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The name of the super-secret project was Suntan. It was to be the ultimate reconnaissance airplane, flying so high and so fast—it was to cruise above 100,000 feet at Mach 2—that detection would be unlikely and interception impossible. But it also would have been a giant winged thermos bottle, with a fuel tank full of liquid hydrogen at –400 degrees Fahrenheit and its outer skin baking at 350 degrees or more. A proposed hydrogen liquefaction plant dedicated to producing fuel for several of the airplanes would have sucked up 10 percent of the natural gas supply of Los Angeles in...

The existence of a new secret plane photographed this week has been confirmed by the United States Air Force. The secret aircraft now has an official denomination: The RQ-170 Sentinel, a flying wing developed by Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works. The RQ-170 is a stealthy unmanned aircraft designed to "provide reconnaissance and surveillance support to forward deployed combat forces." It's flown by the 30th Reconnaissance Squadron at Tonopah Test Range, Nevada, under the Air Combat Command's 432d Wing at Creech Air Force Base, Nevada. The aircraft has a 65-foot wingspan, with a fat body and a blended wing design. It's...

DALLAS — Southern Methodist University will open an engineering laboratory that will be modeled after a Lockheed Martin research center considered among the most innovative in the world.SMU’s Lockheed Martin Skunk Works Lab will open in December 2009 and will draw heavily from the management style forged by the defense contractor. Lockheed’s Skunk Works plant in Palmdale, Calif., develops the nation’s fastest, most versatile military jets and systems. Skunk Works also has offices in Fort Worth, where Lockheed builds fighter jets. "Every groundbreaking technology that has produced an aircraft for the military has been thought about, tested and delivered by...

PALMDALE - Lockheed Martin Corp. and Boeing Co. announced Friday that they will partner to pursue the Air Force's proposed Next Generation bomber, an effort that will include work in Palmdale. Representatives of the two companies said they will partner to perform studies and system development efforts in anticipation of the Air Force's moving forward with the program in the 2010 budget, with an eye toward flying the aircraft as early as 2018. The collaboration will include work in advanced sensors and future electronic warfare solutions, including advancements in network-enabled battle management, command and control, and virtual warfare simulation and...

Lots of SR71 aircraft pictures with brief discriptions of various accidents that occured over the life span of the aircraft.

Stealth jets? Hypersonic bombers? What's really being developed at the military's most famous classified base? On a trip to las vegas in 2004, observing from my east-facing hotel room in the pyramidal Luxor Hotel at daybreak, I watched a fleet of six unmarked 737s make commuter flights to nowhere. These aircraft depart every weekday morning from a tidy, anonymous terminal on the western side of McCarran International Airport. A long line of cars pours into a 1,600-spot parking lot as the jets pull away from the terminal, taxi to the runways, and head out into the desert sky. At the...

The flying days of the SR-71 Blackbird in the Antelope Valley are truly over, as one of the last vestiges of the aircraft's flight tenure in the Valley has departed. The only SR-71 simulator, housed at NASA Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base, has been shipped to an aviation museum in Dallas. The simulator came to NASA when the flight test facility took control of three SR-71s when the aircraft were first retired from military service in 1989. Dryden used the aircraft for high-speed flight research, and NASA pilots trained on the simulator. The one-of-a-kind system was...

ockheed Martin [NYSE: LMT] today unveiled the existence of a new high altitude, unmanned aerial demonstrator to reporters attending the Farnborough International Air Show. The announcement was part of a review of several Skunk Works projects highlighting technologies the company is exploring to enable technology for the future. “This UAV is an effort to better understand the flight dynamics of a tailless unmanned air system in support of our ongoing research and development work for the U.S. Air Force’s future Long Range Strike Program as well as to field the next generation of structural composite concepts,” explained Frank Cappuccio, executive...

The Lockheed Martin Skunk Works revealed on 19 July that it has secretly built and flown a large, high-altitude unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that has been designed to test a range of new technologies critical to what the company foresees as a ‘third-generation’ of unmanned platforms that will emerge in the US in the next decade. Nicknamed Polecat, the high-altitude flying wing demonstrator was launched in March 2003 with USD27 million of internal Lockheed Martin funding and was completed 18 months later. It did not fly, however, until last year. Its key feature is an advanced laminar flow wing that...

Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works, famed for the U-2 and Blackbird spy planes that flew higher than anything else in the world in their day, is trying for a different altitude record: an airplane that starts and ends its mission 150 feet underwater. The Cormorant, a stealthy, jet-powered, autonomous aircraft that could be outfitted with either short-range weapons or surveillance equipment, is designed to launch out of the Trident missile tubes in some of the U.S. Navy’s gigantic Cold War–era Ohio-class submarines. These formerly nuke-toting subs have become less useful in a military climate evolved to favor surgical strikes over nuclear...

PALMDALE - A mysterious flying craft seen hovering over Air Force Plant 42 Tuesday morning was the latest creation from Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Co.'s famed Skunk Works on its maiden flight. The blimp-like aircraft, known simply as P791, is a proof-of-principle vehicle to help engineers learn more about technology and aerodynamics for such airships. "Lockheed Martin is testing a small-scale airship as part of an internal research and development effort," Lockheed spokeswoman Dianne Knippel said. The large white airship is shaped somewhat differently from a traditional blimp, with twin torpedo-like sections joined in the center and a cockpit beneath. Four...

How many problems does it take for “one of the most sophisticated systems ever produced by man” to become just another white elephant? A lot of people have been asking that about the Space Shuttle lately. But the Space Shuttle’s downward spiral started long, long ago. In fact, it started in the Nixon Administration. In the days of triumph which were Apollo, NASA -- still capable of bold vision -- laid out a plan to explore and settle the Solar System. Among its more prominent features were a series of follow-on Moon missions which more resembled Lewis and Clark (or...

Paris Air Show: Lockheed Martin Skunk Works details Morphing UAV progress The Lockheed Martin Skunk Works Advanced Development Programs (ADP) 'Morphing' unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is three weeks away from achieving its first flight, according to Frank Cappuccio, vice-president and general manager of Skunk Works ADP. Morphing technology promises to revolutionise the way UAVs and their combat equivalents, unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs), integrate combat missions with long-loitering intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) duties. It is also central to ADP's work on the US Navy's (USN's) Multi-Purpose UAV (MPUAV) programme. ADP signed a contract for MPUAV with the Defense Advanced...

Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Co.'s famed "Skunk Works" has once again been tapped to do what its engineers and designers do best: create imaginative air vehicles capable of previously unheard-of feats. The Palmdale facility, formally called Advanced Development Programs, recently was awarded two separate contracts for developing the technologies to be employed in future high-speed weapons systems. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency singled out a Lockheed Martin-led team for a $8.36 million contract under the FALCON program. This joint DARPA-Air Force program is intended to develop hypersonic flight technologies that may eventually be applied to a future hypersonic bomber, capable...

LANCASTER - It's all about "thrust" and "drag." That which makes you go, and that which holds you back. Steve Justice, from Lockheed Martin Skunk Works, essentially told more than 100 high school students Friday that the way to get ahead is to minimize drag and use everything they have to succeed. "Don't be bound by the limits of current knowledge," Justice said at the 24th annual Mathematics Field Day at Antelope Valley College. Lockheed Martin Aeronautics jumped on board two years ago in hopes of piquing interest in the fields of engineering and aerospace. Justice, who has been with...

Legendary aircraft designer Clarence L. "Kelly" Johnson was a visionary not only in the exotic aircraft produced by his top-secret "Skunk Works," but in the environment he created to foster such works as the Blackbird family of aircraft. "His way was to be quick, be quiet and be on time," said Rogers Smith, a former NASA research pilot who flew the SR-71. Smith and fellow NASA research pilot Edward Schneider spoke about Johnson and his famed Blackbird at a recent Society of Experimental Test Pilots' symposium in Los Angeles. "Kelly Johnson is my hero," Smith said. "He actually made 'better,...

Sixty years ago, Clarence "Kelly" Johnson pirated an elite group of engineers and mechanics from Lockheed. He forged the team into a separate organization, called Skunk Works, with a mission to develop America's first production jet fighter, the Air Force P-80 Shooting Star. The team developed this quickly, quietly and on time - in 143 days. The origin of the Skunk Works name can be traced back to 1943 - 40 years after the Wright brothers' first flight at Kitty Hawk, N.C. Since developing the Shooting Star, Skunk Works has given shape to many firsts in flight. F-104 Starfighter --...

PALMDALE - Travelers hurrying down Sierra Highway may have noticed the return of a familiar and friendly presence - the mischievous skunk of Lockheed Martin's famed black project workshop, the Skunk Works. He bears a nodding resemblance to the Warner Bros. cartoon character, Pepe LePew, and for decades he couldn't even come out in public. It would be a national security breach to identify yourself as an employee of the Skunk Works. With the Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Co. officially observing the 60th anniversary of the famed hot project shop inaugurated by Clarence "Kelly" Johnson, the skunk emblem is back up...

PALMDALE - Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Co.'s legendary Skunk Works once again will work to stretch the bounds of aviation and imagination with a $9.3 million contract to development technologies for future aircraft that can change their shape to meet changing flight needs. This morphing aircraft structures program calls for "seamless, aerodynamically efficient, aerial vehicles capable of radical shape change," according to the contract award from the U.S. Air Force.