A Farewell to Kelly Johnson

So many top Air Force officers descended on Dayton's Wright-Patterson Air Force Base that a bystander asked: "Who's back at the Pentagon running the shop?" Replied Air Force Chief of Staff General David Jones: "Even more would have come if they could have got away." The beribboned brass hats were there to honor the one man above all others who gave the U.S. Air Force its unchallenged technological superiority: Lockheed Aircraft's famed design chief, Clarence ("Kelly") Johnson, perhaps the most successful aviation innovator since Orville and Wilbur Wright.

Skunk Works. Johnson, who retires this month shortly before his 65th birthday, received the Air Force's highest civilian medal that December afternoon in Ohio, and later the same day was inducted into the Aviation Hall of Fame. Those were only the latest tributes in an extraordinary career. During more than four decades at Lockheed, Johnson personally directed the design and production of 40 planes, including the first American combat jet (F-80), the U-2 spy plane and the Mach 3 (three times the speed of sound) SR-71, which recently flew from New York to London in a record-breaking 1 hr. 55 min. As head of Lockheed's top-secret "Skunk Works" design shop, named after the foul-smelling factory in Li'l Abner, he also played a crucial role in developing spy satellites, electronic jamming and other cloak-and-dagger technologies.

In the eyes of his peers, Johnson is to aviation what Wernher von Braun was to rocketry. From the time he took his first flight in a barnstorming Lincoln biplane from a pasture near his boyhood home of Ishpeming, Mich.--the pilot told him to learn to build planes, not fly them--Johnson has lived aviation. After studying aeronautical engineering at the University of Michigan, he landed a job with Lockheed in the Depression year of 1933, largely on the basis of an impressive wind-tunnel analysis he had made of a model of a forthcoming Lockheed plane; the young graduate recommended a twin tail for the new all-metal, twin-engine Electra, Lockheed's first successful passenger plane (Neville Chamberlain used it to fly home from Munich). Reason: a single rudder offered inadequate control if an engine conked out.

Working in a leaky old building in Burbank, Calif., the novice engineer soon won his designing wings. In 1938 he almost singlehanded persuaded the R.A.F. to order Lockheed's Hudson bomber. In a series of all-night sessions at the drawing board, he completely redesigned the plane to meet British specifications. At that time he was also working on what would become one of the most celebrated U.S. fighter planes in World War II, the twin-boom P-38 Lightning, which awed Luftwaffe pilots called der Gabelschwanz Teufel (Fork-Tailed Devil). Even before the first Lightning took off, Johnson shrewdly anticipated a problem that would soon plague all high-speed aircraft.

As the plane approached the speed of sound in steep dives, the air would begin piling up along the leading edges of its wings, creating shock waves that reduced lift and sent the craft out of control. Johnson's innovative solution: the addition of a braking flap on the underside of the wings. When the flap was lowered, it smoothed the flow of air and restored control. To overcome the P-38's heavy "stick loads" or stiffness of controls during high-speed maneuvers, he was equally creative: he introduced hydraulic boosters like those now used in power steering in cars.

Soviet Archrivals. Although the Germans beat the U.S. into the air with the first jet fighter during World War II, Johnson responded quickly by using new jet engines and a low-wing, streamlined airframe to produce the F-80 Shooting Star, America's first operational combat jet, which became the workhorse of the Korean War. In the first all-jet air battle, it shot down a Soviet MIG-15, the brainchild of Johnson's Russian archrivals, Artem Mikoyan and Mikhail Gurevich. Kelly achieved an even more impressive performance from the Mach 2 F-104 Starfighter ("the missile with a man in it"), which is only now about to be phased out as NATO's dominant plane. Nor did Johnson neglect civilian aircraft; his graceful three-rudder four-engine Constellations set standards for speed, range and comfort for long-distance travel round the world.

Johnson's greatest talent was his ability to create aircraft that pushed men and materials to their limits--and beyond. Wedding glider design to jet technology, he created the long, thin-winged U2, which for almost four years flew so high (80,000 ft.) over Soviet territory that no plane or missile could reach it; it was only when Francis Gary Powers' U-2 was downed by a new Soviet missile in 1960 that the world learned of the spy plane's existence. Johnson's double delta YF-12 interceptor remained unchallenged for a decade until Mikoyan's MIG-25 became operational.

Yet even the MIG-25 cannot fully match Johnson's masterwork, the sleek SR-71 Blackbird, a plane that can fly so high (100,000 ft.) and so fast (2,000 m.p.h. plus) that it was able to cruise near Peking's first H-bomb explosion over the Lob Nor desert of northeastern Sinkiang province in 1967. It took photographs and gathered data without being damaged by the blast. After such daring forays, SR-71 pilots would decorate their fuselages with the silhouette of a cobra-like poisonous snake called the habu, which inhabits a Pacific island where SR-71s are based. When TIME Correspondent Jerry Hannifin noticed that an SR-71 on public display near Washington in 1973 bore no fewer than 42 habus, he inquired about those missions. The Pentagon responded by ordering all the emblems scrubbed off.

Off to the Ranch. As Johnson prepares to retire to his cattle ranch near Santa Barbara, Calif, he is uneasy about the state of American aviation. "We are in a time of great confusion without any forward-looking programs," he told Hannifin. He does not expect an American SST before 1990. Nor does he expect any significant design breakthroughs soon. What he foresees is greater emphasis on fuel economy, with aircraft "flying higher and farther with good payloads, but not necessarily faster."

Kelly Johnson may well be the last of a breed of uniquely gifted pioneering jet-aircraft designers who combined theoretical knowledge with wide-ranging practical skills. For example, his early experience in metal machining acquired during summer jobs in auto plants proved invaluable in working the heat-resistant titanium sheets needed for the SR-71's tough skin, which heats up to cherry red temperatures of 630DEG F. during flight. Johnson deplores the trend toward specialization with the lament of a designer who also knows how to handle machine tools. "Some of the fellows in the Skunk Works never had any cutting oil splashed on them." He expects more and more future decisions to be made by committees of experts with no experience beyond their own specialties. Trouble is, he says, committees "never do anything completely wrong, but they never do anything brilliant either."

Fortunately for such committees--and for all of American aviation--Johnson does not intend to drop out entirely. "If any interesting projects come up that I can contribute to," he promises, "I'll be around at the ranch."

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