There are conflicting observations about the birth of Skunk Works. Engineer
Ben Rich sets the origin as June 1943 in
Burbank, California.
Kelly Johnson has made contradictory statements, some agreeing with Rich, and others putting the origin earlier, in 1939. 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 was
joggled, 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. Moving from the distillery to a larger building, the stench from a nearby plastic factory was so vile that
Irv Culver, one of the engineers, began answering the intra-Lockheed "house" phone "Skonk Works, inside man Culver speaking!" In
Al Capp's comic strip
Li'l Abner, Big Barnsmell's Skonk Works—spelled with an "o"—was where
Kickapoo 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. The range modifications were performed in Lockheed's Building 304, starting with 100 P-38F models on April 15, 1942. Some of the group of independent-minded engineers were later involved with the XP-80 project, the prototype of the
P-80 Shooting Star.
Mary G. Ross, the first
Native American female engineer, began working at Lockheed in 1942 on the mathematics of compressibility in
high-speed flight In 1952, she was invited to join the Skunk Works team.
1950s to 1990s In 1955, the Skunk Works received a contract from the
CIA to build a spyplane known as the
U-2 with the intention of flying over the Soviet Union and photographing sites of strategic interest. The U-2 was tested at
Groom Lake in the
Nevada desert, and the Flight Test Engineer in charge was
Joseph F. Ware, Jr. The first overflight took place on July 4
1956. The U-2 ceased overflights when
Francis Gary Powers was 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 five
A-12 aircraft at a cost of $96 million. Building a
Mach 3.0+ aircraft out of
titanium 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 several
shell corporations to acquire source material.) Several years later, the
U.S. Air Force became interested in the design, and it ordered the
SR-71 Blackbird, a two-seater version of the A-12. This aircraft first flew in 1966 and remained in service until 1998. The
D-21 drone, similar in design to the Blackbird, was built to overfly the
Lop Nur nuclear test facility in
China. 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 from
B-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 the
U.S. Air Force named
Have 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 small
radar cross-section. After a series of successful test flights beginning in 1977, the Air force awarded Skunk Works the contract to build the
F-117 stealth fighter on November 1, 1978. During the entirety of the
Cold War, the Skunk Works was located in Burbank, California, on the eastern side of
Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport (). After 1989, Lockheed reorganized its operations and relocated the Skunk Works to Site 10 at
U.S. Air Force Plant 42 in
Palmdale, 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 and
Steve Jobs visited a Skunk Works Building which influenced Jobs' design. In 2009, the Skunk Works was inducted into the
International Air & Space Hall of Fame at the
San Diego Air & Space Museum. ==Projects==