Quotes from Ben R. Rich

We became the most successful advanced projects company in the world by hiring talented people, paying them top dollar, and motivating them into believing that they could produce a Mach 3 airplane like the Blackbird a generation or two ahead of anybody else.

Over the years we had developed the concept of using existing hardware developed and paid for by other programs to save time and money and reduce the risks of failures in prototype projects.

My years inside the Skunk Works, for example, convinced me of the tremendous value of building prototypes. I am a true believer. The beauty of a prototype is that it can be evaluated and its uses clarified before costly investments for large numbers are made.

Control is the name of the game and if a Skunk Works really operates right, control is exactly what they won't get.

freedom to take risks—and fail—define the heart of a Skunk Works operation.

He told me later that he was surprised to learn that with flat surfaces the amount of radar energy returning to the sender is independent of the target's size. A small airplane, a bomber, an aircraft carrier, all with the same shape, will have identical radar cross sections.

Frankly, I don't think you could have driven a needle up my sphincter using a sledgehammer.

One of the biggest problems we had to overcome was our own extreme invisibility! The ocean waves showed up on radar like a string of tracer bullets. And if the ship was totally invisible, it looked like a blank spot—like a hole in the doughnut—that was a dead giveaway

That primitive Skunk Works operation set the standards for what followed. The project was highly secret, very high priority, and time was of the essence.

Inside the Skunk Works, we were a small, intensely cohesive group consisting of about fifty veteran engineers and designers and a hundred or so expert machinists and shop workers.

I enjoyed the goodwill of my colleagues because most of us had worked together intimately under tremendous pressures for more than a quarter century. Working isolated, under rules of tight security, instilled a camaraderie probably unique in the American workplace. I