KELLY JOHNSON/LOCKHEED CORPORATION

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01070R000100400008-3
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 8
• Document Creation Date: December 20, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 15, 2007
• Sequence Number: 8
• Publication Date: October 18, 1982
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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RADIO N REPORTS, INC.
PROGRAM 60 Minutes STATION WDVM-TV
CBS Network
DATE October 18, 1982 7:00 P.M. CITY Washington, D.C.
Kelly Johnson/Lockheed Corporation
MORLEY SAFER: Kelly is a story about aviation and it's
about a legendary character whose name would have been as well
known as Charles Lindberg, Amelia Earhart, or even the Wright
Brothers if the nature of his work had not made it necessary for
him to live a life in the shadows. Kelly is Kelly Johnson,
designer of airplanes. He rarely talks to reporters, so the
public knows little about him. But half a century he's been
celebrated in the private world of aviation design, and this is
why.
The P-38 Lightning, the Super Constellation, the F-80
Shooting Star, the U-2, the plane that successfully spied on the
Soviet Union until the Russians shot it down in the incident of
May 1960, the SR-71 Blackbird. Where did they all come from,
these great moments of American aviation -- world aviation,
really? Well, all of them came out of the brain of this man,
Kelly Johnson, who for more or less 50 years has been designing
airplanes for the Lockheed Corporation in Burbank, California.
Back in 1922, when Kelly Johnson was 12, he did what all
12-year-old American boys in the Midwest did. He designed
airplanes. Unlike most boys, he's kept those designs. And
unlike most, he continued to design them for 60 more years. His
life is a virtual summary of modern aviation. Forty different
airplanes began life on Kelly Johnson's drawing board. And he's
about the last of the one-man designers.
KELLY JOHNSON: We're into an era where a committee
designs the airplane. You never do anything totally stupid, you
never do anything totally bright. You get an average wrong
answer. And very expensive.
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SAFER: More expensive than one man with a bright idea?
JOHNSON: Yes. I think so.
SAFER: But the pressure is on to not be a generalist
JOHNSON: Right. Most of the people that we have now
coming out from engineering schools either specialize
immediately, or else they want to join the sales department with
an unlimited expense account, become the vice president in charge
of sales.
SAFER: Kelly Johnson's heyday was the years that he ran
Lockheed's famous Skunk Works. It was and is the company's most
renowned, yet most secret facility, named the Skunk Works after
the main industry of Dogpatch, a factory where things of an
uncertain nature were brewed up.
When the government wants something that will fly higher
or faster or more invisibly, it is usually to the Skunk Works
that it turns.
Though Johnson's retired, he's still believed to be
helping on a new plane that may nor may not exist, the Stealth
bomber.
Can you tell us anything about Stealth?
JOHNSON: No, except we started back two years before
the U-2 was shot down to work on it.
SAFER: Nothing else?
JOHNSON: No. I've got to be stealthy too.
SAFER: Other than -- 'cause this has been published, I
guess, that this plane will be, in effect, invisible to radars
that exist right now.
JOHNSON: Happy New Year.
SAFER: [Laughter]
JOHNSON: No comment. If I can talk about it, it's
obsolete. And the other motto is, you can't put your foot in
your mouth if you keep your mouth closed.
SAFER: What are the physical limitations on speed? Can
we go we're going Mach 3 now, plus. Can we go 4, 5? And can
we go as fast as light?
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JOHNSON: The need for going to those speeds is
decreasing every day that we learn how to use unmanned airplanes.
And it would take too much money for what you get to make it.
And I see less and less need for it commercially. Because with
the satellites here, in the shape they're developing, why send a
man's body halfway around the world to Bahrain or someplace to
have a meeting when you can just sit down at your desk and talk
with the speed of light? So have your conferences by TV. You
don't have to do all this traveling. It's bad for the airline
business, but you only travel when you're going to take a
vacation.
SAFER: Good for the body and soul.
SAFER: Two examples of Kelly Johnson's genius, these
two black beauties: the U-2, a plane the world never heard of
until the incident of May 1st, 1960; and the son of U-2, the
SR-71. Both were designed to snoop from a great height at great
speed.
If it bothers you that these are weapons of war, or of
cold war, try to look at them as extraordinary works of art, art
designed according to the rules of physics, but designed also to
defy the rules of nature. And besides, these two don't shoot,
they just look.
[Visuals]
This version of the U-2 is still in use for certain
missions. It can fly at 70,000 feet. It can actually fly much
higher, this plane whose basic design is 25 years old, but the
Air Force won't say how much higher.
The SR-71, operational since 1966. Its profile is
fairly familiar, but most of its innards are still top secret.
It can fly beyond 85,000 feet, beyond 16 miles high, at three
times the speed of sound, plus. The Air Force won't say how much
plus. But it can fly New York to Los Angeles in an hour, maybe
even faster.
SAFER: And what's the story of this plane, the genesis
of the U-2?
JOHNSON: Well, it started back around 1952, when it was
perfectly evident that we in the United States needed to overfly
Soviet territory to find out what they were doing militarily. We
were not making any progress with people on the ground. They
weren't getting out. So I prepared a proposal and took it back
to the Air Force on an airplane that would fly over 70,000 feet
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sufficient distance to do the job.
Well, they didn't believe it. They said, "The engine
won't even run at altitudes that you're talking about."
SAFER: I heard stories that when Gary Powers took off,
I believe from Turkey, on his last run, that in fact the Russians
hadn't knocked this plane down when it was over Russia, that the
plane was sabotaged on the ground. True or false?
JOHNSON: That's false. We know pretty well what
happened to it, because in 1956, when we had been overflying for
about a year, Gromyko, at the United Nations, talked to John
Foster Dulles and said, "You fly over us again, we shoot you
down." And Dulles said, "Well, why don't you?" So we flew for
four years, but then they did.
SAFER: What about the attempts, the previous attempts
at to knock down the U-2s?
JOHNSON: Well, we had actual pictures taken on some of
the overflights there were as many as 35 Russian fighters trying
to get up to get it. In fact, we'd call that the aluminum cloud
that was obstructing our photography.
SAFER: You mean from the cockpit, from the...
JOHNSON: Taking a picture there down toward the ground.
SAFER: They were going through a...
JOHNSON: There was a whole maze of them down about
35,000 feet.
SAFER: I heard at some point the Russians, in their
attempts to knock down U-2, knocked down some of their own
planes. True?
JOHNSON: On that very day they knocked down two of
their own before they hit Powers. He was lucky to get out.
SAFER:
Gary Power was shot
down, but
parachuted safely
to the ground.
The
Russians put him on trial for espionage.
There were those
who
said he should have taken the poison that
the CIA provided
him
with. He was eventually traded for a
Russian spy and
came
back to freedom in the United States.
JOHNSON: Absolutely not. He did exactly what he should
have done.
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JOHNSON: It was his decision to do it if he wanted to.
And he chose to live.
SAFER: So here we have the U-2, which was, I suppose,
the Wright Brothers' version of a spy plane compared with the...
JOHNSON: Well, we expected two years before the U-2 was
shot down that we ought to be working on something that will go
higher and faster and further. And so we again made a proposal
to the military and the CIA that we build a Mach-3-plus airplane.
SAFER: And Mach-3-plus being three times the speed of
JOHNSON: Over 36 miles a minute.
SAFER: And maybe more.
JOHNSON: Or more. We're allowed to say plus, but not
how much more plus.
SAFER: Okay. So what -- is this knock-downable? I
mean is this where the U-2 was on the eve of the Russians
developing something that would knock it down?
JOHNSON: They have not hit it, because of special
design characteristics of the airplane, as well as its speed and
height.
SAFER: By special design characteristics, I assume that
means something that baffles the radar that...
SAFER: Tell me what goes through your mind when you
roll out a new airplane that's never flown before, something
you've designed and you see a young man get in it and start to
roll down the runway?
JOHNSON: What did we forget? What did we forget? And
I'd like to take two days of doing nothing to the airplane,
leaving it sit there, and then just thinking, "What have we
forgotten to do?" And some important things will come up that
way.
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SAFER: Do you utter a prayer at the end?
JOHNSON: If you haven't been doing that all year,
something's wrong.
SAFER: Do you always try to apply your own...
JOHNSON: I do indeed.
SAFER: mistakes and...
JOHNSON: I always used to say that if I didn't have the
hell scared out of me once a year flying in one of our machines,
I should quit designing.
SAFER: One machine that Kelly designed did scare many
pilots, the F-104 Starfighter. As the main combat plane in the
West German Air Force, there were problems: 118 pilots killed
over 22 years.
JOHNSON: The problems were primarily in Germany, and
with insufficient training. The average pilot flying seven hours
a month, which is just not enough to keep current. And they'd go
in in formation, fly right into the ground because they'd follow
the lead airplane.
SAFER: Well, what are you saying, that the plane was
too hot for the pilots?
JOHNSON: Too hot for the pilots, and they gave it a
very tough mission to do. They almost doubled the weight of the
airplane. It went from 17,500 pounds take-off weight to 31,000.
SAFER: What did they heap on it?
JOHNSON: An atomic bomb, all kinds of cameras, more
ammunition, more fuel. So it was a completely new airplane.
SAFER: Do you count on everything you design being a
hundred percent perfect?
JOHNSON: No. I could only point to the record,
probably about 51 percent right.
SAFER: What was your big disappointment?
JOHNSON: Well, a big disappointment was our vertical-
rising airplane that would sit on its tail and climb straight up,
hanging on two big counter-rotating propellers. And it was
supposed to back down the same way. It was supposed to be able
to land on a boat with the deck pitching up and down 20 feet.
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Well,
found
out
that
look
over
your
guess
how
high
wrote
the
Navy
we practiced on clouds and everything else, and we
you could do all these things, but you couldn't
shoulder when you got close to the ground and
you were. So after a few abortive attempts I
a letter, "Dear Navy. We're afraid to fly this
thing." And this is the only time I ever had to eat that much
crow on an airplane. And they said, "Well, we agree with you."
SAFER: Your airplanes -- all weapons, but airplanes in
particular just cost so much money, and cost much more money than
they tell us, than you fellows tell us they're going to cost.
SAFER: They go over budget by factors of 10 or 20 or
100, even.
Can we afford to keep designing new and better aircraft?
JOHNSON: Well, if you project the increasing cost of
military airplanes over the last 10 years to the year about 2000,
there'd be enough money in the budget to buy one airplane for all
the services. It'll be that expensive.
Who would have thought that a Navy fighter like the F-14
would end up costing you $40 million apiece?
SAFER: And particularly when the airplane that cost $40
million and somebody can knock it down with a $2 bullet.
JOHNSON: Hand-held weapon. Yes. That's why I don't
understand the discussions that have gone on in the Department of
Defense about flying a tank in a C-17, or anything that'll hold
it, like a C-5, to the front line of a battle. You could risk a
$100 million airplane and a $4 million tank to one guy on the
ground shooting when it come in to land. And what can you do
with one tank, which can also be knocked off by one man on the
ground?
SAFER: So what are you saying?
JOHNSON: Don't fly tanks around.
SAFER: So what happens? Because there's a limit, as
you say, to the degree of sophistication. Every time you make a
faster plane, you make a better missile to knock it down with.
JOHNSON: It's a losing battle. It ends up and proves
that the best airplane to be designd is going to be a crop
duster.
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SAFER: Top speed of 85 miles an hour.
JOHNSON: I don't care. It can feed us, it can keep us
healthy, and save our country from starvation, and a lot of other
countries. The crop duster is the plane of the future.
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