Great inspirational video highlighting Kelly Johnson's achievements at the Skunk Works division of Lockheed.

[Eight8Victor]

https://youtu.be/pL3Yzjk5R4M

Edited July 19, 2020 by Eight8Victor

[Yooper Rocketman]

Kelly Johnson was a Yooper!!  He was born and raised in Ishpeming, MI.

Tom

 

[donkaye]

Thank you for link!  This presentation was the best one I have heard in years.  The complex history was presented so effortlessly that time stood still for the hour presentation.  What a great storyteller!

[GeeBee]

My aerodynamics prof who worked with Johnson used to have Kelly Johnson once a year. It was always a great session. My biggest laugh was when DefSec McNamara told Johnson that the F-4 Phantom was going to "blow the doors" off the F-104. It held the  records for about 48 hours, then as Johnson said, "We pulled a stock F-104 off the line and reset the record to where it belonged". 

 

[MikeOH]

Awesome!

I loved that the CIA managed to buy the needed titanium from the USSR to build the SR-71

Probably some Soviet era trade minister still languishing in a gulag somewhere over that little screw-up!

[carusoam]

I recently learned how to save YouTube links for later...   

-a-

[GeeBee]

13 hours ago, MikeOH said:

Awesome!

I loved that the CIA managed to buy the needed titanium from the USSR to build the SR-71

Probably some Soviet era trade minister still languishing in a gulag somewhere over that little screw-up!

The Soviets knew. They delivered the world's largest vertical lathe to Westinghouse in Sunnyvale, CA in the 1960's. Why was it needed? To machine the prop shafts for nuclear subs. You cannot machine them on a horizontal lathe as they sag too much. The Soviet view was "if we don't sell it", the Americans will build it anyway.

 

[MikeOH]

13 hours ago, GeeBee said:

The Soviets knew.

 

Oh, really??

Do you have any actual proof of that?  Or, just your SGOTI opinion.  Sorry, but the story about a lathe falls a bit short of 'proof.'

[GeeBee]

Read "Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America" as well as Boris Yeltsin's book, "Against the Grain"

Also as to the vertical lathe, the Chief Flight Instructor at a school I worked at was a machinist on the lathe. He said the Russians that came to install it would joke that the lathe would be "good for the submarines". As an epilogue, a distant cousin of mine, (my mother's family are Germans from the Ukraine) who I sponsored was a machinist with experience on that make. He was asked to help disassemble and move the unit out of Sunnyvale.

Look, the CIA is good, but so was the KGB. To underestimate them is hubris. Remember the US military industrial complex gave us the M-16 that always jammed. The Soviet MIC gave them the AK-47.