Skunk Works Part two (by: Lucas Braun)

 

Before the holiday break I published a part one to this book review. You should read that before reading this blog, but in a short summary the book kicks off with Ben Rich testing the first airplane that is designed to be stealth from the ground up after he has become the manager of the Skunk Works. The book then goes back in time to when Ben was working on the air intakes of the U-2 spy plane. There are immense stories told about the pilots of those planes and their harrowing journeys as they worked to get immensely powerful information about countries from their cameras.

In the center of the book there was a photo gallery that had images of almost all of the projects talked about in the book. This photo gallery also marked a significant turning point in the book, as the book went from talking about the U-2 to the SR-71. This brings us into the start of the second half of the book. Ben Rich has grown in the ranks at the Skunk Works, and is explaining the design process of the SR-71 and how it was such a uniquely challenging plane to build. The Skunk Works faced many challenges building the plane including what metal to use because of the extremely high temperatures that it would need to withstand while flying at Mach 3.3. To solve this problem, the SR-71 was mainly made out of titanium, a metal that has extremely good strength to weight properties, very high temperature resistance, and deformed relatively little when it got hotter and colder. This may have sounded great on paper, but titanium is one of the hardest metals to machine, and is very costly. This made it so the people at the Skunk Works had to design brand new technologies to make the construction of the plane possible. Skunk Works then goes on to explain the flight testing and usefulness of the SR-71, and explain some of the problems that arose with it. The engineers at the Skunk Works had to design a plane as light as possible, to make the plane be able to fly as fast and far as possible. This made it so that the engineers had no weight to spare to make fuel tanks, so the skin of the plane had to act as the tanks. This worked great when the plane was flying fast, and the skin of the plane was hot, but when the plane was sitting on the runway it would literally leak fuel because as the plane got colder the tiles of the plane shrunk, letting fuel through. Many of the other problems stemmed from the plane being too hot, like the Skunk Works having to design a brand new fuel for the plane that had to be so stable that you couldn't light it on fire with a blowtorch. This plane was used for the most critical and dangerous spy missions, as it was almost immune to being shot down due to it flying so high and fast.

Towards the end of Skunk Works to book shifts towards talking about the government's influence on the projects. As Ben Rich becomes the new head of the Skunk Works, a new era in aerospace is unfolding. It is no longer easy to spend small amounts of money on many projects that you aren’t financially attached to. During the era of Ben’s old boss, Kelley, the Skunk Works would take on nearly ten projects a decade, but as Ben takes the position, the number is falling to more like one to two projects a decade. This requires a change in the way that the Skunk Works worked, and they could no longer build such revolutionary planes because the government would be unlikely to fund such a project that has high risk. Another problem that the Skunk Works faced is that the government, made up of congressmen who wanted to be re-elected would be highly unlikely to fund a project that might fail, putting a bad mark on their portfolio. With the new era started, there was also another problem, there had to be closer monitoring on all of the documents that had classified information, making business 30% more costly because of the amount of employees needed to deal with all of the classified parts. All of these things shifted the Skunk Works from being a place where large technological breakthroughs happened to a place that took on long term government contracts that had relatively little new technology.

Skunk Works by Ben Rich was truly one of the best books I have ever read in my entire life. The book was full of some of the most interesting details about aircraft and the works of the government that I have ever read about. I really enjoyed that the book was written by someone who had pretty much all of the technical jobs at the Skunk Works facilities, making the book have much richer details. I also enjoyed the structure of the book, especially the parts where Ben Rich would put stories from other people in the book about the aircraft that the Skunk Works produced, because it really showed you just how great everyone thought the aircraft produced by the Skunk Works was. I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in aviation, and some of the most iconic airplanes ever made, pretty much anyone could understand this material with even the most basic aerospace knowledge.