Lockheed engineer to speak at aviation museum event

In 2018, Lockheed Martin’s legendary “Skunk Works” division will celebrate what it calls 75 years of “disruptive innovation.”

Starting in 1943, when what became the Skunk Works delivered in just 143 days the XP-80 Shooting Star to counter wartime German jets, the iconoclastic unit has produced some of the most groundbreaking aircraft in history, including the U-2 spy plane, SR-71 Blackbird, F-117 Nighthawk, F-22 Raptor and F-35 Lightning II.

Steve Justice, a 33-year veteran of the Skunk Works operation, is one of the keynote speakers at this year’s Pacific Aviation Museum Pearl Harbor’s Discover Your Future in Aviation program on Saturday. The museum-wide event is designed to educate and provide visitors with career opportunities in the field of aviation.

Justice, who lives in Los Angeles, retired as director for integrated systems at Skunk Works in September. “It was literally a dream come true” to work for the Lockheed unit, the aerospace engineer said.

He used to draw airplanes as a boy, and in college, “I said I want to work there, and literally, I got to do that for over 30 years,” Justice, 61, said in a phone interview. “I got to work on programs that contributed directly to the security of the United States.”

Most of what Justice did was classified. But he was able to talk a bit about his role in configuration development on the F-22 Raptor stealth fighter, an advanced warplane that is based in Hawaii.

“I was one of the guys that got to draw what the airplane looked like — how all the equipment fit in, how you accommodate all the weapons,” he said. Parts of the plane design that he worked on, including the distinctive diamond-shaped wing, made it into production.

“One of the reasons we chose that particular wing platform, even though other wings performed just as well, was it held more fuel,” Justice said. He also worked on the distinctive wedge-shaped F-117 stealth attack aircraft, which slipped past Iraqi radar on Jan. 19, 1991, to bomb 37 targets in Baghdad as anti-­aircraft tracers lit up the sky in Operation Desert Storm.

Skunk works was the wartime brainchild of visionary founder Kelly Johnson, who in 1943 brought together a handpicked team of Lockheed engineers and manufacturers in a circus tent next to the main facility in Burbank, Calif. — and adjacent to a plastics manufacturing plant that created a strong odor.

The “Li’l Abner” comic strip featured a malodorous location deep in the forest known as the “Skonk Works” where a strong brew was made from skunks, old shoes and other ingredients, and the name was soon applied to the experimental engineering department, Lockheed said.

The company said the Skunk Works division, now in Palmdale, Calif., among other locations, still works under Johnson’s mantra of “quick, quiet and quality.”

In 1976, a U.S. Air Force SR-71 Blackbird flew from New York to London in less than two hours at speeds in excess of Mach 3, according to Lockheed. Skunk Works engineers are developing a new spy plane, the unmanned SR-72, to fly at speeds up to Mach 6, or six times the speed of sound.

Justice recalls one secretive company meeting he had in 2000 — only a small part of which he could reveal — when he and five others were summoned to meet with five individuals who did not introduce themselves.

“We sit and they ask us who we are, what we do, where we went to school, what our hobbies were, what we did at work, what our family lives were like, that kind of stuff,” he recalled.

After leaving the room briefly, Justice and the others returned to find a document “that when we signed it, we would say we would never, ever divulge who these people were or what it was they wanted,” he said.

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the group that ordered the meeting stopped answering their phones, Justice said. One was dead and another turned up missing a limb. “These were the guys that were one of the groups out on the tip of the spear for the United States,” he said. He declined to confirm they were at the Pentagon.

Justice said the theme for his 3 p.m. talk at the Pacific Aviation Museum will be “from passion to dream to reality.”

“I’m going to walk through my journey from a kid wanting to design airplanes and the steps that I took to realize that dream,” he said.

The event takes place 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday. It includes Capt. Ronald McGee, an F-4 Phantom pilot, Boeing 787 Dreamliner flight instructor and son of a Tuskegee Airman, speaking at 1 p.m.; and Nagin Cox, a spacecraft operations engineer who works for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, speaking at 2 p.m. A variety of organizations will have information booths.

For information and tickets, go to 808ne.ws/PAMdiscover