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Kelly Johnson

1910–1990 · 80 years Specialist

A mining-town engineer who redrew a wind-tunnel model his professors dismissed

Portrait of Kelly Johnson — CIA — circa 1975 — Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Clarence Johnson grew up in Ishpeming, an iron-mining town on Michigan's Upper Peninsula, the son of Swedish immigrants; his father ran a small construction business. At 13 he tripped a schoolyard bully hard enough to break the boy's leg after being mocked for his name, and classmates started calling him Kelly instead, after a popular song, and it stuck. He worked through Flint Junior College before earning bachelor's and master's degrees in aeronautical engineering at the University of Michigan, and as a student ran wind-tunnel tests on Lockheed's new Model 10 Electra that turned up a stability flaw his own professors waved off. Lockheed hired him anyway, in 1933, as a tool designer for 83 dollars a month, and let him prove the flaw was real.

Johnson fixed the Electra's stability problem with a twin-tail redesign and spent the next four decades running Lockheed's most demanding programs, becoming chief research engineer by 1938 and, in 1943, delivering the country's first operational jet fighter, the P-80, in 143 days flat. In 1943 he also designed the P-38 Lightning, the first American fighter past 400 miles an hour, and by 1958 he was running the Advanced Development Projects division informally nicknamed Skunk Works, where he built the U-2 spy plane for the CIA and then the SR-71 Blackbird, an aircraft that flew so high and fast that outrunning it was, for decades, not a serious option for anyone. He formalized his approach as Kelly's 14 Rules — small teams, minimal paperwork, fast decisions — a management doctrine aerospace companies still teach.

Johnson designed or contributed to more than 40 aircraft and answered to almost nobody once Skunk Works proved itself, a level of trust the Pentagon extended to very few contractors during the Cold War, and it let him build genuinely dangerous machines: the U-2 program required a secret Nevada airstrip that became Area 51, and pilots died testing several of his designs before they reached service. His personal life ran at the same intensity as his work — three marriages, the first ending with his wife Althea's death in 1969 after 32 years together, the second to his secretary Maryellen, who died of illness in 1980 after less than a decade married. He worked past his 1975 retirement as a paid consultant, unable to fully let go of the division he had built from a distillery building and a joke about a comic-strip moonshine still.

Johnson developed hardening of the arteries in his brain in his final years; his handpicked successor Ben Rich described visiting him in the hospital and finding him drifting in and out of coherence. He died in Burbank in December 1990, at 80, and Lockheed had already renamed one of its research centers for him in 1983, while he was alive to see it. His 14 Rules outlived the SR-71 and the Cold War both, cited today by software and hardware teams with no connection to aerospace, and Skunk Works itself became a generic term for any small, secretive team built to move faster than the organization around it.

Lifespan

15401700180019002030

Kelly Johnson's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

P-38 Lightning invention
First American fighter to exceed 400 mph; nearly 10,000 built 1939
P-80 Shooting Star invention
America's first operational jet fighter, designed in 143 days 1943
U-2 reconnaissance aircraft invention
Built for the CIA at a secret Nevada test site that became Area 51 1955
SR-71 Blackbird invention
Mach 3-plus reconnaissance aircraft, still the fastest air-breathing jet ever flown 1964
Kelly: More Than My Share of it All book
Autobiography, co-written with Maggie Smith 1985

Life in brief

with age at each point

February 27, 1910 aged 0 Born in Ishpeming, Michigan
1933 aged ~23 Joins Lockheed as a tool designer after finding a flaw in the Model 10 Electra
1938 aged ~28 Becomes Lockheed's chief research engineer
1943 aged ~33 Designs the P-80 Shooting Star jet fighter in 143 days
1955 aged ~45 Delivers the U-2 spy plane for the CIA
1964 aged ~54 Awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom
1966 aged ~56 SR-71 Blackbird enters service
1975 aged ~65 Retires from Lockheed, succeeded by Ben Rich Continued as a paid consultant for years afterward.
December 21, 1990 aged 80 Dies in Burbank, California, at 80