Kelly Johnson, every mention
54 scenes · ← back to Kelly Johnson
tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone David Rosenthal 39Ben Gilbert 14Brendan Eich 1
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Kelly Johnson comes up
Formula 1: Fast cars, celebrities, and B2B software (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:15:09 Ben Gilbert The way people talk about Adrian Newey is basically the same way that they talk about Kelly Johnson from Skunk Works from our Lockheed Martin episode.
Lockheed Martin (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 9:27 David Rosenthal The Electra and Casablanca brings us to the first core part of our story, which is World War II, which transforms everything, and a man named Clarence Kelly Johnson
- ▶ 9:57 Ben Gilbert And like, it was not a thing until Kelly Johnson started the Skunk Works.
- ▶ 10:08 David Rosenthal That was written by Ben Rich, who was Kelly's second in command for a long time at Skunk Works and then took it over when Kelly retired.
- ▶ 10:58 David Rosenthal So who is this Kelly Johnson?
- ▶ 11:05 David Rosenthal His nickname is Kelly, because when he was in grade school growing up in Michigan, you know, his real name was Clarence.
- ▶ 11:11 David Rosenthal An older boy called him Clara on the schoolyard, and Johnson attacked him so viciously that he broke this kid's leg.
- ▶ 11:21 David Rosenthal And so after that, all of his schoolmates never called him Clarence or Clara again, and they nicknamed him Kelly.
- ▶ 11:26 Ben Gilbert Okay, so not Clara, but why Kelly?
- ▶ 11:36 David Rosenthal So after every Skunk Works test flight for the rest of his tenure running Skunk Works, they'd throw a big party, and Kelly would challenge anyone, all comers, to an arm wrestling match.
- ▶ 11:56 David Rosenthal And maybe the best airplane designer ever to live, that is Kelly Johnson.
- ▶ 12:25 David Rosenthal Kelly would become the chief engineer, but his boss at the time, Hall Hibbard, would say, that guy can see the air.
- ▶ 12:33 David Rosenthal So Kelly ends up winning the Collier Trophy twice, one of only two people to do so in history.
- ▶ 13:02 David Rosenthal And Kelly is really one of the, if not the principal engineer that designs and builds the Electra.
- ▶ 13:28 David Rosenthal Kelly once said that unless he had the hell scared out of him at least once a year in a cockpit, he wouldn't have the proper perspective to design airplanes.
- ▶ 13:39 David Rosenthal Okay, so the start of World War II rolls around, and the first thing that Kelly and Lockheed do is they adapt the Electra
- ▶ 14:12 David Rosenthal So then, once the U.S. enters the war, and as they're gearing up to enter the war, Kelly designs the amazing P-Thirty-eight Lightning Fighter, which was the U.S.'s elite
- ▶ 23:04 David Rosenthal So, after the war, Kelly says, hey, this is special.
- ▶ 23:27 David Rosenthal So Kelly is both the chief engineer of all of Lockheed and running Skunk Works at the same time.
- ▶ 23:56 David Rosenthal So Kelly and his handful of bright young designers that he selected took over some empty space in building 82.
- ▶ 24:18 David Rosenthal Those guys brainstormed what if questions about the future needs of commercial and military aircraft, and if one of their ideas resulted in a contract to build an experimental prototype, Kelly would borrow the best people he could find in…
- ▶ 24:48 David Rosenthal All that mattered to Kelly was our proximity to the production floor.
- ▶ 24:55 David Rosenthal He wanted us, the engineers and designers, only steps away from the shop workers to make quick structural or parts changes
- ▶ 25:31 Ben Gilbert The other thing on the small number of people, this gets to the Skunk Works rules, and Kelly created this incredible document, 14 rules, that we'll link to in the show notes.
- ▶ 26:25 David Rosenthal So, I think it's worth going through a bunch of Kelly's rules.
- ▶ 30:32 Ben Gilbert Kelly.
- ▶ 31:03 David Rosenthal So Kelly has a quote about this in the book.
- ▶ 32:52 David Rosenthal He says, the full weight of government secrecy fell on me like a sack of cement that day inside Kelly Johnson's guarded domain.
- ▶ 43:48 David Rosenthal And remember, Kelly Johnson, one of his big principles is like, we test our products.
- ▶ 44:34 David Rosenthal Kelly Johnson is sort of like Sam Walton in his prop plane, scouting out for, you know, Walmart locations, flying sideways.
- ▶ 45:15 David Rosenthal And there's a quote from Kelly Johnson here about this in the book.
- ▶ 1:52:36 David Rosenthal So Kelly had his 14 rules.
- ▶ 1:53:07 David Rosenthal That element is missing from Skunk Works and Kelly's philosophy.
- ▶ 1:53:37 David Rosenthal Kelly's philosophy of all that matters is rapid delivery of superior products.
- ▶ 1:59:35 David Rosenthal Okay, so when Skunk Works and Kelly and Ben Rich and everybody sit down to work on this, the current state-of-the-art fastest plane at the time, this is late-nineteen-fifties when they start working on this, is the McDonnell Douglas F-IV…
- ▶ 2:00:05 David Rosenthal And the F four itself was only a bit faster than the Skunk Works built F one Oh four star fighter that Ben, you mentioned earlier, which was the first Collier trophy that Kelly Johnson won.
- ▶ 2:06:46 Ben Gilbert But they did consider, I think, Kelly and the Skunk Works team were really advocating to build a tactical aircraft that was based on this, or a bomber, and that never happened, so every version of the SR-V-I or the early prototypes of the…
- ▶ 2:08:34 David Rosenthal You can imagine Kelly Johnson's reaction to this.
- ▶ 2:08:47 David Rosenthal The airplane wins Kelly his second Collier trophy.
- ▶ 2:11:29 Ben Gilbert There's technicalities to it, but you know, Kelly and team basically
- ▶ 2:15:47 David Rosenthal Kelly Johnson, as amazing and a genius as he is, is a very stubborn man, and the stated purpose, the Air Force's goals with the F-sixteen, was to have a cheap fighter.
- ▶ 2:16:09 David Rosenthal That's not Kelly's MO.
- ▶ 2:16:42 Ben Gilbert As the program evolved, the specs actually changed to what Kelly decided to build their prototype airplane to do, but the prototype they produced was not in spec for the original F-sixteen requirements.
- ▶ 2:17:22 Ben Gilbert The might and budget and proactivity of the military are facing a lot of resistance at home, and that is probably a good thing for our society that that was happening, and at the same time, it made Kelly kind of a relic.
- ▶ 2:17:56 Ben Gilbert Kelly retires.
- ▶ 2:17:57 David Rosenthal Kelly retires.
- ▶ 2:21:04 Ben Gilbert There is one more great Skunk Works airplane, and it is under the administration of Ben Rich, Kelly's successor.
- ▶ 2:22:20 David Rosenthal That Skunk Works employee was then thirty-six-year-old Dennis Overhalser, who, uh, was a mathematician, and he, like you said, reads this paper and brings it to Ben Rich, who just six months earlier had taken over from Kelly as head of…
- ▶ 2:22:37 Ben Gilbert And he's told, don't stick your neck out, no one's getting the crazy amount of rope that Kelly had, so prepare to just be
- ▶ 2:22:54 David Rosenthal And even Kelly himself, he's retired, but he stays on as an advisor, so he still has his fingers and everything.
- ▶ 2:23:24 Ben Gilbert If it works, it will be a thing that is invisible on radar, but Kelly sort of looks at some of the early sketches of what you would have to do to make this thing into an airplane and basically thinks, that's not an airplane.
- ▶ 2:47:51 Ben Gilbert And airplanes are just not built by small teams in this sort of auteur way, the way that they were in Kelly's era.
- ▶ 3:28:45 David Rosenthal Kelly's 14 Laws and LMSC's Seven Tenants are a pretty damn good way to do it.
The Browser (with Brendan Eich, Chief Architect of Netscape + Mozilla and CEO of Brave) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:40:35 Brendan Eich Sometimes the Skunk Works projects, he actually looked at Kelly Martin's team.