ScienceDirect - Technol Rep Tohoku Univ ... - Garryck Osborne

NICK COOK 143
Since the interview was to take place on the main site itself—a rare
sanction, Lindeke reminded me—I was reminded to leave my camera
and tape recorder in the PR building. This functioned as an air lock
between the outside world and the organization's highly secure
operations on the other side of the road.
We drove in his car to the main gate, where our documentation was
double-checked and triple-checked. It took an age before we were finally
admitted to aerospace's inner sanctum.
Gordon's office was located in an administration block in the lee of the
giant hangar. There was a low-slung building to the left of the gate and a
cluster of busy-looking facilities to the right. These were the factories
where the bulk of the company's classified work went on.
The giant hangar was what you were meant to see. The real work went
on in the buildings in its immense shadow.
I followed Lindeke to Gordon's office. The cool, low-lit atmosphere
chilled the sweat on my back and I wondered what it must be like to work
in this windowless environment all the time, day in, day out; and whether
it was true, as the engineer had told Bill Scott, that they really didn't let
you go once you were inducted.
We stepped into an office, as dimly lit as the corridor I had just left. A
tall, powerfully built man got up from a table on the edge of the room.
Jack Gordon, the fourth president of the Skunk Works, smiled hesitantly
and shook my hand.
The Skunk Works and its dynastic leadership system was founded in
1943 by Kelly Johnson, a hugely talented, opinionated and irascible
aerospace engineer, in response to an urgent U.S. Army Air Forces
requirement for a jet fighter to counter the emergent threat of the
Messerschmitt 262. The Me 262, a twin-jet swept-wing fighter-bomber
of revolutionary performance, had recently been identified by Allied
intelligence as being under development for the Luftwaffe.
Johnson had long been badgering the Lockheed leadership for a special
engineering department—small, agile and free of the overweening overheads
and administrative baggage that encumbered technical progress in
every large aerospace corporation (including Lockheed); and with the
XP-80 project he finally got it. The XP-80 was built in just 143 days and,
despite arriving too late for a showdown against the 262, went on to
become an aviation classic.
The unorthodox methods Johnson pioneered to bring the XP-80 in on
time and under budget—all the while under conditions of intense
secrecy—set the standard for everything that followed. Ten years later,
when the CIA drafted a requirement for a spyplane that could overfly the