Denys overholser biography sample

He was described in a memoir by former Skunk Works Director Ben Rich as having had a “boyish grin and quiet self-confidence.”

“Most of our veterans used slide rules that were older than Denys Overholser, and they wondered why in the hell this young whippersnapper was suddenly perched on a throne as my guru …,” Rich wrote.

The key to the project would be radar cross-section calculations, which denote how detectable an object is with radar.

The result is that the operations at the Skunk Works aren’t what they once were. Pyotr Ufimtsev, the chief scientist at the Moscow Institute of Radio Engineering, authored a paper titled “Method of Edge Waves in the Physical Theory of Diffraction.” It held the secrets to stealth with a set of equations that predicted the amount of energy that would be reflected to the source based on the shape of the object.

This was the second time that Russia had helped our efforts.

I’m in awe of the organization that was the Lockheed Skunk Works. Where the U-2 cruised sub-sonic, the aircraft that would eventually become named the Blackbird would travel at three times the speed of sound.

Rich the Technician

While a substantial portion of Skunk Works is dedicated to his time as a leader of the organization, he had to prove his technical chops, and the place where this really shone was in propulsion.

That’s right, the bats were running directly into the F-117 and falling dead. They weren’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination, only being 84% fuel efficient – however, that was 10% better than any other design at the time, and it was good enough. It’s better to command more people and equipment – that you can talk about – than it is to own the program that will allow you to own a war.

Projects like stealthy ships never made it to be a substantial part of the arsenal.

He’d estimate the results of complex calculations that would take Rich or the team hours to do. Even though Johnson pushed Rich away from the aircraft for some time before finally being convinced, Johnson and the aircraft had something in common. None of the airplanes or surface-to-air missiles at the time could reach it at that height. Ben Rich – who took the helm after Clarence “Kelly” Johnson – mixes personal stories of triumph and frustration into a compelling read in Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed.

(Besides, Piper Cubs don’t fly at 80,000 feet!) The next challenge was to make an airplane that was effectively invisible to radar. The generals planning for the gulf war had to wonder how long it would take to grind down the air defenses such that the full stage air combat and domination could begin. (This is the kind of experience that Gary Klein would discover in fire commanders and other experts.

If you want to get a picture of an enemy position at a specific time of day, you could have it. “They were just off the edge, the finest minds in aerospace, in each discipline, all in one group.