Kelly Johnson
Clarence Leonard "Kelly" Johnson was an American aeronautical and systems engineer. He is recognized for his contributions to a series of important aircraft designs, most notably the Lockheed U-2 and SR-71 Blackbird Born:Clarence Leonard Johnson, February 27, 1910, Ishpeming, Michigan, U.S. Died:December 21, 1990, Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
The Kelly Johnson Story (Video)
In the summer of 1938, a twenty-eight-year-old farm boy from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan found himself holed up in a London hotel room. He had just seventy-two hours to design a new aircraft, one that the British Air Ministry needed to prepare for a war that looked more likely with each passing day The young engineer’s name was Clarence Johnson, but he went by the name Kelly.
Clarence Kelly Johnson
Born: February 27, 1910, Ishpeming, MI
Died: December 21, 1990, Los Angeles, CA
Nationality: American of Swedish descent, a Westman.
Kelly Johnson was born in the remote mining town of Ishpeming, Michigan. His parents were Swedish, from the city of Malmö, county of Scania. His father ran a construction company.[5] Johnson was 13 years old when he won a prize for his first aircraft design. He attended Flint Central High School and graduated in 1928, then went to Flint Junior College, now known as Mott Community College, and finally to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he received a Bachelor's and Master's Degree in Aeronautical Engineering.
While attending grade school in Michigan, he was ridiculed for his name, Clarence. Some boys started calling him "Clara". One morning while waiting in line to get into a classroom, one boy started calling him "Clara". Johnson tripped him so hard the boy broke a leg. The boys then decided that he was not a "Clara" after all, and started calling him "Kelly". The nickname came from the popular song at the time, "Kelly With the Green Neck Tie". It stuck.
At the University of Michigan, Johnson conducted wind tunnel tests of Lockheed's proposed Model 10 Electra airliner. He found the aircraft did not have adequate directional stability, but his professor felt it did and told Lockheed so. Upon completing his master's degree in 1933, Johnson joined Lockheed as a tool designer on a salary of $83 a month. Shortly after starting, Johnson convinced Hall Hibbard, the chief engineer and designer of the Model 10 Electra that it was unstable. Hibbard sent Johnson back to Michigan to conduct more wind tunnel tests. Johnson eventually made multiple changes to the wind tunnel model, including adding an "H" tail, to address the problem. Lockheed accepted Johnson's suggestions and the Model 10 Electra became a major success. The Model 10 Electra competed with the Boeing 247 and Douglas DC-2. The Electra gained considerable fame as it was flown by Amelia Earhart on her ill-fated around-the-world expedition in 1937.
The design improvements in the Electra brought Johnson to the attention of company management, and he was promoted to aeronautical engineer. Kelly rose through the ranks quickly, he became chief research engineer in 1938. In 1952, he was appointed chief engineer of Lockheed's Burbank, California plant, which later became the Lockheed-California Company. In 1956 he became Vice President of Research.
Johnson became Vice President of Advanced Development Projects (ADP) in 1958. The first ADP offices were next to a plastic factory and the stench was so vile that Irv Culver, one of the engineers, began answering the intra-Lockheed "house" phone with hello "Skonk Works!"[12] The Skonk Works was where Kickapoo Joy Juice was brewed in the popular Lil Abner comic strip. The name skunk works rapidly spread throughout the aerospace community and is now associated with any facility doing high tech cutting edge research and design.
Kelly began to hone the skunk works principles that he would become famous for in the aerospace community all the way back in 1938. In July 1938, while the rest of Lockheed was busy tooling up to build the Hudson reconnaissance bombers to fill that British contract, a small group of engineers was assigned to fabricate the first prototype of what would become the P-38 Lightning.
Oh, and that Hudson bomber, Kelly designed it single-handedly at the age of 29. He traveled to England with Courtland Gross, A Lockheed director, the British nixed the original design. Johnson recalls: "They told us the bombs had to go under the floor, that they needed forward shooting guns and dozens of other things." "So, I redesigned the airplane in my hotel room in a couple of days according to British specifications." Johnson's design landed Lockheed an order for 200 planes, the largest order that had ever been placed in the U.S. during peacetime. In all, Lockheed built 3,500 Hudson's for the U.K. by the end of World War II.
Kelly Johnson set the team apart from the rest of the factory in a walled-off section of one building, off limits to all but those involved directly. Secretly, a number of advanced features were being incorporated into the new fighter including significant structural improvements 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 P-38 was the first 400 mph fighter in the world.
In 1955, Kelly and his skunk works team received a seemingly impossible assignment: The United States needed an aircraft that could fly so high it could avoid being shot down, or potentially even detected. Soviet Radar and intercept fighters of the era were limited to altitudes of 65,000 feet, and the highest any American aircraft could reach was just 48,000 feet. The Air Force solicited requests for an airplane that could fly at an astounding 70,000 feet with a 1,500 range.
Kelly Johnson’s Skunk Works responded with a design that they claimed could fly as high as 73,000 feet with a range of 1,600 miles. The Air Force rejected his design… but the CIA was interested. Yes, the CIA, America’s secretive spy was about to get into the airborne reconnaissance business. The agency let a contract to Lockheed. In only eight months Johnson and his team designed and built the high-flying spy plane, it was know as the U-2 Dragon Lady. Realizing the U2 could not be tested and flown out of Burbank Airport, they selected what would become known as Area 51, at Groom Lake, Nevada which was acquired, a runway had to be constructed for the project. The spy planes were dismantled, loaded onto cargo planes and flown to Area 51 and then re-assembled for flight testing. The aircraft was renamed the U-2 in July 1955, The "U" referred to the deliberately vague designation "utility" instead of "R" for "reconnaissance", The CIA assigned the cryptonym AQUATONE to the project, while the USAF used the name OILSTONE for the progarm support they gave to the CIA.
On May 1, 1960, a Soviet SA2 surface-to-air missile finally managed to shoot down one of the CIA operated U-2 spy planes. It was flown by pilot Francis Gary Powers. The aircraft was flying at 70,000 feet, higher than US intelligence thought could be spotted and targeted by Soviet radar. An SA-2 Guided missile hit the U2 but didn’t blow it out of the sky. Powers was able to ride the Dragon Lady down from 70,000 feet to 30,000 feet before he could safely eject. The Skunk Works team knew the operational life of the U2 would be limited and they were already working on a replacement. Kelly Johnson began preliminary work inside Lockheed in late 1957 to develop a follow-on aircraft to the U2.
The designs were nicknamed "Archangel" . As the aircraft designs evolved and configuration changes occurred, the internal Lockheed designations changed from Archangel-1 to Archangel-2, and so on. These names for the evolving designs soon simply became known as "A-1", "A-2", etc. The last change was an update of the A-11, adding twin canted fins instead of a single right-angle one, and adding a number of areas of non-metallic materials to reduce the radar cross section of the aircraft. This became the A-12 design. On 26 January 1960, the CIA ordered 12 A-12 aircraft.
The Airforce had an iteration that became the SR-71 and eventually the CIA and AirForce programs were merged in favor of the SR-71.Lockheed’s SR-71 could sustain speeds in excess of Mach 3.2, flying at altitudes higher than 78,000 feet. During its 43 years in service, the SR-71 had over 4,000 missiles fired at it from the ground and other aircraft. Not a single missle ever hit its target. All of this amazing design was done on slide rules and drafting tables along with a high dose of Westmen IQ.
Kelly served on Lockheed's board of directors from 1964 to 1980, becoming a senior vice president in 1969. He officially retired from Lockheed in 1975 and was replaced by his good friend Ben Rich. Lockheed retained Kelly as a consultant at the Skunk Works. At the time of Kelly’s retirement the skunk works was developing the F117 stealth fighter which made its first test flight in 1976. A number of factors contributed to Johnson's extraordinary career. He was a very talented designer and engineer. He could quickly and accurately estimate design characteristics such as mass, characteristics that usually were determined through long calculations. He was also ambitious and an excellent salesman, aggressively promoting ideas while also gaining trust. In addition, he created teams and a work environment where creativity and productivity could flourish. Kelly’s boss at Lockheed, Hall Hibbard, summed it up best, “That damn Swede can actually see air,”
Johnson died at the age of 80 at St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank after physical deterioration and the advancement of senility, caused by the hardening of his arteries connectied to his brain. He is buried at Forest Lawn Cemetery, Los Angeles, California.
In the summer of 1938, a twenty-eight-year-old farm boy from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan found himself holed up in a London hotel room. He had just seventy-two hours to design a new aircraft, one that the British Air Ministry needed to prepare for a war that looked more likely with each passing day The young engineer’s name was Clarence Johnson, but he went by the name Kelly.
Clarence Kelly Johnson
Born: February 27, 1910, Ishpeming, MI
Died: December 21, 1990, Los Angeles, CA
Nationality: American of Swedish descent, a Westman.
Kelly Johnson was born in the remote mining town of Ishpeming, Michigan. His parents were Swedish, from the city of Malmö, county of Scania. His father ran a construction company.[5] Johnson was 13 years old when he won a prize for his first aircraft design. He attended Flint Central High School and graduated in 1928, then went to Flint Junior College, now known as Mott Community College, and finally to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he received a Bachelor's and Master's Degree in Aeronautical Engineering.
While attending grade school in Michigan, he was ridiculed for his name, Clarence. Some boys started calling him "Clara". One morning while waiting in line to get into a classroom, one boy started calling him "Clara". Johnson tripped him so hard the boy broke a leg. The boys then decided that he was not a "Clara" after all, and started calling him "Kelly". The nickname came from the popular song at the time, "Kelly With the Green Neck Tie". It stuck.
At the University of Michigan, Johnson conducted wind tunnel tests of Lockheed's proposed Model 10 Electra airliner. He found the aircraft did not have adequate directional stability, but his professor felt it did and told Lockheed so. Upon completing his master's degree in 1933, Johnson joined Lockheed as a tool designer on a salary of $83 a month. Shortly after starting, Johnson convinced Hall Hibbard, the chief engineer and designer of the Model 10 Electra that it was unstable. Hibbard sent Johnson back to Michigan to conduct more wind tunnel tests. Johnson eventually made multiple changes to the wind tunnel model, including adding an "H" tail, to address the problem. Lockheed accepted Johnson's suggestions and the Model 10 Electra became a major success. The Model 10 Electra competed with the Boeing 247 and Douglas DC-2. The Electra gained considerable fame as it was flown by Amelia Earhart on her ill-fated around-the-world expedition in 1937.
The design improvements in the Electra brought Johnson to the attention of company management, and he was promoted to aeronautical engineer. Kelly rose through the ranks quickly, he became chief research engineer in 1938. In 1952, he was appointed chief engineer of Lockheed's Burbank, California plant, which later became the Lockheed-California Company. In 1956 he became Vice President of Research.
Johnson became Vice President of Advanced Development Projects (ADP) in 1958. The first ADP offices were next to a plastic factory and the stench was so vile that Irv Culver, one of the engineers, began answering the intra-Lockheed "house" phone with hello "Skonk Works!"[12] The Skonk Works was where Kickapoo Joy Juice was brewed in the popular Lil Abner comic strip. The name skunk works rapidly spread throughout the aerospace community and is now associated with any facility doing high tech cutting edge research and design.
Kelly began to hone the skunk works principles that he would become famous for in the aerospace community all the way back in 1938. In July 1938, while the rest of Lockheed was busy tooling up to build the Hudson reconnaissance bombers to fill that British contract, a small group of engineers was assigned to fabricate the first prototype of what would become the P-38 Lightning.
Oh, and that Hudson bomber, Kelly designed it single-handedly at the age of 29. He traveled to England with Courtland Gross, A Lockheed director, the British nixed the original design. Johnson recalls: "They told us the bombs had to go under the floor, that they needed forward shooting guns and dozens of other things." "So, I redesigned the airplane in my hotel room in a couple of days according to British specifications." Johnson's design landed Lockheed an order for 200 planes, the largest order that had ever been placed in the U.S. during peacetime. In all, Lockheed built 3,500 Hudson's for the U.K. by the end of World War II.
Kelly Johnson set the team apart from the rest of the factory in a walled-off section of one building, off limits to all but those involved directly. Secretly, a number of advanced features were being incorporated into the new fighter including significant structural improvements 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 P-38 was the first 400 mph fighter in the world.
In 1955, Kelly and his skunk works team received a seemingly impossible assignment: The United States needed an aircraft that could fly so high it could avoid being shot down, or potentially even detected. Soviet Radar and intercept fighters of the era were limited to altitudes of 65,000 feet, and the highest any American aircraft could reach was just 48,000 feet. The Air Force solicited requests for an airplane that could fly at an astounding 70,000 feet with a 1,500 range.
Kelly Johnson’s Skunk Works responded with a design that they claimed could fly as high as 73,000 feet with a range of 1,600 miles. The Air Force rejected his design… but the CIA was interested. Yes, the CIA, America’s secretive spy was about to get into the airborne reconnaissance business. The agency let a contract to Lockheed. In only eight months Johnson and his team designed and built the high-flying spy plane, it was know as the U-2 Dragon Lady. Realizing the U2 could not be tested and flown out of Burbank Airport, they selected what would become known as Area 51, at Groom Lake, Nevada which was acquired, a runway had to be constructed for the project. The spy planes were dismantled, loaded onto cargo planes and flown to Area 51 and then re-assembled for flight testing. The aircraft was renamed the U-2 in July 1955, The "U" referred to the deliberately vague designation "utility" instead of "R" for "reconnaissance", The CIA assigned the cryptonym AQUATONE to the project, while the USAF used the name OILSTONE for the progarm support they gave to the CIA.
On May 1, 1960, a Soviet SA2 surface-to-air missile finally managed to shoot down one of the CIA operated U-2 spy planes. It was flown by pilot Francis Gary Powers. The aircraft was flying at 70,000 feet, higher than US intelligence thought could be spotted and targeted by Soviet radar. An SA-2 Guided missile hit the U2 but didn’t blow it out of the sky. Powers was able to ride the Dragon Lady down from 70,000 feet to 30,000 feet before he could safely eject. The Skunk Works team knew the operational life of the U2 would be limited and they were already working on a replacement. Kelly Johnson began preliminary work inside Lockheed in late 1957 to develop a follow-on aircraft to the U2.
The designs were nicknamed "Archangel" . As the aircraft designs evolved and configuration changes occurred, the internal Lockheed designations changed from Archangel-1 to Archangel-2, and so on. These names for the evolving designs soon simply became known as "A-1", "A-2", etc. The last change was an update of the A-11, adding twin canted fins instead of a single right-angle one, and adding a number of areas of non-metallic materials to reduce the radar cross section of the aircraft. This became the A-12 design. On 26 January 1960, the CIA ordered 12 A-12 aircraft.
The Airforce had an iteration that became the SR-71 and eventually the CIA and AirForce programs were merged in favor of the SR-71.Lockheed’s SR-71 could sustain speeds in excess of Mach 3.2, flying at altitudes higher than 78,000 feet. During its 43 years in service, the SR-71 had over 4,000 missiles fired at it from the ground and other aircraft. Not a single missle ever hit its target. All of this amazing design was done on slide rules and drafting tables along with a high dose of Westmen IQ.
Kelly served on Lockheed's board of directors from 1964 to 1980, becoming a senior vice president in 1969. He officially retired from Lockheed in 1975 and was replaced by his good friend Ben Rich. Lockheed retained Kelly as a consultant at the Skunk Works. At the time of Kelly’s retirement the skunk works was developing the F117 stealth fighter which made its first test flight in 1976. A number of factors contributed to Johnson's extraordinary career. He was a very talented designer and engineer. He could quickly and accurately estimate design characteristics such as mass, characteristics that usually were determined through long calculations. He was also ambitious and an excellent salesman, aggressively promoting ideas while also gaining trust. In addition, he created teams and a work environment where creativity and productivity could flourish. Kelly’s boss at Lockheed, Hall Hibbard, summed it up best, “That damn Swede can actually see air,”
Johnson died at the age of 80 at St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank after physical deterioration and the advancement of senility, caused by the hardening of his arteries connectied to his brain. He is buried at Forest Lawn Cemetery, Los Angeles, California.