Lockheed hid a whole aircraft factory under a fake painted suburb
During the Second World War, Lockheed's Burbank plant vanished beneath an enormous painted tarpaulin showing a sleepy neighbourhood, complete with rubber cars, fake fire hydrants and hundreds of trees made from chicken wire and feathers. Underneath, workers were turning out thousands of warplanes.
The company's name is itself a disguise of sorts. The brothers Allan and Malcolm Loughead had run an earlier aircraft firm that folded in 1920 when surplus wartime planes flooded the market. In December 1926 Allan and three partners, including John Northrop, launched a new venture spelled Lockheed, phonetically, so people would stop mispronouncing it. Its Vega, flown to records by Amelia Earhart and Wiley Post, sold 141 examples. Then the Depression bankrupted its owner, and in 1932 a group led by Robert and Courtlandt Gross bought it out of receivership for just $40,000. Allan had hoped to bid himself but judged his $50,000 too little to be taken seriously.
War made it a giant. Lockheed and its Vega subsidiary produced 19,278 aircraft, about six percent of the American total. The star was Kelly Johnson's twin-boomed P-38 Lightning, the only US fighter built from Pearl Harbor to victory over Japan. Johnson's prototype team, working secretly in a smelly former distillery, made it the first fighter to reach 400 mph, and he later called that the start of the Skunk Works, the name borrowed from the comic strip Li'l Abner.
That secretive division went on to create the P-80, America's first jet fighter to score a kill, then the U-2 spy plane, the SR-71 Blackbird and the F-117 stealth fighter. Other hits included the Constellation airliner, whose triple tail let it fit into existing hangars, and the C-130 Hercules, still built today.
Costly overruns on the C-5 Galaxy transport and the TriStar airliner brought the firm close to insolvency by 1971. Its request for a $250 million government loan guarantee sparked fierce debate, with Admiral Hyman Rickover accusing it of privatising profits and socialising losses. Lockheed eventually merged with Martin Marietta in 1995.
Source: Lockheed Corporation
