The Albuquerque Radio Control Club Newsletter
www.arcc.club
June 2015
AMA Chartered Club #2022
Secrets of the Skunk Works!
Exclusive photographs of once-classified inventions
from Lockheed’s famous brain trust.
By Chad Slattery
Air & Space Magazine
August 2014
walked out of U.S. Army Air
Forces General “Hap” Arnold’s
office with a contract to design
what became the first U.S. jet
fighter to see combat. In just
215 days, 23 handpicked engineers built it in a drafty hangar
so awash in the fumes from a
nearby factory that wags started calling it the Skunk Works.
Justice began canvassing
program managers for other
artifacts and documents that
could be released to honor the
anniversary. The objects in
this gallery had never before
been seen by anyone without
When the Lockheed Martin
Skunk Works began marking
its 70th birthday this year, media specialist Bob Driver
dragged an old suitcase into a
Though an order came down to clean
company director’s office.
house, an employee hid this A-3 concept
Opening it, he asked if the
model for 45 years. Kelly Johnson originalcontents could finally be
ly carried it to a 1958 meeting in a suitshown to the public.
case. Making the tail optional was a rudimentary attempt at stealth; without it, the
Inside was a 55-year-old
model of the A-3, Lockheed’s aircraft would have appeared smaller on
screens. Nine months later, the confirst try at blending stealth with radar
cept evolved into the A-12 Blackbird.
speed—and a direct predecessor of the triple-sonic A-12 Blackbird. It had
Continued page 2 --->
been designed by Skunk Works founder Clarence “Kelly” Johnson, and Driver had hidden it
NEXT MEETING
away for decades, defying periodic management directives to purge company archives.
June 4th, 2015 at the Asbury Methodist Church at 7pm.
The director he approached was Stephen
Don’t forget to bring you’re entry for the show-n-tell
Justice, who runs Advanced Systems Developprize. (Winner gets a gift card for Hobby Proz)
ment at Skunk Works. “I treasure that the peoProgram:
ple here want to protect our history,” says JusTips & Tricks for assembling ARF kits by Lester Beason
tice. “Bob recognized the A-3 model as being
and John Pompa.
something special, and important to hold onto.”
Seventy years earlier, Kelly Johnson had
Raffle Prize:
stood on a desert lakebed in California and
This month we will draw AMA cards for a $20 gift card
grinned as an XP-80 screamed past him on its
maiden flight. Seven months before that, he had
to Hobby Proz.
Continued --->
Continued from page 1
ARCC General Membership
Meeting Minutes, May 7, 2015
The meeting was called to order at 19:07 with 10
members present.
Announcements & Business


U-2 engineers borrowed off-the-shelf hardware whenever possible, like this circular slide rule modified for cockpit mounting. Pilots used it to calculate the airplane’s
exact performance, which was critical information when
overflying the Soviet Union in an aircraft whose speed
needed to be maintained within a five-knot range. It was
probably used only in early testing, since its density altitude maxes out at 60,000 feet—two miles below the U2’s eventual operational ceiling.
a security clearance.
Why so much secrecy? “It takes about onetenth the time and one-tenth the resources to
develop a countermeasure to anything that’s
introduced,” Justice says. “To maintain your
edge over any threat, you need to protect what
your capabilities are. And sometimes you need
to protect their existence.”
Today’s Skunk Works employs 3,700 employees at facilities in Palmdale, California,
Marietta, Georgia, and Fort Worth, Texas. They
are working on over 500 projects, from radar
coatings to war games to compact fusion reactors to a Mach 6 spyplane.
Sifting through the archives revealed breathContinued page 4 --->
ARCC Calendar 2015
June 4
June 24
June 27-28
July 2
July 29
Aug 6
Aug 15
Aug 26
Sept 3
Sept 5-6
Sept 23
Oct 1
Oct 17
Oct 28
Member Meeting
Board Meeting
Scale Meet
Member Meeting
Board Meeting
Member Meeting
National Aeronautics Day
Board Meeting
Member Meeting
Labor Day Meet
Board Meeting
Member Meeting
Swap Meet
Board Meeting
Asbury
Asbury
Maloof
Asbury
Asbury
Asbury
Asbury
Asbury
Maloof
Asbury
Asbury
Maloof
Asbury
Swap meet was successful
Family Day – more planes than pilots
15 Aug is National Aeronautics Day
Move Family Day to that day
Suggestion for next year
Will discuss at next board meeting
Contact city about display of field address – Keith
Guests
None
Treasurer Report

Vic reported the club’s balance
Report approved
Secretary Report
April meeting minutes were approved
Events
Scale Meet
Reviewed sponsored prizes
Indoor Flying Fridays 6-9pm – Heights Cumberland
Safety Minute
Charging batteries inside a vehicle – no, do not do
Program

Chuck showed tearing down and rebuild of his racing
engine
Jet quickie sport engine
Monthly Raffle
Not enough interest, so no drawing was done.
Continued page 5 -->
AMA Vision
We, the members of the Academy of
Model Aeronautics, are the pathway to the
future of aeromodeling and are committed
to making modeling the foremost sport/
hobby in the world.
Are more propeller blades better?
Jeremy Kinney, a curator at the National Air and
Space Museum, shares his thoughts.
By Paul Hoversten
Air & Space Magazine
February 27, 2012
As for the Orion/Hercules propellers, “this is a
tricky question and there are a lot of ‘opinions’
out there” Kinney writes in an email. “Many oldtimers would say that square props are best for
low speeds and takeoff performance, while
round props are best for efficient cruise, which
reflect the actual uses of these airframes.”
The longer answer, he says, is that rectangular, wide blades emerged as engine power increased in the late 1940s because they absorbed energy more efficiently than the traditional narrow-tapered, round-tip blades, increasing
the airplane’s overall thrust-to-weight ratio without increasing its propeller diameter. Both the P-
The email-bag brings questions from two
readers about propeller blades. John E. Peters
of The Villages, Florida asks: “Why do some aircraft, particularly of World War II vintage, have a
three-bladed propeller while others have four?
Is there an advantage to having one over the
other?”
And Jeff Rankin-Lowe
of London, Ontario, Canada asks about the
blades on two more modern aircraft: “The P-3 Orion and C-130 Hercules
(pre-J model) have essentially the same engine, so why do Hercs
have square-tipped props
and Orions have rounded
tips on their propellers?”
For the answers, we
turned to Jeremy Kinney,
a curator at the National
A sailor hoses down the propeller on a P-3 Orion during an aircraft wash on
Air and Space Museum,
the flight line at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island, Washington. (U.S. Navy)
who explains that the use
of four blades on World War II aircraft (such as
3 and C-130, says Kinney, have rectangular
the North American P-51 Mustang) increased
blades; the difference is in the tips.
the blade area, which produced more thrust,
“It is all about application,” he explains. “The
without increasing the overall diameter of the
C-130 needs high thrust at takeoff” and a
propeller.
square tip provides that along the entire length
Kinney says the reason why in the late 1930s
of the blade. The C-130’s bulbous shape shape
the designers of the Vought F4U Corsair used
and lower cruise speed (around 335 mph)
the inverted gull wing was to accommodate the
“deters the tips from suffering from compressibilbig 13-foot, three-blade propeller—the largest
ity burble -- the setting off of small sonic booms
used on a fighter up to that time. That propeller
as the propeller rotates at high speeds [since
was right for the largest fighter engine at the
the tips move faster than the roots at the hub].
time: the 1,800-horsepower Pratt & Whitney RThe P-3 is a long-distance airplane with a cruise
2800. When four-blade propellers came along
speed that's 45 mph higher, and those rounded
early in World War II, they alleviated the probtips help offset compressibility burble.”
lem of getting enough ground clearance for the
The new C-130J, Kinney points out, has
tips. (Shorter, four-blade props replaced the
“super-pointy tips” on the six blades of its two
Corsair’s three-blade props on the less curvedDowty R391 scimitar propellers.
wing F4U-4 and –5 models in the Korean War.)
Continued from page 2
taking technologies and capabilities. Some were
too early for their time; some cost too much;
some filled a need that didn’t yet exist. But everywhere, Justice says, “you see clear examples
of the creativity and unbounded imaginations of
the grandfathers of the Skunk Works.”
Project Harvey, an initiative to develop a radarundetectable aircraft, was followed by a tailless rhomboid design, quickly renamed the
Hopeless Diamond when Lockheed engineers
discovered that while it was truly stealthy, it
was uncontrollable in flight. This drawing
shows the outboard wings and single tail that
were tacked on to improve stability. The Harvey studies evolved into Lockheed’s Have
Blue stealth demonstrator, the direct precursor
to the F-117.
This faded glass slide illustrates a
study for a NATO competition,
which was seeking a verticaltakeoff-and-landing interceptor to
replace the F-104 Starfighter. Power came from the supersonic variant of Rolls-Royce’s Pegasus engine; The notation “PCB” in the description of the propulsion system
meant “plenum chamber burning,”
an afterburner-like thrust booster
for the front fan.
Engineers used this 24-inch-long model, made from
balsa wood and meticulously scribed with India ink,
to show placement of the F-117’s internal structure
and access doors. The model shop found it nearly
impossible to make all the flat surfaces come to a
single point on one corner. Engineers later encountered the same difficulty fabricating the prototype on
the factory floor.
This late 1950s helmet belonged to
Skunk Works test pilot Ross Cooper. It
completed the partial pressure suit worn
during the first U-2 flights, and was hand
-painted with the company’s then-secret
emblem. The helmet’s soft shell protected the cramped cockpit’s low canopy
from scratches. For nearly four decades, the skunk was itself a very protected image, never seen outside classified areas.
For every design that makes it into
the air, there are thousands that
don’t. This one didn’t. The designation was for Variable Sweep, seventh configuration. A two-seat
bomber proposed in 2006, it was
engineered around a variable-cycle
engine that flew efficiently at both
subsonic and supersonic speeds.
This bomber concept explored the
advantages and tradeoffs of swinging versus fixed wings. “Stealth is a
fundamental enabler for access to
denied areas,” says company director Stephen Justice, “but future
bombers will first need to fly very
far, arrive very quickly, and then
persist. That’s a very conflicting set
of requirements, a design nightmare. But that’s where the fun is
for us.
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Continued from page 2
Show and Tell
None
New Business
None
Next Meetings
The next board meeting is on 27 May at 1830 at the
church. It is open to the general membership.
The next general membership meeting will be on 4
Jun May at 1900 at the church.
Meeting adjourned at 2100
Keith Perry
Secretary
Intended as an operational follow-on to the X-33
suborbital spaceplane technology demonstrator,
the single-stage-to-orbit VentureStar never left the
drawing board. Skunk Works pitched a missionready version, carrying a payload of two Militarized
Space Planes and 16 Common Aero Vehicles
(warhead-equipped hypersonic gliders), to the Air
Force with this 20-inch-long stereo lithograph model, made in 1999.
A May 1975 Skunk Works report, “Progress Report No.
2, High Stealth Conceptual Studies,” includes this early
drawing from a stealth aircraft study called Project Harvey (named after the invisible rabbit in the 1950 James
Stewart movie); the program eventually led to the F117. Based on results from D-21 drone flights, Kelly
Johnson believed that Little Harvey’s smoothly blended
shapes offered the best combination of speed and
stealth. Ben Rich, Johnson’s protégé, argued for faceted angles. It was one of the rare times Johnson’s design did not prevail.
In November 1958, Kelly Johnson took a Lockheed
JetStar to a secret meeting organized by the CIA in
Cambridge, Massachusetts. He carried this blueprint, carefully folded inside the same ordinary suitcase that held his A-3 concept model, to show a
panel of experts determined to develop an airplane
that would outpace Soviet missile advances.