Skunk Works Enjoys Sweet Smell of Success

The 36 color symbols on the company badge worn by Lockheed Martin Skunk Works President Jack Gordon look like abstract art, but they are government access codes that tell the story of a dramatic business revival at the aerospace firm.

Each symbol represents a government program, and together they reflect a robust business for the first time in years at the fabled Skunk Works, which since the 1940s has led the world in military aircraft technology.

A string of crucial contract wins during the last year has filled the Skunk Works plant in Palmdale nearly to capacity and resulted in a hiring program that will add 1,000 employees by the end of this year.

The Skunk Works is developing a drone spy jet called the Dark Star, a special-mission military plane dubbed Big Safari, and the stealthy airframe for a new missile called JASSM. It will also build the first prototypes of the Pentagon’s new Joint Strike Fighter.

The most daunting technical challenge of all is the Venture Star, a single-stage launch vehicle that would fly into orbit and could represent the biggest success (or failure) in the history of the Skunk Works.

The Skunk Works has long operated in deep secrecy, saying little about the advanced aircraft it develops until a mysterious and usually unconventional plane flies overhead. In line with that tradition, Gordon cryptically noted that the company has just begun assembling a new top-secret aircraft in one of its high-security hangars where visitors are never allowed.

Although most of its work still remains shrouded in the so-called black military world, the Skunk Works has nine programs that are unclassified, and it is slowly migrating to a more open approach in its business.

The company has the newest aircraft-manufacturing facilities in the nation, as well as a tradition and talent pool without peer in the aerospace industry.

“The intellectual vitality of the Skunk Works is stronger than ever,” Gordon said.

At a time when some of the key players in the Southern California aircraft industry continue to face an uncertain or dismal future, the Skunk Works has become a dramatic counterpoint.

The very solidity of the Skunk Works seems to ensure that aircraft design and manufacturing will remain a key component of the region’s economy, though certainly at a much reduced scale in the years ahead.

Despite the steep aerospace bust of the early 1990s, some of the nation’s top engineering talent remains in Southern California--along with the nation’s best weather for flight testing and an paralleled network of universities, according to McKinsey & Co. consultant Robert Paulson. These resources will enable the industry to come back, experts say.

“I still see a lot of great things happening in Southern California,” said Les Lackman, general manager of North American Aircraft. “The talent pool is still here.”

For example, North American, now a division of Boeing Co., was given up for dead in the late 1980s. But it retains a design staff of 200 engineers in Seal Beach and is beginning to grow again from its current base of 3,500 employees worldwide, according to Lackman. Only last week, it won a key contract to develop an experimental hypersonic aircraft, and it is discussing a number of joint activities with its new owners at Boeing, Lackman noted.

Even loyal veterans of the Skunk Works questioned whether it could survive the end of the Cold War and the deteriorating business climate in California in the early 1990s.

The company’s employment fell below 4,000, and it was surviving mainly on maintenance and modification contracts on aircraft it had produced during the Cold War.

In many ways, however, the new, leaner defense environment has played to the Skunk Works’ traditional strengths of rapid prototyping, integrated product teams and low-volume production of highly advanced aircraft.

Skunks Works programs are seldom controversial, because they are secret, too small to attract strong political opposition and completed so fast that critics have little time to mobilize.

When Lockheed and Martin Marietta merged in 1995, it again raised questions of whether the Skunk Works might be lost in cost cutting by the defense giant as it shed excess capacity.

Lockheed Martin produces military aircraft in both Georgia and Texas, but both of those operations have been shrinking rapidly, while the Skunk Works has stabilized and begun to grow.

The Skunk Works expects to have 6,500 employees by the end of this year, including 1,000 new hires and 1,500 who were transferred from Ontario when that Lockheed Martin facility was closed last year.

By comparison, Lockheed Martin’s Georgia aircraft plant has slid from 30,000 workers in the 1980s to 9,200 workers today, and its Texas aircraft plant has gone from 30,000 to 10,700.

The Skunk Works has become a technological resource that is being tapped throughout the far-flung company, something of a brain trust that takes on the toughest jobs. As a result, the Skunk Works is getting involved in a much wider range of programs, something that should further guarantee its future success, according to Lockheed Martin aeronautics sector president Micky Blackwell.

“The Skunk Works has the potential to double,” Blackwell said in a recent interview. “What we have done is create a virtual company that intertwines the operations of the three companies. Our goal is to eliminate competitive boundaries between them.”

But sometimes that means the Skunk Works gets the short end of the stick. In the JASSM (joint air-to-surface standoff missile) program, corporate executives overruled the Skunk Works’ desire to bid for the program and decided that Lockheed Martin’s Florida-based missile division would take the lead.

It won the program, in large part because the Skunk Works helped develop the missile’s stealth airframe. Similarly, the Skunk Works developed the F-22 jet fighter, and it will build the prototypes for the Joint Strike Fighter, neither of which will be manufactured at the Skunk Works.

But the Skunk Works has the lead role on some programs with enormous potential. If the company succeeds in its X-33 single-stage-to-orbit launch program, it would be a new technological high-water mark for the Skunk Works.

The company has pursued the idea of a plane that could fly into orbit since the mid-1980s, because it saw a dire need to reestablish U.S. dominance in space, said Bob Baumgartner, program director.

With just $60,000 in seed money from the headquarters, a Lockheed engineer sketched out a crude design on a piece of paper in 1992 and sent it to executives with a note saying, “This might work.” NASA selected the design for an 18-month contract.

Of course, the Skunk Works is not without its failures. Late last year, its Dark Star reconnaissance drone crashed on only its second test flight, forcing the company to redesign the flight control system, Gordon said.

Skunk Works’ designs are so radical and innovative that crashes are not unexpected. The firm’s prototype for the F-117 crashed, as did an early prototype for the F-22. The most famous crash of the Cold War, involving spy pilot Gary Francis Powers, occurred in a Skunk Works U-2.

The crashes have done little to tarnish the Skunk Works’ reputation, however.

“The Skunk Works’ successes are pretty impressive,” said John Harbison, an aerospace expert at Booz, Allen & Hamilton. “The Skunk Works has always had a world-class capability.”