insulting them to the point

where they would show us what they had,

because we did not know whether Powers had just defected.

Painter: So, Kelly was brought in and made some public comments

about what was being shown on TV,

saying, "That's no U-2. Soviets are lying."

Powers Jr.: As a result, all of a sudden,

maybe they didn't shoot it down.

Maybe there's no plane wreckage.

Maybe the pilot died. They have no evidence.

Release the cover stories.

Justice: Then the U.S. announced,

"Well, we lost tck of a weather plane.

It may have wandered into Soviet airspace."

And the Soviets go, "Got you."

Powers Jr.: Premier Khrushchev comes up and says,

"Ah, we do have the pilot. Here he is.

Ah, we do have the wreckage. Here it is."

The trial, guy gets stuck in a Russian prison,

sentenced to 10 years imprisonment.

The first three months of his captivity

was solitary confinement.

And then he was interrogated -- bright lights,

long days of questioning, Mutt-and-Jeff type of scenario.

One KGB guy would come in,

rough and gruff, yelling and screaming,

"You tell us everything, or we'll shoot you tomorrow."

The next guy would come in,

"Mr. Powers, you help us, we can help you."

Trying to get information out of him

by any means necessary, short of physical abuse.

He would reveal certain things that he knew

they could find out in the press.

He'd keep other things secret that he knew

that they could have no ways of finding out.

Gilliland Jr.: Francis Gary Powers was held

for quite a while, and then eventually, you know,

there was the story with the "Bridge of Spies,"

you know, the movie that was done.

Powers Jr.: February 10, 1962,

you have two spies on each side of this bridge --

Rudolf Abel on the west side, my father on the east side.

They are positively ID'd.

They walk home to their respective freedoms.

My father returns home to an American public

that doesn't really know what to make of this ordeal.

There have been misinformation and rumors in the papers

that he had defected, that he had landed

the plane intact, that he had spilled his guts

and told the Soviets everything he knew

or that he hadn't followed orders and committed suicide.

Dad is not able to go back into the Air Force at the time.

He's the known spy.

If they employ him, they will be accused of employing spies.

In the meantime, Kelly Johnson offered my dad a job

as a Lockheed test pilot, flying U-2s.

Justice: One of the attributes of Kelly,

while he was a tough guy, he had a soft spot,

and he always wanted to take care of his pilots,

and when Francis Gary Powers came back,

Kelly couldn't stand to see that guy on the street.

This was a national hero,

even though he wasn't being treated like one,

so, yeah, Kelly gave him a job.

Narrator: I felt for Powers.

He and I were both now known to the public.

After the U-2 incident, everything changed.

It was suggested to me by security people

that I not go to work by the same route.

I've been told to avoid certain traffic intersections

and watch out for big trucks.

I slept with an automatic pistol close by.

There were concerns, and the CIA told him

that he needed to take precautions,

because somebody like him was somebody who an adversary

might want to kidnap or do something about to prevent him

from embarrassing them with new technology again.

It does sound paranoid, but it wasn't crazy.

The idea behind it is that they would, like, get them

and torture them and say, "Tell us how you built the U-2,"

but that was a very real threat because, as far as we know,

the Soviets never got

a spy plane over the United States.

Narrator: The U-2 is still busy, now over Cuba.

This aircraft took the pictures that were the basis

for our move on Cuba.

The images showed Soviet missiles just 90 miles

from U.S. soil.

That was the aircraft that discovered the missile sites

on Cuba that weren't supposed to be there.

That's when the Cuban Missile Crisis started.

I have directed the continued and increased close surveillance

of Cuba and its military buildup.

Narrator: A U-2 was shot down over Cuba.

They had 11 radar and missile sites turned on against him

and repeated their success with Powers,

except, this time,

Major Rudolf Anderson was killed.

It is apparent that the U-bird has just about

reached the end of its reconnaissance capability.

We knew we needed a new kind of airplane,

one that was near impossible to shoot down,

a plane unlike anything man had ever seen before,

something so fast the human eye could barely see it in the sky.

yearsbefore the U-2 was shot down,

that we ought to be working on something that would go higher,

go faster, go further.

We'd be starting from scratch, just like the Wright brothers.

Powers Jr.: Kelly Johnson and the Skunk Works team realized

they had to develop some type of an airplane

that could fly higher and faster than the U-2

in order to avoid Soviet missiles.

We have to design something better.

Jacobsen: It was impossible to think about,

but Kelly Johnson said, "We did it with the U-2.

We can do it."

Carpenter: We needed an airplane that flies not at 70,000 feet

but at 85,000 feet and above.

Instead of an airplane that flies at 450 miles an hour,

we needed an airplane that flies at 2,100 miles an hour --

Mach 3-plus.

Mach is a designation for capturing the speed of airplane

relative to the speed of sound.

Mach 1 is the speed of sound.

Mach 3 means that you're covering 1 mile

every second and a half.

Mach 3.2, the airplane goes faster than a .30-06 bullet.

You cannot turn the airplane in the state of Ohio

it goes so fast.

What made it so special and so difficult

was that there were so many things in it

that had never been done before.

You know, for example, that's the first time

we ever built anything large out of titanium.

The decision to use titanium is traceable to

the environment in which it flew.

When you're traveling 2,000 miles per hour,

the friction of the air rubbing over the airplane

heats up the airframe to about 550 degrees Fahrenheit,

which is about as hot as your oven can get at home.

You could almost immediately rule out aluminum,

because aluminum above about 370 degrees loses its strength.

So he was driven to titanium because it's strong as steel

and half the weight of steel,

but we really hadn't used much of titanium.

Narrator: To get the titanium, we went to an unlikely source --

our enemy.

Carpenter: We don't have a titanium source

in the United States, so the CIA eventually set up

a frontal company in Europe,

and the Russians sold us all the titanium.

They never knew who they sold it to.

So you had the CIA buying the materials

that they needed for this aircraft

so it could fly over the Soviet Union and spy on them.

It was an incredibly ambitious aircraft to design.

The other issue is that jet engines are really, really good,

even up to Mach 2, Mach 2.5,

but once they go beyond that speed, it gets very tricky.

Westwick: For a Mach-3 flight, you have funnel just

an amazing quantity of air through these jet engines.

The quantity of air is like as much water

as flows over Niagara Falls.

That's the volume of air that you're funneling through.

The problem is, when you're funneling that volume of air in,

you get these shock waves in the air that prevent the air

from actually reaching the jet engines,

so the engine stalls, and the airplane crashes.

Narrator: We needed a special engineer to solve

the air-flow problem on our new plane.

His name -- Ben Rich.

Westwick: Ben Rich helped solve that problem

by designing this cone in the middle of the jet engine

that moves in and out depending on how fast you're flying,

and that allows the aircraft to control shock waves,

one of Ben Rich's early signature achievements.

You're not talking about a computer that, you know,

you can just put a couple lines of code in

to operate the intake.

You know, you're talking mechanical hydraulic systems

that was very difficult to operate,

and it was Ben's job to fix it, and he did.

And he solved that problem without computer

and without digital, all analog, which is a --

And that made him famous.

Gilliland Jr.: I remember walking around,

and I'd see these big 500-gallon drums,

and they'd catch the leaking fuel.

The airplane actually expands mid-flight

because of the heat soak.

They couldn't get a sealant that would really work tight,

so what happens is, the plane leaks on the ground,

a lot of fuel,

but once it gets up to speed at altitude,

the airplane tightens up, and it's tight as a drum.

Middle of July in 1961,

the airplane was being assembled,

and from that time, not a very long period of time from July

to the next February, a whole airplane was built.

Took them on a truck, took them up to the test site.

Narrator: At the time, the Soviets had a new ally, in Cuba.

It seemed at any moment,

we could be on the brink of nuclear war.

We needed to test our new recon plane,

and we went back to the place

where we had our greatest success --

Area 51.

Painter: Out a Groom Lake, Area 51,

they worked on doing testing,

which essentially turned that from a temporary area

into a permanent facility.

That's when they realized they needed hard,

fast buildings.

Narrator: In testing, while flying Mach 3.2,

we found we could reduce the internal temperature

by painting the plane black, hence the name Blackbird.

There was a great deal of risk involved for everyone.

We had to make sure the pilots didn't cook in the cockpit.

Law: The environment that they were in,

the minimum surface temperature around the cockpit

was 550 degrees, and some parts of the cockpit windshield

were up at 640 degrees Fahrenheit.

Cappuccio: The test pilots knew the risk they were taking

because of the nuances

associated with propulsion ramping.

There was always a 5%, 6% chance you'll get a shock wave

that goes around the entire vehicle.

And we had one, and it snapped the vehicle in hal

It literally broke the vehicle in half.

We lost the pilot.

So Kelly -- he was very nervous in the beginning.

"Did I get the calculations right?

Did I use the right safety factors?"

Petraeus: These are individuals who voluntarily went into

that world understanding the risk,

just constantly pushing the envelope,

knowing the importance of the tasks

in which they were engaged.

The day of the mission, you came in about 2 1/2 hours

before the flight.

You had to have a physical before every flight

that you had to pass.

At that point, they fed you high-protein food

to give you the energy through the flight -- steak and eggs.

About an hour 15 prior, you donned your space suit.

They then took you out to the airplane.

They gave you time to taxi out to the runway.

Your greatest sense of speed is on takeoff.

You release the brakes.

You light those two powerful afterburners.

Within 20 seconds, you're going to go 4,500 feet

and lift off doing 240 miles an hour.

You'll climb through 20,000 feet less than 2 minutes

from the time you release the brakes.

Now, once you got up there, typically around 78,000 feet,

you can see the curvature of the Earth.

The sky above you is absolutely black,

because 97% of the atmosphere is below you.

At night, the sky is absolutely spectacular.

90% of the stars you can see up there we can't see on the earth

because the atmosphere filters them out.

It's very quiet.

You're in an airplane that's traveling

at three times the speed of sound,

so most of the sound is behind you.

You see the Earth from a different perspective.

Those were 11-hour-and-20-minute missions, some of them,

so it's like the long-distance runner.

You're not necessarily sprinting, but you've got to

keep your energy up, so you watched your diet.

I remember once on a mission, the night before,

I'd had a seafood dinner.

And I had an explosive diarrhea attack,

one of those really interesting moments in your life.

We had a discussion, and we kind of said,

"Well, you know, if you don't change a baby's diapers,

what's the worst thing that can happen?

Maybe they'll get a rash."

So I told my back-seater -- I said,

"I think we can press on."

I said, "The last thing I want

is a message sent to the president,

'The pilot pooped in his suit, so they had to return back.'"

I can't remember if I got a rash,

but they had to tear out the liner when we got back,

and I gave our suit-maintenance people a case of beer

for having to reconstitute my suit.

Narrator: The Blackbird made my men go beyond their limits --

the men who flew

and those who made it possible to fly, our engineers.

To me, some of the most remarkable thing of it

is that it was all done using logarithms

and trig tables and Friden calculators.

Jacobsen: It's just so remarkable to think about.

You know, they were just looking at physics.

They were looking at basic foundations

of how science works.

They simply used their minds, their imaginations,

and their willingness to engineer a system.

They didn't have computers.

How could you possibly come up with such advanced technology?

So a lot of people came to believe that the Skunk Works

were actually reverse-engineering

some kind of alien technology

Kelly Johnson brought to Area 51.

e Air Force

in December of 1953.

He had gone home to his ranch in California, and he looked out

and saw something he couldn't quite understand.

This was something that was moving at a very high rate

of speed away from him, and he drew a little sketch

of what the aircraft looked like.

Narrator: I have definitely believed in the possibility

that flying saucers exist.

This is in spite of a good deal of kidding

from my technical associates.

I am now more firmly convinced than ever.

Jacobsen: Because of this extraordinary circumstance,

whatever it may have been,

a lot of people came to believe that the Skunk Works

were actually reverse-engineering

some kind of alien technology

Kelly Johnson brought to Area 51.

Law: There were some people --

they had come up with this idea of all these weird things

that had supposedly happened at the test site

to do with the Blackbirds.

Because how could you possibly come up with such

advanced technology?

They didn't have computers.

Cappuccio: What about the conspiracy theories

that the Blackbird was based on alien technology?

They like to believe it because they can't envision

a class of people that can think out of the box.

There was no magic. It didn't come from anything else.

It just came from somebody having a dream.

If you look at Kelly's design book, it's about 20 pages.

I was very, very interested in understanding

how he managed to envision something so unique

from the technology that existed at the time.

I didn't get the magic until there was one chart

that had a propulsion curve in it,

and he said, "You know, I think I can get 20% higher."

And it finally dawned on me -- if you go 20% higher

on every part of the design --

It's easier to go from 1.5 Mach number,

which we knew how to do, to 3,

and that was how genius works.

Narrator: All it really is, is the application

of common sense to some pretty tough problems.

The mental challenge is entertainment for me.

It's always been, even back to my first day at Lockheed.

He gets the job at Lockheed as a tooling engineer, by the way.

He wasn't hired to be an aerodynamicist.

He was hired to design the tools to build the airplane.

But he goes to the chief engineer, Hall Hibbard,

at the time, his first day on the job and says,

"Your design for the Model 10 Electra,"

which was the newest plane that Lockheed is developing,

"is unsafe and unstable,

and you can't build it that way."

This was a passenger aircraft,

and you don't want that kind of airplane to be unsafe.

It was all he could do to keep from firing the kid on the spot.

"Who are you? You know, where'd you come from?"

But they bring Kelly in the next day and says,

"Okay, why is it not going to fly?"

And Kelly is able to answer every one of his questions

to the satisfaction that Hall gives this college graduate

the model for the aircraft and says, "Fix the airplane."

And that's what he did.

Westwick: He said, "I think the way to solve it --

instead of having one tail, have two."

And they tested it, and, sure enough,

the twin-tail solution solved the problem

and turned out to be a kind of hallmark

of a lot of that generation of planes.

Trimble: You don't see too many split-tail designs until 1933,

and then you see it with the Model 10,

and then, suddenly, everybody has got a split-tail design.

It gets copied by almost everybody,

but, essentially, he saved the company,

you know, with that idea in 1933,

because if they had come out with the airplane

that they had designed originally,

it would have been too unsafe,

and airlines just wouldn't buy it.

Narrator: I quickly got promoted,

eventually becoming chief research engineer.

Over the next decade, I worked with the likes of Howard Hughes

and Amelia Earhart.

It was in 1943 that I set up a secret division

within the Lockheed corporation

to build the P-80 during World War II.

Officially, we were called Advanced Development Research,

but the boys came up with "Skunk Works"

because we were hidden next to a plastics factory,

and the fumes drifting over stunk.

Everyone at Skunk Works understood our mission.

We had our own set of rules, my rules.

If there was a Steve Jobs of the aerospace industry,

it was definitely Kelly Johnson.

And what Kelly did in his approach

was to simplify everything

and, above all, keep the momentum going.

The way he put it was,

"I'd rather make a wrong decision

that keeps things moving forward

than to stop everything for several weeks

to make sure that we're making the right decision."

Narrator: Three times, I was offered company president

at Lockheed and three times declined it.

To me, there was no better job at the corporation

than head of Skunk Works.

We were about getting things done,

but not everyone appreciated our methods.

The Skunk Works did have its enemies.

People didn't like the way the Skunk Works did things,

believed that they cut corners,

that they were not living by all the rules and everything.

You know, it was, like, on the fly, "Go, go, go.

We don't have time for bureaucracy."

And this became a problem later in the '60s,

when that was threatening to the machine

that was the Pentagon, and, surely, someone like

Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara,

who loved to control things like the businessman that he was --

And you could see Robert McNamara making a move

to take out Kelly Johnson and the Skunk Works.

Narrator: The Blackbird was the fastest jet-powered,

manned aircraft ever made,

with speed records that were never broken.

It was also known as the SR-71.

The "SR" stood for strategic reconnaissance.

The SR has an unequaled reputation

for accomplishing what it was set out for.

Carpenter: During the Arab-Israeli War of 1973,

95% of the imagery that our president used

to render decisions came from the SR-71.

And the photography was spectacular.

When you take a normal sheet of paper

and you're holding it out in the parking lot

and I fly over at 85,000 feet, doing 35 miles a minute,

I will take your picture, and I will see you standing

beside your car holding this sheet of paper.

And most of the time, I could tell you

what kind of a car you were driving.

But that's the quality of the imagery we brought back

for the leadership here in this country.

Six presidents used us because they knew

they could send us out, and we'd come back.

Powers Jr.: I've heard stories from pilots

where they'd be flying missions during Vietnam,

and they would see the missiles come up,

and they would see them fall back down,

because the SR was going so fast,

the missiles could not keep up with them.

Gilliland Jr.: There have been over 5,000

surface-to-air missiles that have been fired

at the SR-71 by hostile countries.

Not one of them ever hit an SR-71.

As Dad used to say,

"It helped end the Cold War with Russia,

because they spent, you know, a lot of money

shooting surface-to-air missiles and never getting a hit,

so it helped Russia go bankrupt a little faster."

Narrator: With the success of the SR-71,

I wanted to build a new version of the Blackbird,

more than just a recon plane, something far greater.

Once they finished building the SR-71s,

if you go into Kelly's logs,

you can tell that the one that he wanted to build the most

was a fighter-interceptor version.

Called the YF-12A, and it was a missile shooter.

It was being proposed as an interceptor.

Trimble: There was a lot of fear about what would happen

if the Soviets decided to attack us with bombers

rather than missiles,

so the whole idea of that airplane

was intercepting an incoming Soviet bomber,

and Kelly wanted to sell that to the Air Force,

sell hundreds of them, actually.

And this became a problem later in the '60s,

when, at the Pentagon, now led by Secretary of Defense

Robert McNamara, who loved to control things,

and there's a sense of, "Wait a minute.

That boys club out in California called Skunk Works

has a little too much power."

And you could see him, you know, making a move to take out

Kelly Johnson and the Skunk Works.

And McNamara shut it down,

shut the program down, said it wasn't needed.

Narrator: McNamara's decision is almost unbelievable.

The Air Force has gone with us

all the way supporting the plane,

but McNamara and his band see it differently.

Cappuccio: Now, what happened was -- Kelly was

a very influential player in Washington at the time,

with his contacts in the agency that had used SR-71

and his contacts with the Air Force, right?

Well, the Air Force pilots liked the SR-71,

so he started going around the system.

And McNamara was furious.

And a decree came back, "You will cut up the SR-71 tools,

and you will destroy all the drawings."

And that was an edict.

You know, to kind of get the point across, they told

Lockheed to destroy the tooling, which the U.S. government owned.

And when you do that, you make the cost of

restarting production astronomically higher,

so that was the decision that finally killed the Blackbird.

Narrator: The damage has been done, the tools destroyed.

We were never able to build the version of the Blackbird

our country needed, the YF-12.

To this point, I have laid off 130 people in engineering,

and it's a sad time for me.

This was a really difficult time for the Skunk Works

when it happened.

It needed money.

It had a few thousand employees, and they needed things to do,

and the F-12 was supposed to be that thing.

Narrator: Yesterday, I took my yearly physical.

The doctor says I must have an operation.

My stomach has so many ulcers that the outlet is down

to the size of a pencil.

Constant pain.

Trimble: And, at that point,

Kelly's health was deteriorating to the point

where he had started thinking about whether he should retire.

But he also didn't like the idea of retiring, either.

That wasn't really sort of in his DNA, so he kept going,

but by 1972, 1973,

they decided to pass it on, and Ben Rich was the guy.

Painter: Ben -- he had an extremely hard job,

because Kelly was still a consultant,

so he was still coming to Lockheed.

He still had that strong loyalty bond

with so many of the engineers and people that worked there

that instead of going to Ben for answers,

they would wait for Kelly to come in on his day of work.

So Ben had to overcome all that to establish his leadership,

his fingerprint on the Skunk Works.

The key job in running the Skunk Works

is to work on the future.

Ben understood that, and he worked hard at it,

and he was very good at it.

Once he saw stealth, he took hold of it

and pursued it with a vengeance.

If I made a plane invisible to radar, would you buy it?

Kelly was never impressed.

He thought Ben had the wrong idea,

that Lockheed was just going to waste money.

He pretty much put his reputation

and his whole career on the line

when he went after that stealth technology.

Trimble: After Vietnam, our losses toimble: A,

surface-to-air missiles were pretty bad,

and it became pretty clear that unless you had some way

of defeating these ground-based radars that could cue these

surface-to-air missiles that you were going to lose

your entire Air Force if you ever got into combat again.

So they had to come up with a way to make aircraft

less visible to those radars.

DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency,

sent out a request

to the seven most recent fighter-building companies

for experimental stealth technology,

and they had a requirement to get the radar cross-section

down to certain levels.

Okay. So, think about the radar cross-section on the SR-71,

that it shows up on enemy radar the size of a man, okay?

We need an airplane that's going to show up

the side of a ball bearing.

That was the new challenge.

"We're going to make an invisible airplane."

Cappuccio: How we came across stealth was --

the SR-71 and the angles of the tails

were taking the radar section

and bouncing the radar beam away.

So the radar system was not picking up that reflection.

And Ben said, "If I can make a plane with all flat plates,

that radar won't pick up the signal."

Justice: Ben went to the CIA.

The CIA gave him permission to brief the Air Force

on the stealth technologies embodied in the Blackbird

and say, "Hey, we deserve entry into this," and they said,

"Well, we've already given out all the contracts.

There's no more money to give out,

so if you want to participate,

you've got to kind of do it on your own."

And so Ben says, "We'll participate.

Give us a $1 contract,

which means we have a formal relationship with you,

but we basically pay our own way."

Skunk Works is on its knees at this point in 1975.

It's got to have something new.

Painter: The company needs to up-front $10 million

as their share in building a prototype,

so he has to go to the corporate fathers and say,

"Give me $10 million, because I got to build

an airplane for unproven technology."

He pretty much put his reputation

and his whole career on the line when he went after that program.

Carpenter: Kelly was never impressed.

He thought that Ben had the wrong idea,

that Lockheed was just going to waste money.

To describe the radar cross-section,

Ben would roll marbles across the desk.

Ben went to Kelly and said, "Look at this.

What would a Soviet radar see?

Here's a marble, and based upon that,

they would not identify that as a significant threat

but, rather, a radar anomaly."

Justice: And Kelly just thought,

"You're not going to be able to make it,"

and, quite honestly, broke one of his own rules.

Kelly would just assume something could be done,

and that's what he expected his teams to do,

but that's where you see Ben

having that piece of DNA of the Skunk Works.

You know, let's just assume it can be done.

Let's make it happen.

Law: Denys Overholser came up with this idea

that reflects the beams in all the directions

to where they don't make a return,

based on a bunch of Russian calculations.

Narrator: Just like they once sold us the titanium

for the Blackbird, the Russians inadvertently

helped Skunk Works again.

Trimble: Denys had come across a Soviet mathematics journal.

The Soviets had no idea that that's what those equations

could be used for, or they would never

have allowed it to be published in that kind of a publication.

But because they did and Denys read it and applied it,

the Skunk Works suddenly had sort of a secret sauce

to breaking this problem that had affected aircraft

in Vietnam and the U-2 itself, which is radar detection.

So, Alan Brown comes in,

and he's leading Lockheed's effort under Ben Rich,

and he doesn't care about the aerodynamics,

because he's a propulsion guy.

First of all, we did the calculations.

We built third-scale models, which we tested on radar ranges.

It was made up of a whole bunch of flat plates,

and the reason for that was that

we did not have the technical capability

to calculate the radar cross-section

from curved surfaces at that time.

Keep in mind this is why Kelly Johnson

hated this approach that Ben Rich took.

There aren't any airplanes out there that are made flat,

because air doesn't like flying over corners, right?

You want nice, smooth, rounded surfaces,

and there wasn't a rounded surface

anywhere on that airplane.

He called it the Hopeless Diamond,

and it was a way of sort of ridiculing

this design that, to an aerodynamicist, is sinful.

I think some people called it the Hopeless Diamond

because they thought it was a hopeless effort.

The shape of it was -- It was actually a geometry

problem pretty much.

You wanted a, you know,

angle of incidence and angle of reflection.

If a radar hit comes in this way,

it's going to bounce off, so what you want to do

is control the way it bounces off

so that the bounce doesn't go back to the guy

that shined it on you in the first place.

When the radar hits it, right,

instead of bouncing right back to you,

if I can curve it, I'm bouncing it here.

That radar don't pick up the signal.

So it's analogous to playing billiards.

You hit one cushion, it goes to someplace else.

Narrator: The first phase of the competition

was to build a scale model

to test its invisibility to radar.

Ours was easily the best.

But next, we had to build the actual plane.

Could this Hopeless Diamond really fly?

To find out, we needed to test it.

We needed to go back to where we had our greatest success

and our most guarded secrecy.

We needed to go back to Area 51.

Narrator: At Area 51, Ben's Hopeless Diamond

was going to be tested.

We were going to find out

if an airplane could really become invisible on radar,

if it could be become completely stealth.

The stakes were high.

If the airplane showed up on radar,

the project could be scrapped,

but Ben and his team believed they could do it.

I still had my doubts.

You have to remember that Area 51 has not only

the most interesting new, top-secret development

that the Air Forces are coming up with,

but they also had the top radar people,

so we were going to fly against

the very best radar team in the country.

So we said, "Okay, we'll make it easy for you.

Tomorrow afternoon, at 3:00,

we're going to come over that hill at 500 feet altitude.

You won't even have to look for us.

You'll be pointing in the right direction

right at the beginning. Okay?"

Off we go.

3:00 comes and goes, and they said,

"Oh, guess you missed your takeoff time."

I said, "I don't think so."

There's a guy looking through a telescope,

which is run... parallel to the radar.

Looking through his telescope, he said,

"I just picked the airplane up. It's just 8 miles out."

The radar guys immediately kicked their radar,

assumed it wasn't working properly.

We flew over the whole situation without being seen at all.

As soon as that happened, immediately, the Air Force said,

"Okay, we got to have a military version of this."

Narrator: The damn thing worked.

Didn't happen too often,

but this time, I was wrong, and I told Ben as much.

Trimble: Kelly was always quite stubborn

and always quite insistent that he was right,

and he would do these bets with people.

He would bet them a quarter, and, you know,

it was a really big deal if you won a bet against Kelly,

because he would pay you the quarter.

You know, he would admit that he was wrong,

but it would just very rarely ever happen.

And so he paid Ben Rich a quarter

and admitted that he was wrong.

Narrator: Our plane would be called the F-117 Nighthawk.

The prototype got off the ground,

but much work still remained.

This would be the first completely stealth aircraft

and also be the first jet fighter

Skunk Works built in over 20 years.

The 117 has a radar signature less than a BB on a radar.

So you get anything over a BB, you'll pick it up.

Let me give you an example.

If I accthat would bet a nut ipicked up by radar.

So, you're sitting there saying,

"Wow. We're making all these airplanes.

How do I know a manufacturing guy didn't drop a nut?"

So that's the concern.

Jacobsen: When the F-117 Nighthawk came along,

I mean, it was so secret

and it was so important to keep it secret,

they gave it its own test-flight facility out in Tonopah,

which is on the far skirts of the Nevada test site,

and it became known as Area 52.

And they built a whole setup specifically for the F-117.

Feest: I was flying the F-15 at Langley Air Force Base,

and my squadron commander called me in

and shut the door and said, "Hey, are you interested

in going to fly at the 4450th test group?"

None of us knew what was going on,

but we knew there was something

highly classified and different.

I decided to go.

After you've checked out, they put you in a room

and they turn on a projector

and they show you pictures of the F-117 for the first time.

And, usually, the first comment is, "That thing flies?"

Because it doesn't look very aerodynamic.

Morgenfeld: First test flight was my first flight in the F-117.

So, what scared me more than anything isn't so much

that something could happen physically to hurt me.

It's the fact that we work very hard on airplanes

to eliminate single-point failures,

and the airplanes are very redundant.

And you walk out to the airplane --

I am a single-point failure.

If I goon it, I've ruined it for a lot of people,

and it's very much a team effort.

Brown: The idea of a pilot, you know,

first flying an F-117 was pretty scary to me.

I mean, at 4:30 in the morning,

they'd be stuck into the cockpit.

They open the hangar doors.

There are no lights anywhere on the airfield.

And they tell the guy, "Okay, you taxi out there,

turn right, 1/2 mile, you get to the main runway,

turn right again, take off."

So you're taking off on a runway in the dark.

"Oh, by the way, don't worry about the control system.

It's completely disconnected from all the controls.

It just goes to a computer,

and the computer operates the controls

because the airplane's basically unstable.

Good luck. You'll be fine."

Feest: You get acclimated to totally night-flying.

We had flight surgeons and doctors

that monitored what we did

and decided that we had to do certain things

to be able to fly at night and sleep during the day.

So at Tonopah, we had room-darkening shades.

They Velcroed black across our windows.

So when we were in there during the day,

you couldn't tell what time of day it was.

They also had a rule that, at night,

after flying, we had to be in our rooms

before the sun came up, because the doctors said,

"If the sun came up, your mind would go,

'Oh, something's wrong here.'"

All of us are daytime creatures.

We don't usually live in the black world.

When you consider that there were something

like 10,000 people that worked on the F-117

and they all kept this secret for 21 years,

that's a remarkable piece of American history.

On August 6th, in response to the unprovoked Iraqi invasion

of Kuwait, I ordered the deployment

of U.S. military forces to Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf.

Iraq's brutality, aggression,

and violations of international law

cannot be allowed to succeed.

President Bush made the decision to deploy 42 F-117s

from Tonopah, Nevada, to Saudi Arabia.

I'd been briefed on the F-117 for a number of years,

and when it was deployed,

you just had this sick feeling

it was actually going to be used,

that you're going to go to war.

Mullins: A good friend of mine, Al Whitley,

who was full colonel --

On the first night of the war,

Whitley and one of his young pilots

were walking out to get in their airplanes.

They were both going to Baghdad.

The pilot said to Whitley, "I hope this works."

Narrator: I had been convinced that stealth was the technology

that will change the character of aerial warfare.

If the enemy can't see the aircraft with radar,

he can't hit it.

The role of the 117 in the Gulf War

was to wipe out the whole command-and-control system

of Iraq, flying night missions.

The design of the F-117 was to be the first ones in.

We were told what the F-117 radar cross-section was,

how it would perform,

so we had to trust the engineers to Skunk Works.

But I can tell you, flying the first night of Desert Storm,

we're not sure, as pilots,

whether or not the stealth technology's going to work.

On the first night of the war, well, I felt an --

Every time I think about this,

I felt an emotional attachment to these guys.

This was their first-ever combat mission -- ever.

I used to go spend nights with them at Tonopah,

so I knew these people and had become personal friends.

We promised them a lot, and we'd never proved it.

It's one thing to test an airplane on a range

where you measure this stuff.

It's another thing to go to Baghdad at night.

Feest: The first night of Desert Storm,

I was chosen to lead the first attack.

It was 1,000 miles from our base to Baghdad,

so these were long missions.

We took off that night the way we practiced --

no lights on the airplanes.

We found our tankers.

We would top off with fuel and, at a designated time,

stealth up our aircraft, bringing in the antennas

so that you could no longer talk to anybody or hear anybody.

Once we did that, we're gone.

I had the first target, so my only goal right now

was to find that target and hit it at the time

they wanted me to hit it.

I found the target.

The weapons-bay doors automatically open.

I pickle off the bomb.

The doors slam shut.

I looked back over my left shoulder,

and when I looked back,

I always described it as looking at a giant fireworks display.

This was anti-aircraft artillery.

I noticed it was coming at me, so I thought,

"I'm getting out of here as fast as I can."

Man: We have to go to Baghdad. We're going to Bernard Shaw.

Shaw: Something is happening outside.

People are shooting towards the sky,

and they are not aware or cannot see what they're shooting at.

This is extraordinary.

We're being told to get off this platform

and get inside into the air-raid sh--

Holliman: We still have seen no signs of any airplanes coming in here.

All we're seeing is the Iraqi response from the ground.

I have a statement by the President of the United States.

The liberation of Kuwait has begun.

When they broke in and said that the first attacks had happened,

I knew that the Skunk Works jets were in doing their job.

Just prayed that everybody made it home safe.

Five months ago, Saddam Hussein started this cruel war

against Kuwait.

Tonight, the battle has been joined.

The U.S. air strike was almost certainly designed to begin

with these stealth fighters.

Feest: The sky over Baghdad was lit up.

I thought about the guys that were flying with me

that night and I thought,

"Those going into Baghdad are going to have it tough."

Cappucio: The pilots on the 117 were very dicey.

"Are they shooting at me? We know they're shooting."

The question gets to be, "Why is the pattern so erratic?"

Baghdad air defenses could not see that aircraft coming.

Why? Because it was stealth.

All hell has broken loose because they are just firing

stuff up in the air pretty much regardless,

you know, not knowing where anybody is.

The only way they knew the 117s were overhead

was things started blowing up.

It was a harrowing experience, and I thought it was unique

that I was able to make it through there.

And now I snapped the aircraft back

to head back to Saudi Arabia.

I had a list of all 12 pilots flying in that first go,

and I wanted to hear them all check in.

I checked in my wingman, and he answered.

And then as we rejoined,

I heard other pilots checking in,

and I checked off the names as their call signs were read.

And right before approaching my tanker,

I looked down and I had a check mark next to every call sign,

so I knew everybody was coming home that first night.

Our 12 aircraft came back.

There was not one single thing wrong with any of those planes.

We all realized, "This stealth technology works."

The F-117 made up approximately 2.5%

of the total Allied Air Force that was there,

and they would wind up taking out about 40%

of the high-value targets.

Their value can't be overstated.

Feest: We flew 1,271 sorties in Desert Storm

and never got touched by anything.

Statistically, nobody had ever seen anything like this before.

The F-117 was a really major factor

in the success in the First Gulf War.

The accuracy was just unprecedented.

The airplane did exactly what it was supposed to do.

Bush: Six weeks since the start of Operation Desert Storm,

our military objectives are met.

Kuwait is liberated.

Iraq's army is defeated.

Feest: The 117 had proved its worth to the American public,

and after we got home,

one of the stories we all would tell

is how this aircraft saved our lives.

We all came home because of the engineers.

The engineers that built this aircraft built it right.

Brown: With anything that you do like that,

you always have it at the back of your mind,

you know, did you think of everything?

And we were very pleasantly surprised

that we didn't have a single casualty

in either of the Gulf Wars.

You know, you put that much of your heart and soul

and time away from your family and everything into something,

it's kind of heartwarming to see it come to fruition

and that everything you'd done had a good ending to it.

Mullins: The bottom line is -- it changed the nature

of military combat aircraft permanently.

Stealth was the most important technological change

in military combat aircraft

since the introduction of the jet engine.

Jacobsen: Before stealth technology,

war planners used to think about,

"How many aircraft do we need

to take out a certain enemy facility?"

After stealth, it was, "How many facilities do we want

to take out with a single aircraft?"

Narrator: It proved again our axiom.

If you have a good man and let him go,

he'll really perform.

My own life has come full circle,

but if God should call me tonight,

I will have had more than my share of it all.

In the '90s, because of the evident success

of stealth aircraft in the Gulf War,

the Skunk Works really became famous in a sense.

People started asking, you know,

"Where did these airplanes come from?"

And then, you know, the Skunk Works was it.

Then Ben Rich publishes a book about the development of stealth

and a longer history of the Skunk Works.

And the book is a real gift to our family,

because I learned a lot about his career.

We knew he was an engineer,

and we knew he worked for Lockheed.

That was, you know --

But details, you know, I did not know.

And my sister -- I remember her looking at me

and saying, you know, "Dad worked on that?"

Westwick: And this book was a best-seller,

and Skunk Works becomes kind of a buzzword

in corporate-management circles,

and every company has to go out and form their own Skunk Works,

which is where you do these kind of secret,

you know, cutting-edge projects.

Other aerospace companies have their equivalent of Skunk Works.

Westwick: Boeing has its Phantom Works,

which is basically a Skunk Works knock-off.

But they don't have 75 years of lessons learned

and the continuous record of technological breakthroughs.

A lot of the future technologies

are being worked on by the Skunk Works right now.

Crawford: They're constantly working on other things

that have other missions.

You just don't know about it.

You have no need to know.

Romig: People used to ask me all the time,

"What's Skunk Works working on?" And I would --

I kind of stopped once we got to the F-117,

and people would say, "What are you doing now? Oh, you're doing nothing."

And the answer is, "Of course we're doing a lot.

Ask me in 25 years. I'll tell you what we were doing."

Jacobsen: What is known to the public about Skunk Works

is maybe 10% of the actual work

that Skunk Works has done so far.

But there's also another thing that I found

so interesting learning about the Skunk Works.

The U-2 is still flying today.

So when you think about that, it's remarkable.

It's never been retired.

There's been an effort to develop

an unmanned aerial vehicle called the Global Hawk

and others that could actually replace the U-2,

but each time it's about to be retired

and finally put to rest,

if you will, there's a recognition

that what it provides is still uniquely worth preserving.

In Iraq and in Afghanistan, there were some specific battles

in which the U-2 was very, very useful, again,

because of the precision of its optics

and the resolution of the cameras.

It is still very, very useful.

Justice: For me, it was the place to work because of the legacy

with these incredible flying machines.

The Skunk Works created airplanes

that changed world history.

What makes the Blackbird special to me is --

it is this piece of sculpture that is sinister-looking,

it is purposeful-looking, and it draws out an emotion.

For me, it's a blend of excitement and pride

and awe that such a machine even exists.

Carpenter: Kelly Johnson -- he always considered

the SR his greatest achievement

of all the airplanes that he had developed,

starting in the '30s until he retired.

Trimble: The retirement of the SR-71

took place just a few months before he died.

The Air Force, to sort of say "thank you"

to the people of the Skunk Works,

took one of the remaining aircraft

and did a flyby over the runway at Burbank.

Law: And I know that Ben had gone to a hospital to get Kelly,

and Ben said he really didn't talk very much.

Trimble: Ben Rich picked up Kelly in a car

and drove him out to the runway at Burbank to see the SR-71.

They kept the windows up.

They didn't let the employees come to see him,

because they knew he may not even know who they were.

There was some level of dementia that he lived with

that got worse and worse and worse.

But then, when he heard those engines of the SR-71,

he responded.

And, all of a sudden, he came alive.

He knew something special was happening.

Then it wasn't too long after that he died.

Beard: Aircraft designer Clarence "Kelly" Johnson died

today at the age of 80 after a long illness.

Johnson helped to design more than 40 advanced aircraft

during his long career at Lockheed.

He organized Lockheed's Skunk Works unit

and worked on the SR-71 Blackbird, the U-2,

and the F-104 Starfighter.

During his long career in aviation,

Johnson received three presidential citations,

including the Medal of Freedom.

Carpenter: I equated the time I was able to spend with Kelly Johnson

equivalent to the privilege of being able to fly the airplane

because he was such a giant in his industry.

He was the Leonardo da Vinci of aviation.

His designs -- so unique.

The guy's a genius.

He combined really extraordinary technical knowledge

with equally extraordinary leadership capacity.

Kelly Johnson never, in a sense,

got the credit that he was certainly due

because of the covert nature of what was being done,

but was not one, I don't think, who cared about that.

He was devoted to, as we say,

a mission larger than self that was of enormous importance,

and he and his team performed near-miracles

with cutting-edge work.

Narrator: To do something spectacular

required unconventional methods.

It is amazing what can be accomplished

when no one cares who gets the credit.

You do what's right by sticking to your convictions,

and you'll do okay.

Like a lot of 12-year-old kids in the 1920s,

Clarence "Kelly" Johnson liked drawing pictures of airplanes.

Unlike those kids, Kelly Johnson never stopped drawing planes.

I think it'd be a long, long time

before we have an airplane

that has higher performance than the SR-71.

So we may be seeing, here, the highest-speed military airplane

that there will be around for a long time.

This is Dennis Quaid with "An American Portrait."