Episode 9: Prove It

Tom Kwasniak: It’s the ‘40s, it’s the middle of World War II, there are new types of technologies being fielded left and right from all sides that are involved in that conflict, and America needed to step up their game, and they had to do it quickly. Getting pulled into the war in 1941-42, it was really important to get ahead and get ahead quickly, and I think that the Skunk Works were part of America’s answer to that, getting out there and developing aircraft that had never been flown before, platforms that had never been thought possible before, getting that edge and keeping ahead of that edge. Tied into that inherently is rapid prototyping.

Narration: Aircraft development begins with an idea, conceptual design sketches, and eventually physical models of that idea, but none of these are things you can actually fly. Rapid Prototyping is the phase of aircraft development where engineers take all those sketches and models, representing hours of conceptual thought and make them a reality.

Tom Kwasniak is a Project Engineer here at the Skunk Works. The majority of his day is spent solving engineering problems on the factory floor.

TK: So I went to school for Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Tech. Even growing up, I was basically interested in two things, it was airplanes and racecars. When I went to college, it was tough to work on airplanes on the side, so I was on the Formula SAE team, which is an open-wheel race team. That was a lot more accessible to me than working on airplanes at the time, and that was really where I learned that I liked being on the manufacturing end of things. Something about being out on the floor and working with the product directly, that was where I wanted to spend all my time when I was on the Formula team. We had a little design studio upstairs in our shop, all the jigs and equipment and machinery were downstairs, and I just always found myself downstairs as opposed to up in the office working on CAD, and I guess that sort of continued on to my professional career.

Narration: Most traditional design models follow a linear process of analysis, design, development, implementation, and finally evaluation, but rapid prototyping isn’t so linear. Think back to a time when you were trying to make something new work. Maybe you designed and built a wooden car for a pinewood derby, or you crafted your own design for a Halloween costume. Was the process linear? Or was it more fluid? Did you strictly follow the concept or did you make changes to your design on the fly, after seeing the realities of the build process? In rapid prototyping the goal is to concurrently analyze, design, and develop the product while building, continuously re-evaluating the design as more information is available. This non-linear approach is what makes rapid prototyping rapid, because engineers are solving problems as they build the product, rather than solving everything before building starts. This approach is significantly more difficult to execute, but it’s often the only way to go when schedule is of the utmost importance.

TK: That’s an inherent part of the Skunk Works philosophy is programs that start as six folks working in a broom closet saying, “Hey, I think I can make this work” and then testing and developing that in increasing increments until finally you are riveting together product on a floor, putting together some kind of platform or some kind of a new technology that’s never been seen before.

Mike Swanson: I guess I consider that I have somewhat of a short attention span when it comes to the projects I like to work, so the Skunk Works is well-suited to me because I like the ability to go in and develop a new product every two to three years.

Narration: You might recognize Mike Swanson from previous episodes. Mike is the ADP Chief Engineer and has a lot of experience rapidly prototyping secret aircraft.

MS: I guess in a purist sense, prototyping in general goes back to the Wright Flyer, the early concepts in aviation flight, those were essentially technology demonstrators, trying to build a full-scale flying machine that a man could operate. But there was no precedence for doing some of the things they were doing, so coming up with the whole warped-wing concept, and getting the airflow shapes right so you could have the lift that you needed and all the controllability.

Narration: Just as the Wright brothers designed and developed their Wright Flyer, proving air travel is possible, Skunk Works engineers design and develop future technologies, proving that what seems impossible, is possible.

MS: Prototyping, a lot of times, is defined as the first article of a production run, maybe it doesn’t have all the capabilities, but it could also be a technology demonstrator that really isn’t intended to go into production, but you are doing something to mature a technology or understand how it’s going to operate in a flight environment. Sometimes prototypes are used for political reasons, the “if you build it they will come” sort of mentality, that you’ve got to have something actually built and flying before you can get enough customer interest to actually go pursue a program and develop it into production. So the rapid prototyping really goes hand-in-hand where because you are trying to mature capabilities, technologies, demonstrate a new system, depending on what that prototype’s function is, you want to invest the minimum amount of money, the minimum amount of time, minimum amount of resources into that effort, and so we tend to try to do it as rapidly as possible.

TK: Rapid prototyping is just essentially trying to prove you can do something. Let’s say you are just trying to prove that a process works, that could be a form of rapid prototyping. That kind of trial and error, if you will, that kind of process development is a form of rapid prototyping at the smallest scale, but it can go all the way up to a full platform of some kind, an entire air vehicle.

MS: You are going into unknown territory with maybe a new design or a new concept, and you want to see how it’s going to work, and that’s how the X-series of aircraft got started. Back in the late ‘40s, early ‘50s, NASA developed the X-plane series, so the X-1, X-2, X-3, we are up to X-…in the 50s at least by this point. But those initial X-planes were all about getting better understanding and operating in supersonic environments. The X-1 was the first aircraft to break the sound barrier with Chuck Yeager, and then beyond that it was, how can we push that boundary further? How can we go to Mach 2? What kind of controllability do we have? What can we do to improve our efficiencies? And then, X-planes are definitely, in my mind, a category of prototypes more geared towards that technology demonstration, pushing boundaries as opposed to maybe taking something that you are going to put into production later. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a new vehicle, it could be an adaptation or a modification of an existing vehicle. We have been working on, over the last several years, Automatic Ground Collision Avoidance System, Auto GCAS, a sort of autonomous control algorithm on your vehicle that, in case a pilot blacked out during training or he got fixated on a target when he was doing a strafing run, in a lot of cases they would run into the terrain or lose control and crash the vehicle, and we have lost several pilots over the last decades or more in that kind of condition. And so the Skunk Works started working on algorithms that would essentially take over control of the vehicle for a short period of time if it sensed that the pilot was going to get into that situation where he was going to impact terrain. And so we actually prototyped it at Edward’s Airforce Base on an F-16, demonstrated the capability, used that as a marketing tool to convince the Airforce of the benefits of this capability, show that it actually worked, and it didn’t adversely affect it’s ability to perform it’s mission; because you don’t want this thing taking over in critical times, but it has now been adopted on the F-16; they are incorporating it in the F-22, the F-35. And it’s been credited with at least saving, I want to say 7 or 8 pilots’ lives since it’s been implemented on the F-16. The cool thing about that is it’s really a pure software implementation, it’s using the existing terrain databases on the F-16, it’s using the sensors, the control system, everything that already exists there, so it’s a fairly easy retrofit to existing aircraft.

Irene Helley: In a rapid prototyping world, you have to go with smart people, who understand the problem, working together to solve for the greater good.

Narration: This is Irene Helley, the U-2 Program Director.

IH: What we do at the Skunk Works, it means really lowering the burden of the layers of approvals and forms and processes, and you just get to the heart of how can we pull this thing together in the shortest amount of time possible. Here in the Skunk Works, sometimes that means making sure that the engineers are collocated with the manufacturing team. We’ll sit on the same ground plane, we’ll sit in the same room, and we’ll work together. And if something pops up in the manufacturing world, the engineers, the designer, the guy that originated or created this design is right there to help fix the problem alongside, and everyone has a sense of obligation, but also a sense of authority and responsibility. So here it doesn’t matter if you are a budding engineer or somebody who’s been around for a long time; if you are willing to take the risk and you are willing to do a good job and devote yourself to the problem-solving techniques, that’s what matters.

It was probably my first couple of months here at the Skunk Works, and I had a manager that asked me to go solve a problem. They had this weird hinge that they wanted to develop, and it was in a really close, enclosed area, and there were a lot of constraints in the design of it. And he said, “Just go fiddle with this and see what you can come up with.” Well, I worked on it for about a day or two, and I came back to my manager and I said, “Hey, I think I have a solution here.” And I showed it to him, and his face kind of contorted and he kind of gave me this weird look and he goes, “I have never seen a design like that before!” And then he mulled over it for a bit and he goes, “You know what? That totally works. That’s a great idea!” and we rolled with it. And that’s one of the things about being in an environment that allows you to be creative, is that “just because we have always done it that way before” isn’t always the right answer. We are constantly faced with new constraints and new things that we have to work around, and so as a young engineer it’s really valued because you are unhampered by “oh well that’s the way we used to do it.” I think that’s why we have such a great value and emphasis on bringing in young engineers and people even maybe from outside of the traditional industry to help us through some of our greatest challenges, because we really value the diversity of thought and the diversity of background and how you shape your experiences because that will pour into new solutions that haven’t been considered that way before.

Shawn Parsons: It’s about solving problems, and it’s not about trying to be perfect up front; it’s about being prepared to solve the problems as they come, to again keep moving that product along. For me, as a project engineer, I think it’s just about having enough small understanding of a lot of things to know who to contact to solve the problem, kind of like being a detective that also just knows who to connect who with.

Narration: Shawn Parsons has been with the Skunk Works just over a year. Shawn is a Project Engineer who was asked to lead a huge project only a few months into her career.

SP: That’s what’s exciting about working here, it’s not just “oh I’m doing this, I’m doing this”; the workflow is everybody is just kind of focused on building a product and a thing, and of course you have your specialties that you are in charge of, but really everybody is just doing what they can. The workflow is a little chaotic but it’s a productive chaotic, because everybody is continually moving this product along. I told my manager I was coming to do this, and now he’s going to listen and be like, “Ah she just told everybody that we have chaos over here at the Skunk Works!” Productive chaos!

Everything can be an experience, so it’s important to have really well-rounded experiences. So for me, my first internship was not in aerospace; I actually did a manufacturing internship experience for GE with down-hole oil well equipment, because I’m from Oklahoma and it’s all oil and gas, you know, and so for me, I think it’s about finding experiences where you can really evolve yourself and be a well-rounded engineer, not just “oh I need to get research that’s aerospace-related, or chemical engineering-related” but just finding opportunities anywhere you can to put your hands on stuff, and I think that’s really, really important. Because the school is already giving you the theoretical, the academic building blocks, so it’s really important, I think, to focus even more on finding the physical building blocks, because you are going to need them! Especially if you are going to build something, which is what we do here.

IH: The most important part is to really be able to see your problem from multiple different points of views and different lenses. I know for me, I have a degree in mechanical engineering, and I see things from a very structural perspective. The best part about problem-solving and working in this diverse environment is being able to sit down and look at a problem from different angles and try to figure out the best way to attack a problem and make things work. For this one program we were on, we had to figure out a way to manufacture something in the most cost-effective way, but making sure it met all the requirements and was able to integrate with all the other needs from signature management to materials, to supportability and maintainability once this airplane made it out onto the field, and so once you actually look at a problem and realize the complexity of it all, and that you can’t answer the question by yourself, you recognize the value of teamwork and working with others who are also experts in their field. And there’s so much to learn about and that’s what keeps the job really exciting. And so it is really an expectation that while you are there representing your specific discipline, you are providing insight to the other disciplines to help understand where you are coming from while absorbing the needs and requirements from those other folks as well.

There’s a wide variety of the types of programs that we have here. It usually starts out with first understanding what the customer need is. Keeping that at the forefront of our minds as we go into the design process…it does you no good to design an elaborate airplane that may be beautiful, that may fly perfectly, but if it doesn’t meet the mission requirements, it really doesn’t matter. We have a whole team of conceptual designers, and these are folks who kind of conceptualize what the end-result should look like. They are uninhibited by the realities of how hard something might be to do or figure out or understand or manufacture. And their purpose is just to help us spread our wings and think outside of the box that we place ourselves in, so we always start with something like that, that is just boundless and limitless. And then we start to understand ok, how can we make this a reality? And that’s the fun part of the process.

From there, we work with configurators to understand the big blocks. Ok, how do we put this stuff together? What capabilities does the platform, the airplane, the whatever it is, have to have in order to make it work? And then you start adding more fidelity to the design by bringing in the right subject matter experts from subsystems to the vehicle to analysts to materials people to manufacturing folks, and starting with day 1, you have to include that “cradle to grave” forethought of how this is all going to come together. Then what you want to make sure is that you stay connected through the whole process, so as you complete the design process and you go through reviews, you make sure that the people who are out there who will be actually building and prototyping this vehicle are sitting there with the engineers to ensure that they are not making any silly decisions, they are not making designs that only look good in the 3D environment of the computer but when it comes into real life, “hey, there’s no way for a mechanic to get their hand in there and turn that tight little screw.” So it’s working through all the details of how do you practically pull something like this together? Then when we hit the manufacturing floor, its ensuring that those designers are still available to the people building it, because there will be problems, you won’t be able to understand and know all of the run-ins that you are going to have later on, so ensuring that you maintain open communication. And so as you go through the finishing touches of manufacturing, you are thinking about testing, how are you going to verify all the requirements? How are you going to test and make sure that the airplane will perform as intended and that it will be safe and that it will accomplish its mission? And from that, that’s a partnership with the customer. And from there, you go straight through to deployment of the asset. And so there are a lot of steps involved in a quick prototyping organization, but a lot of it has to do with ensuring that you are working across disciplines every step of the way.

TK: You really need to move fast if you want to prove a prototype can work with the current technology. It doesn’t matter whether you are working, again on airplanes or consumer products or whatever else; there is going to be a window over which your product is useful. Nothing is useful forever necessarily, except for maybe bricks or something, right? But most products have an optimal window over which they are going to be useful. When you are on that leading edge of technology, technology is constantly accelerating and developing, and unless you can move as quickly as the technology is developing, you are always going to be chasing something that is just ahead of you. So let’s say I want to build a new airplane today…you take the current state of the art in terms of the designs and the characteristics you want that airplane to have, the manufacturing processes that currently exist, your capabilities of all your software and subcomponents and things that can go in there, and you package them all together. If it takes you ten years to get that prototype out there, all the parts that you are using and all the technologies that you are using is going to be ten years old.

MS: A key tenant of rapid prototyping is “don’t invent what you don’t have to” on a program. I mean, usually what we are trying to do with these prototypes is hard enough in terms of what is the environment they are operating in or the technologies we are trying to integrate, so we will absolutely beg, borrow and steal components, subsystems, hardware, from wherever we possibly can. Good examples are the more complicated systems like the landing gear. The X-55 advanced composite cargo aircraft is probably a good example, a recent one that we spent a lot of time working on. The whole technology that we were trying to demonstrate on that program was the use of advanced manufacturing techniques and composite materials to significantly reduce the amount of time it takes to fabricate and assemble a large aircraft. There was never any intention to put that thing into production, it really was just to demonstrate those technologies. We really didn’t want to spend money developing new fuel systems, landing gear, engines, and so on that project we kind of took it to an extreme where we took an existing Dornier 328 regional jet, a commercial jet, and we took the wing, and inside the wing was the fuel systems, the engines, as well as the landing gear, and basically the cockpit off of that jet, and then reassembled it with our brand-new composite fuselage and vertical tail. And so it was kind of a novel way…because we were basically given two years and $50 million to build an aircraft that could carry cargo pallets equivalent to a C-130. A C-130 could carry 4, we could carry 2, but it was a large, 30,000 pound aircraft, and the only way that we could see to get the cost down to less than $50 million was to reintegrate a lot of existing systems and hardware, and focus all of our energy and effort on the stuff that we absolutely had to develop from scratch.

You know, you can only go so far in a wind tunnel or through computer simulations and modeling; at some point, you need to be able to scale it up, really demonstrate does it work in flight or not, and what are the issues that we have when we actually get in that environment.

SP: I’m not working low-boom, but it’s a great example to talk about because it’s public and anyone listening can go learn all about QueSST, our low-boom technology demonstration. We have simulated the fact that it’s not making a low-boom or that it’s coming together, but saying you’ve done it in a simulation is not the same thing as doing it in a first flight and proving it out, so I think that’s the important part, is it gives confidence and a real-life article to the achievement. And plus, it’s going to be way more fun to watch LBFD fly off than it is to just watch it simulated flying on your computer screen.

IH: I mean, if you think about the birth of aviation and the Wright brothers, think of how many different ways they tried to solve that one problem. There were a lot of failures early on before things really actually, literally took flight. And we see that on the big scale; we also see it on the small scale here. There was a project I worked on a while ago where we were trying to figure out a new way to use these different actuators, right? We were trying to water-proof them. And there were a bunch of different engineers that all sat around in a room, and we were trying to model this, we were trying to do analysis on this, we were trying to figure out the nth degree of what we could do with this actuator, push it to its limit and then be able to predict it. But really, all this time we spent doing all this analysis, and spreadsheeting and modeling, if we had just taken it to the field and tried it out a few different times, we would have saved that much more time, collected a whole lot more data and been able to learn about physically how this thing works in the real world.

I think sometimes, we tend to paralyze ourselves with the analysis of it all, and we kind of jokingly call it “paralysis by analysis.” We want to get to the 100% solution, where everything is right and you know exactly what the answer is going to be and you think you can’t make a mistake at all. But the more important thing to do is to be willing to fail a little bit, fail early and fail often.

Narration: Skunk Works offers two facilities for employees to experiment, tinker and prototype. They are affectionally called the Innovation Garage and the Swift Lab.

IH: The Swift Lab is more of a mission systems and software-based lab, and the Innovation Garage is more of your mechanical lab. So the Innovation Garage is an area that we have for folks to go and just try different things, whether it’s for work, for home, for an opportunity to go think about something or try to put into reality.

Early on, when we first opened the Innovation Garage, we had a junior engineer working with a senior engineer, and they were developing a text fixture. So the junior engineer basically completely did the design and said to the senior engineer, “Hey, will you come just spot-check what I did? I think I’m good here.” And the senior engineer came over, turned the model around the computer a bit and said, “You know, it does. This is a really good design! But something about it just doesn’t seem right. I can’t put my finger on it, but I’ve been doing this for years and something looks a little funny here.” Well, the Innovation Garage had just opened and so the junior engineer said, “Well, why don’t we go down and test it out? Let’s go build this thing.” So they did. They built a small-scale version of it, they 3D-printed it, it took maybe an hour or so of their time, and they started to put it together. Well, they soon realized that the way the hinges were designed, it was off by just a fraction, something you would never even see when you were playing with a 3D model on the computer. But as they built the scaled model, it became very clear what the problem was. Well, they ended up saving the program tons of money, and a ton of cost and schedule by finding this one little misalignment that they went and fixed on the computer, very easily, before moving into the final product. That is what rapid prototyping is all about: fail early, fail often. Get in there, try it out and see if it works before you actually go on to the big developmental program. And so the Innovation Garage, the Swift Lab…those are areas for us to play, it’s like a sandbox, it’s for you to just explore the different ways you might be able to make something work better or to find out ways that it might not work at all, and give yourself the opportunity and grace to try again.

Narration: Rapid Prototyping isn’t only about the products but also the factories in which the products are built.

Travis Reid: The Skunk Works is migrating towards connected systems and tools that enable us to be efficient in the physical space just as much as we are now in the digital space with virtual prototyping and virtual environments.

Narration: This is Travis Reid, the Director of ADP Production Operations Special Projects for the Skunk Works.

TR: The future factories will harness the capabilities of automation, integration of robotic systems and solutions, precision and advanced metrology and other various applications to support future build. So it will be a much different factory in the regard of how data flows and how systems operate with each other. It will allow, downstream many years from now when that system is deployed, you will be able to look back and understand what that air vehicle looked like when it left the factory floor and what it looks like today, so data will be really powerful in characterizing the environment that the aircraft was produced in and what it ultimately became, and then ultimately throughout its lifetime how the system is sustained and maintained. The digital thread will allow the operators to really understand the performance of their product and understand as issues arise, what to do to resolve it and how to proceed in various situations.

TK: It’s not about how amazing your decisions were upfront, it’s about how you recover from the areas where you had to take a risk. Or you had to make a choice that was maybe not the greatest choice, but it’s better to make a choice than have none at all. Ultimately, none of that matters when you are down at that end point and you want to go put the product together and get it tested. All those issues that you had earlier, they are all behind you and you just need to figure out how to recover and get your product rolled out as fast as you can.

The Skunk Works has done exactly that, with all the pain involved, multiple times. And the rose-colored glasses of history…I can’t imagine that they didn’t have similar problems on prototypes back in the Kelly Johnson era, working on Oxcart, or working on Have Blue. You know, looking back on them, they are all resounding successes, but they are all very painful while you are doing it, which is, quite frankly, part of the fun, right? All those challenges that you run into in getting a rapid prototype platform fielded, those are the things that you remember. You remember when you see the product come online for the first time, you remember maybe when you won the proposal, you remember when you see it fly away. Those are the ones that you will see with rose-colored glasses forever. What you also remember is all the most painful things that happened while that was occurring, but those things never seem to make it into the overall narrative of the successful program, right? But that is what makes the job fun, is solving those particular problems and doing something that is really difficult with a team, and ultimately yielding a product at the end that everyone can be proud of and that you can take out there and prove something with.

Narration: Inside Skunk Works is created in Palmdale, California and Fort Worth, Texas. Stay tuned for words of wisdom from Irene Helley. To see photos of engineers from this episode check out our show notes at lockheedmartin.com/insideskunkworks. To all our listeners, thank you for a great season.

IH: There’s this common misconception that in order to be an engineer, you have to be really good at science or math, and while that is helpful, I think what is more important to consider is, do you like to problem-solve? Do you like to get in on difficult problems, difficult situations, tear them apart, and figure out how things work and how to make them better? And so for folks who are thinking or even contemplating about engineering as a career choice or as a major in college, the first thing you need to ask yourself is do you enjoy problem-solving? Do you enjoy getting into the nitty-gritty of how things work and how to understand ways to make things better? And that’s really at the heart of engineering. The math and the science and the textbook stuff, that just comes with extra hard work. But really, the best advice I have is if you are thinking about engineering, think about what you like to do and pour your heart into it.

First of all, there is no “right major.” Sure an engineering degree definitely helps, but I’ll say, some of the leading leaders in our organization have majored or gone to school for something completely different than the discipline they now either lead or host or are involved with. So one of the leading experts in mission systems in the Skunk Works actually has a chemical engineering degree. You would never make that leap, right, if you were going through college. I used to interview a lot of people who were looking to start their career at the Skunk Works. One of my favorite questions to ask is, “What do you do outside of school?” So we all, engineers, we love school, we love doing problem sets, I’m sure that’s common amongst a lot of engineers is we like to do the textbook stuff. But outside of the classroom, what do you do? Do you like to tinker around with your car at home? Are you making upgrades to networks and things like that that you work on at home? Maybe you are building your own computer or maybe you are doing something else, but when you come to the Skunk Works, we are looking for someone who is more than just book smart. It’s more than about getting the 4.0 GPA, but what we are really looking for is somebody that we call “skunky,” someone with vision, someone who likes to solve hard problems, someone who is passionate about the work that they do and someone that isn’t an engineer just in the classroom, but is an engineer in life.

There are some classics in the history of aviation that are worthy of revealing and worthy of understanding, and so if you are interested in becoming a Skunk someday, I’d say step one, go back and look at some of your favorite airplanes. What made them so amazing? What captured everyone’s hearts? And how did they become the best of the industry? Think about those things and think about you can make them even better going forward.