In 1910, seven years after Wilbur and Orville Wright made history with the world’s first powered flight in their Kitty Hawk Flyer, Clarence L. Johnson was born in Ishpeming in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
As a 12-year-old growing up in the rural mining town, Johnson became fascinated with airplanes and the exploits of the Wright brothers. His curiosity was further piqued by the Tom Swift series of science fiction and adventure novels popular at the time with young readers.
“I read every Tom Swift novel I could get my hands on. I read, ‘Tom Swift and his Airplane’; ‘Tom Swift and his Electric Car’; ‘Tom Swift and his Submarine’; and I said that’s for me,” he recalled in a biography by Leland Haynes.
At age 13, prior to seeing his first plane in the sky — the World War I-era Curtis Jenny military training aircraft — he won a contest for an airplane design he named The Merlin 1, Battle Plane.
And before he grew up to gain worldwide acclaim as Kelly Johnson, one of the most brilliant and innovative aircraft designers in American aviation history, he had to deal with the youthful baggage of his given name, Clarence.
In grade school he was bullied and teased by boys who made fun of his name, calling him Clara. One morning while waiting in line to get into a classroom, a boy mocked him as Clara. Johnson had heard enough. He knocked the boy over and broke his leg.
“The boys then decided I wasn’t a Clara, and looking for a new nickname, started calling me Kelly,” he said. “The name came from a popular song at the time, ‘Kelly with the Green Neck Tie.’ From that time forward, it would always be Kelly Johnson.”
Today, Johnson’s aeronautical accomplishments seem as though they were from a fictional movie script. In a 50-year career with Lockheed Corp. (once owned by Detroit Aircraft Corp.), he personally designed or led the design team that produced 40 of America’s most iconic military and commercial airplanes.
His original designs included the F-80 Shooting Star, America’s first combat jet fighter that, in 1945, hit a top speed of more than 500 mph; the sleek F-104 Starfighter, the first production airplane to surpass Mach 2 with a top speed of more than 1,600 mph; and the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance jet, still the fastest and highest-flying aircraft ever, breaking the Mach 3 barrier with a top speed of more than 2,000 mph and reaching an altitude of 85,000 feet, or 16 miles above the earth.
In addition, Johnson was co-designer of the P-38 Lighting, the most formidable fighter-bomber aircraft in World War II. The P-38 hit a top speed of more than 400 mph, 100 mph faster than any other aircraft at that time. It could climb to 3,300 feet in less than 60 seconds — a huge advantage in aerial dog fights.
Kelly also designed, and his team built, the high-altitude U-2 spy plane that gained worldwide Cold War notoriety when it was shot down in 1960 over Russia. The pilot, Gary Francis Powers, who worked for the CIA, was captured.
The downing of the U-2, thought to be impregnable to other aircraft or missiles, was the impetus for Johnson to design the SR-71 Blackbird to outrun Russian missiles and “rule the skies for decades.”
Johnson’s design of this aircraft was one of the best examples of his innovative genius. “It was no easy task. Everything about the SR-71 had to be invented from scratch … the design, the technology, even the materials,” he said in Haynes’ biography.
To make it all a reality, Johnson was the first to use titanium for the skin of an aircraft so that it could withstand 550 degrees Fahrenheit temperatures, which were caused by the friction of the air passing over the plane flying at more than 2,000 mph. The record-setting aircraft is still the King of Speed, the fastest production aircraft ever built when it was retired from service in 1997.
Johnson wasn’t just a passive designer behind a desk. He was a test pilot and flew the chase, or support, jet while developing the SR-71. Ironically, even though he logged 2,300 hours flying some of the fastest and most sophisticated airplanes of the day, he didn’t obtain his pilot’s license until he was 62 years old. He secured the license so he could do aerial surveys of ranch land he bought in California.
Although he initially wasn’t a fan of the slow-flying C-130 Hercules propjet transport air freighter, Johnson contributed to its design and development. The workhorse aircraft remains in service more than 60 years after its inception.
During his teenage years, Johnson’s parents, immigrants from Sweden, moved to Flint from Ishpeming. In high school, he worked for his father’s construction company and in the motor testing section of Buick Motor Co.
By the time he graduated in 1928, he had saved $300. At the time, Johnson tried to sign up for flying lessons at Flint Airport, but the instructor refused his money and told the youngster to use it for college. Johnson would later say it was the best advice he ever received.
He went on to earn a Bachelor of Science degree at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and applied for a job with Lockheed, today Lockheed Martin Corp. He was turned down for lack of experience.
He went back to Michigan and obtained a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering in 1933 and reapplied at Lockheed. This time he was hired as the company’s sixth engineer at a salary of $83 per month.
Soon after he signed on, he expressed doubts about the stability of the company’s new 10-passenger Model 10 Electra aircraft. Lockheed’s chief engineer, Hall Hibbard, took the new employee’s concerns seriously, and sent him back to the University of Michigan to further test a model of the airplane in the university’s wind tunnel.
Johnson’s testing led to changing the airplane’s single tail into a double tail design, which cured its aerodynamic problems and earned him a promotion to full aeronautical engineer.
The twin-engine Electra became a commercial success, and later on gained notoriety as the airplane that flew Amelia Earhart into eternity when she disappeared on an around-the-world flight in 1937.
Johnson’s reputation for brilliance was cemented when, at age 29, he traveled to England with a Lockheed director to deliver plans for the Lockheed Hudson bomber for the Royal Air Force (RAF).
The British had other ideas for the bomb racks and machine guns, and rejected the design. Johnson went back to his hotel room and went to work redesigning the airplane. Two days later, he emerged with a design that met the British specifications. The subsequent request for 200 airplanes was the company’s largest peacetime order. By the end of World War II, Lockheed built 3,500 Hudson bombers for the RAF.
Another of Johnson’s lasting contributions to the lore of Lockheed was the company’s top-secret design and manufacturing unit, named Skunk Works.
In 1943, as Lockheed was churning out 28 various World War II airplanes per day, there was little available workspace for Johnson and his team to meet a deadline to build the top-secret XP-80 (later known as the F-80 Shooting Star) jet fighter.
Not one to be dissuaded, Johnson set up a secure makeshift workshop under a rented circus tent near a manufacturing plant. Trouble was, the factory’s exhaust emitted a foul odor that sometimes permeated the tent.
One of Johnson’s engineers, a fan of Al Capp’s “Li’l Abner” comic strip — which featured a mysterious Dogpatch Skonk Works where characters brewed a strong, smelly beverage from skunks, old shoes, and other weird ingredients — began using the term “Skunk Works” when answering the phone, and the name stuck.
Working around the clock in the impromptu workshop, Johnson and his small, dedicated team produced what was the prototype of America’s first jet fighter, the XP-80, in a record 143 days.
Lockheed later changed the name of the facility to Skunk Works, and registered it as a trademark for Johnson’s development unit. Meanwhile, the U-2 aircraft, which the team delivered in nine months, is a testament to Johnson’s motto: “Be Quick, Be Quiet, and Be on Time.”
Today, Lockheed Martin’s 215,000-square-foot Skunk Works facility is located in the desert at Palmdale, Calif., 62 miles north of Los Angeles. It houses one of the most secretive aircraft design and production plants in the world.
Johnson’s career at Lockheed saw him hold every top engineering and research position up to the rank of senior vice president as he continued to oversee Skunk Works projects. Three times he turned down the presidency of the company to continue with his Skunk Works crew, although he served on the board from 1964 to 1980.
In addition, he helped design a secret airbase in Groom Lake, Nev., later known as Area 51. The facility was used to test many of Johnson’s new aircraft, including the Dragon Lady and the U-2.
In his 50 years at Lockheed, he was showered with dozens of prestigious national and international aviation awards. Four of those were U.S. presidential citations, including the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest civilian award.
Johnson officially retired from Lockheed in 1975. For another five years he remained on the company’s board of directors while serving as a consultant to his beloved Skunk Works and other Lockheed special projects.
Kelly Johnson died in 1990 at age 80 and, fittingly, is buried among Hollywood’s most famous stars in Forest Lawn Cemetery in Los Angeles. He was enshrined in the Michigan Aviation Hall of Fame in 1988.
Upon Johnson’s retirement, Lockheed President Carl Kotchian summed his career up best: “It is not probable that we will (ever) see Kelly’s like again.”
