How I Came to Read Kelly

Back when I was writing a review on Ben Rich’s Skunk Works, I was trying to find a way to procrastinate. On the bookshelf in front of me, was an unopened copy of Kelly: More than My Share of It All. This book is an autobiography of the life of Clarence L. “Kelly” Johnson, one of the top American aerospace engineers. He deserves a lot of credit with making Lockheed one of the major US aerospace companies. I happily spent the rest of the day curled up in a corner with several cups of tea reading through it. At a brisk 200 pages, it took me a few hours to go through it.

I’ll go over an overview of the book and my opinion of it later, but for now, I’ll just tell you how I was surprised while reading the book. I was surprised in two ways. First, I always knew Kelly was an extremely accomplished aerospace engineer. I was aware of his contributions through reding Skunk Works, but that book only begins in the 1950’s. I never realized how accomplished Kelly was before then. If you had just ended his career right after WW2 he could still be considered an American aerospace giant. The second was how short aerospace as a field has been around. Not to take too much away from the overview section, but in Kelly’s career he helped prep Amelia Earhart flight and flew in a development model of the blackbird. His career spanned subsonic propeller flight to supersonic (greater than Mach 3) flight, and in every category, he made multiple large contributions.

Overview of Kelly

Like Skunk Works, this too was an autobiographical account of someone who led the development of the cutting edge in aeronautics. Unlike Skunk Works, this autobiography covers the entirety of Kelly’s life, not just his time leading the Skunk Works. It begins with Kelly’s childhood. Born to a poor family with 9 children, he describes how his austere upbringing shaped his work ethic. It was also in childhood that he got his nickname. A school bully started to call him Clara and they got into a fight. Kelly was smaller than the other kid but he won the fight and his classmates started calling him Kelly after a popular song of the time and his “fighting Irish” spirit. It was also in childhood that Kelly gains a love of aeronautics from, among other things, Tom Swift novels.

After a head injury stops him from going to college on a football scholarship. Kelly continues on at the University of Michigan where he gets involved with wind tunnel testing. He and his best friend began renting the tunnel from the University of Michigan and offering up the use of it to car companies. While completing his master’s degree in aeronautics, he had run tests on the Lockheed Electra and he later went to work for them. Once there he criticized the conclusions of the Lockheed Electra’s testing and he was sent back to see if he could fix it. In chapter 5 we get a quick diversion into kelly’s personal life with his first marriage and we learn of his love for ranch life. Chapter 6 brings us in contact with a few giants of early aerospace like Amelia Earheart and Wiley Post. During his time at Lockheed Kelly worked with both of them on tuning their aircraft.

We soon arrive at the dawn of the second world war on the European continent. The British are searching for a new antisubmarine patrol boat and Kelly’s team at Lockheed designs one over a marathon 3-day session. Another two notches in Kelly’s WW2 design cap was the P-38 and the C-6. The second of the two would later serve as Lockheed post WW2 propeller transport and be called the Lockheed Constellation.

If I had to split kelly’s career in two I would make that split on June 8th 1943. That’s when Kelly and Lockheed got a contract to design and build the first US jet fighter, the F80, in 180 days. His team built it in 143 days. This tight program schedule gave birth to the skunkworks operation. After the F-80 proved itself in Korea Lockheed designed the F-104 to improve on it. The next two chapters after describing the F-104 is dedicated to the design and development of the U-2 and the SR-71/A-12.

The final quarter of the book breaks away from developments at Lockheed. Chapters 15 and 17 takes another detour into Kelly’s personal life. Chapter 16 talks about the management of Skunk Works and how it was operated to be so efficient. Kelly also details his 14 rules which I document in my review of Skunk Works. In chapter 18 Kelly muses about how we can continue to defend ourselves from threats from an operations point of view. As a child inspired by Tom Swift, Kelly spends chapter 19 guessing about what technology the future holds. These predictions were made in 1985 so I will go over some of them with the benefit of about 35 years of hindsight in the next section. Finally, Kelly closes this book with a chapter about how life is good and over his life he’s had “more than [his] share of it all”.

Kelly’s Predictions in Hindsight

Chapter 19 is dedicated to Kelly’s belief of what the future up to 2000 would hold. It’s currently 2018 and with the benefit of hindsight, I’m going to look back on these predictions. Lots of people make lots of predictions about the future and most of them are wrong. Kelly even says that predicting the future is a hard thing to do especially in the modern age of rapid technological advance.

ABM Technology

Kelly believes that anti-ballistic missile (ABM) technology is something we must and will invest towards. His beliefs that we will be using space-based lasers as our primary means of ABM is similar to Ronald Regans Strategic Defense initiative which was proposed around the same time as the writing of this book. While that might have been the zeitgeist of the time, it never came to be. Instead, the major push towards ABM tech, after the US withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty in 2002, was towards kinetic kill technology. This is where we would, in a vast simplification, hit a missile with another missile in flight. It is currently under development and shows a 50 percent success rate in certain scenarios against intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Drone Technology and Stealth

Kelly believes that the human fighter pilot’s days are numbered and that the fighter/bomber aircraft of the future should be un-crewed. He believes that this will happen before the year 2000. Again Kelly has the right idea of how the US is headed but is overly optimistic about his timeline. The now-iconic predator drone has its first flight in 1994, but until the mid-2010’s we only really saw interest in ground attack drones. Today we see much more interest in fighter drones and 6th generation fighters like the proposed UK’s Tempest will have full unmanned capabilities. Kelly also predicted that stealth will play an important role in both missile and fighter technology and he was right as both the F-22 and F-35 have both been developed with stealth as a major factor.

Supersonic Transport

On supersonic transport (SST), Kelly talks about how the supersonic transport of the future will have to overcome high fuel consumption and the sonic boom problem. One of NASA’s newest X-planes, the X-58, is being built to investigate solutions to the sonic boom problem. Its first flight is planned to be in 2021. Here Kelly was not optimistic about the timeline that we could accomplish this in and he was right as today there are no commercial supersonic flights taking place. An interesting note about current commercial SST ambitions is that startups like Boom Aerospace are taking the lead in developing the next generation of SST flight instead of large companies like Boeing or Airbus. Kelly does make mention of possibly using in-air refueling to make SST a more likely concept but I have not heard of any company using this approach.

There are a few other ideas like kinetic kill weapons for capital ships and undersea mining but I’m only going to talk about the 3 I know the most about.

My Opinion

As an aerospace engineer, I found Kelly: More than my Share of it All an interesting read. The sheer span of his work is awe inspiring. Unfortunately, his genius in aircraft design does not carry over into writing. I often found myself wanting more details. Kelly skims over each topic giving each a chapter. He talks cover his 80-year life and the design of seven aircraft in 200 pages. He includes several interesting substories in chapters, but they often feel dry and delivered in a simple way. If you are looking for the first book on cutting-edge astronautics I highly suggest Ben Rich’s Skunk Works which I reviewed here. If you have already read skunkworks, enjoyed it, and want to learn more about Kelly Johnston then pick up this book as a quick read.

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