Building That Helped Give Birth to U-2, Stealth Fighter Is Razed : Burbank: A Lockheed team designed secret military aircraft in the ‘Skunk Works’ complex that included ‘old 304.’

To those who worked there, it was simply called “old 304,” a windowless, cream-and-rust colored metal building on the northeast corner of Burbank Airport.

But its dull appearance belied the history made there. The building was one of several that was home to Lockheed’s famous “Skunk Works,” birthplace of generations of advanced--usually secret--military aviation designs that created aircraft such as the U-2 spy plane of the 1950s and the F-117 Stealth fighter, which demonstrated pinpoint bombing accuracy during the Persian Gulf War.

Huge cranes pulled the last standing walls of old 304 to the ground Tuesday as part of Lockheed’s plans to clear and put up for sale most of its 320 acres of property at the airport. The design center and most of its employees were moved to Lockheed facilities in Palmdale, beginning in 1990.

Although much of Southern California’s defense-oriented aerospace industry is scaling down, the bulk of the Skunk Works tasks went to Palmdale, Lockheed executives say. Several buildings used by the design team have already been razed, and others will follow.

On hand to watch the latest Skunk Works building reduced to several piles of twisted metal was Earl Beyer, who for 10 years worked in the building as a maintenance carpenter before retiring several years ago. He was there when engineers and designers planned some of those advanced military planes.

But as he watched demolition workers tear holes in the building’s walls, he was not mournful or sentimental about the building’s demise. “Some things just outlive their usefulness,” he said.

For Lockheed, the Burbank buildings outlived their usefulness largely because most were built during World War II and were too expensive to maintain. In addition, the growth of the adjacent Burbank Airport encroached on the Skunk Works facilities, making it more difficult to maintain security for top-secret operations.

The buildings that housed the Advanced Development Projects unit were dubbed the Skunk Works by workers in the 1940s because fumes from a nearby chemical plant filled their new quarters with a foul odor. The name was taken from an illegal whiskey still--in which everything from dead cats to anvils were dissolved to give the moonshine “character”--featured in the then-popular Li’l Abner comic strip.

James W. Ragsdale, a Lockheed spokesman, said Building 304 was one of several manufacturing buildings used between the early 1940s and the early 1980s to assemble military and commercial airplanes.

“It was no more or no less significant” than any of the other buildings at the Skunk Works, he said. “They are all a part of aviation history.”

It was advanced warplanes that brought the Skunk Works its fame, beginning with America’s first military jet, the P-80, tested in 1944.

In 1964, the SR-71, a high-altitude spy plane that was the first jet capable of flying Mach 3--three times the speed of sound--was developed at the Skunk Works. It remains the fastest aircraft in history, having set a speed record between Los Angeles and Washington of 68 minutes, 17 seconds.

Among the most famous planes developed at the Skunk Works was the U-2, a single-seat, high-altitude reconnaissance jet that made secret spy flights over China and the Soviet Union in the 1950s.

The flights, at altitudes beyond the reach of enemy planes or antiaircraft missiles of the time, were known only to the political and military leadership of the United States and the overflown countries, which searched for some way to shoot down the craft.

When, in 1960, the Soviet Union downed a U-2 flown by CIA pilot Francis Gary Powers, Soviet Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev seized on the incident to cancel a summit conference with President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Tony LeVier, the pilot who first tested the U-2 in August, 1955, and who now works as a safety consultant for Lockheed, said the razing of the Skunk Works in Burbank represents the loss of a page in aviation history.

In its heyday, the Skunk Works produced some of the most advanced planes in the world, he said, and for him, a young test pilot, it was like being a kid in a candy store.

“God, you wouldn’t believe the amount of airplanes they cranked out of this place,” LeVier said.

The F-117 Stealth fighters were designed to use advanced design principles and new materials to make them virtually undetectable by radar. They showed their combat abilities during the Gulf War when they dropped laser-guided bombs on enemy targets, providing spectacular television pictures that were widely publicized by the Pentagon. The planes were later used to patrol the Iraqi “no-fly” zone.