AMERICA'S ARSENAL THE SKUNK WORKS' SPECIALTY: STEALTH Lockheed
By - Nancy J. Perry

(FORTUNE Magazine) – Workers at Lockheed are proud, and their office walls show it: News clips and photos of the startlingly angular F-117A Stealth fighter are everywhere. But nobody is flying higher because of the aircraft's so far so-superb performance in Gulf combat than its salty designer, Ben Rich. He ran Lockheed's supersecretive Skunk Works -- formally, the Advanced Development Projects division -- from 1975 until this past December. Eerily, his retirement party took place the same date that F-117A pilots from the 37th Tactical Fighter Wing dropped their first bombs on Iraq. The commander of that unit, Colonel Alton Whitley, was supposed to be at Rich's party. Instead, he dedicated that night's missions to him. Says Rich: ''They flew an American flag for me on the plane, and I'm going to get it next week. So I felt pretty good.'' Rich has reason to revel. Under his no-nonsense leadership, employees at Lockheed's scruffy Skunk Works plants in Burbank, California, developed and produced the world's first Stealth attack plane in just 31 months -- on time and under budget. The 59th and final aircraft was delivered last July. Says Bill Sweetman, technical editor of Jane's Information Group and author of three books on the Stealth technology: ''Ben Rich gets a lot of credit for preserving an extremely lean organization. There is absolutely no fat in the Skunk Works.'' There are several thousand employees, for instance, but only one vice president. Guests drink from paper cups. Says Rich: ''They called me 'FBR' -- and the F didn't stand for friendly.'' In addition to coming in under budget -- each plane cost $42.6 million to build -- the F-117A can now flaunt an even bigger selling point: It works. Says Sweetman: ''Lockheed took what people thought was a weird, exotic machine and built something usable.'' Exactly how it works is still classified, but some details have leaked out. Its figure is its fortune: Stealth technology first became a reality when Lockheed devised a way in the mid-1970s to hide an airplane from radar by building it out of flat surfaces -- an aerodynamically appalling concept. At the time, flat surfaces were needed to scatter the radar beam and keep it from bouncing back to its source, where it can be picked up as a blip on the radar screen. (Today computers can design curved surfaces that do the trick as well.) Most of the radar that is not scattered is absorbed by the fiber-and-resin composite material that covers the plane. A further Stealth trick: To find and home in on targets, the F-117A uses heat-seeking infrared sensors rather than radar, which emits signals that can give away the plane's position. As the pilot approaches the area he wants to bomb, he turns on his infrared target-imaging system, which finds, tracks, and displays the objective on a cockpit monitor. The pilot points the cross hairs on the monitor at precisely the spot he wants to hit -- say, a ventilation shaft on the roof of a bunker -- and directs a laser beam at the target. The plane releases a bomb equipped with a sensor that follows the beam to its destination. Bye-bye, bunker. Contributing significantly to the success of the F-117A and other warplanes in the Gulf is a weapon that most contractors -- Lockheed included -- don't much like to discuss: intelligence. From the same ''black'' world that brought us the Stealth fighter comes a vast array of spy satellites and surveillance planes that are feeding to military commanders in the Gulf details of enemy tactics, targets, and air defenses -- the moment they are sighted. Says Jeffrey Richelson, author of America's Secret Eyes in Space: ''This is our first test of real-time satellites in a wartime setting.'' He adds that if the U.S. were still relying on the old photographic system, ''We'd be screwed.'' Lockheed is one of several contractors whose spy craft are keeping a watchful eye on the Gulf. Probably the best known of the spy satellites that the government says do not exist are the KH-11 and Advanced KH-11 Keyhole reconnaissance versions, built by Lockheed and TRW. Intelligence experts believe that at least three, and as many as six, of these unblinking electronic eyes are now orbiting 300 miles above the earth, taking high- resolution pictures of Iraq twice a day. The Advanced KH-11 is particularly adroit: In addition to photomultipliers that amplify light and sensors that detect camouflage, this $1.5 billion watchdog has an infrared imaging system that lets it see at night. The KH-11s are constantly sending images to other satellites that relay them to ground stations in the U.S. and Saudi Arabia for instant analysis. Says Peter D. Zimmerman, a George Washington University professor and former State Department arms control expert: ''If you've ever tried to drink from a fire hose, you understand how much information our image interpreters can get hit with every day.'' Although many of its products are working overtime in the Gulf, Lockheed isn't expecting a bonanza from them. The U-2 and TR-1 reconnaissance aircraft, as well as the F-117A, are out of production and thus contribute only marginally to the company's $10-billion-a-year business. And according to Lawrence M. Harris, a defense analyst at Kemper Securities Group, revenues from classified space programs, including the KH-11, are declining as well -- partly because of advances in microelectronics that extend the life of today's satellites. On the other hand, the war probably can't hurt. Rumor has it that because of the F-117A's success in Iraq, the Air Force might want to buy 20 more. If it materialized, that order would bring Lockheed a cool $850 million in revenues and prop up the company's wobbly $2.2-billion-a-year aeronautical business. Lockheed also hopes that the positive publicity surrounding its products -- in particular, the F-117A -- will give it an edge in competition with Northrop to build a next-generation stealthy Advanced Tactical Fighter for the Air Force. Until the Iraq conflict, many Americans had associated the F-117A with a December 1989 bombing raid in Panama, in which one F-117A pilot missed his target by several hundred yards. Says Sweetman: ''The performance of the F-117A in the Gulf will be an enormous boost to Lockheed in the ATF contest. It speaks directly to what the Air Force wants in its next fighter: super performance without a super price.'' That performance is certainly raising the profile of the formerly stealthy Ben Rich, who is finally being allowed to stand up for his airplane. Two weeks after the F-117A first swooped over enemy targets in Iraq, Rich was accorded America's surest sign of celebrity status: an invitation to appear on To Tell the Truth. The real Ben Rich couldn't wait.