The Impossible Factory

The extraordinary true story of Lockheed Martin’s “Skunk Works”—the radical innovation hub that designed the greatest airplanes of the twentieth century—and the visionary who made it all possible

It began with a humble warehouse building in Burbank, California, and a charismatic young engineer named Kelly Johnson. In 1938, Johnson, who was then freshly out of the University of Michigan’s school of engineering, got the idea for a small, agile, disruptive engineering shop—one that could help America’s war machine innovate more quickly. By 1943, with the U.S. now in World War II and desperate for new technology, “Advanced Development Projects”—later nicknamed the “Skunk Works”—was born.

During Johnson’s forty-seven years at Lockheed Martin, the Skunk Works developed at least half a dozen planes that would have been the capstone achievement of anyone else’s career. There was the P-38 Lighting, which outdueled Axis pilots over Europe and the Pacific. The XP-80, America’s first ever fighter jet, which did indeed help the Allies win World War II. The Constellation, the first passenger plane with a pressurized cabin, revolutionized commercial air travel. The U-2 spy plane, which could reach an astonishing altitude of 70,000 feet, enabling it could fly dangerous covert missions in Soviet airspace during the height of the Cold War. And perhaps most famous of all, the A-12/SR-71 Blackbird, one of the most unusual, and iconic, planes ever designed.

But the planes were only part of Kelly Johnson’s legacy. There was also his management style, which would come to shape organizations for decades to come. Under him, the Skunk Works’ structure—flat management, no red tape, extraordinary speed—quickly became the model for nurturing innovation, and eventually would fuel the nimble startups of Silicon Valley. Half a century before Mark Zuckerberg coined the motto “move fast and break things,” Kelly Johnson was living that mantra—and at the same time helping the Department of Defense secure the fate of the free world.