Ben Rich
Benjamin Robert Rich (
June 18 1925 â€"
January 5 1995) was the second director of
Lockheed's
Skunk Works from 1975 to 1991, succeeding its founder,
Kelly Johnson. Ben Rich was responsible for leading the development of the
F-117, the first production
stealth aircraft. He also worked on the
F-104,
U-2,
SR-71, and
F-22.
Rich was born in
Manila in the
Philippines, one of the five children of British lumber mill superintendent Isadore Rich and his French wife Annie, the daughter of one of his paternal grandfather's Jewish customers who resided in Alexandria, Egypt. The Rich family was one of the first Jewish families to settle in Manila. Having fled the Philippines just weeks before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, they moved to the
United States in 1942, where Ben Rich became a naturalized US citizen. He worked (with his father) in a
Los Angeles, California machine shop during
World War II, and studied at the city's Hamilton High School. After the war he started his college education when he was 21, majoring in
mechanical engineering at
UC Berkeley, followed by a master's degree in
thermodynamics at
UCLA, instead of in the medical field as he originally planned.
Upon graduation Rich was hired by Lockheed as a theromodynamicist. There he worked on a variety of projects - he was awarded a
patent for designing a
nichrome heating system which prevented Navy patrol plane crew's penises from freezing to their urine extraction pipes. He designed inlet ducts for the F-104 Starfighter, the
C-130 transport aircraft, and the
F-90 fighter.
In December 1954 Rich was seconded to the Skunk Works, the secret research and development section run by Lockheed's chief engineer Clarence "Kelly" Johnson. There he designed the inlet ducts for the U-2 spyplane. Then he led the effort to build large-scale
hydrogen liquefaction plant for a proposed hydrogen-powered supersonic aircraft, codenamed
Suntan. After this was cancelled when hydrogen proved to be impractical, Rich was program manager for the propulsion systems for the U-2's successor, the
SR-71 Blackbird. The idea to paint the high-speed aircraft's skin black, to help dissipate the tremendous frictional heat, was Rich's. He designed the engine inlet cones, the air conditioning system, and was the chief thermodynamicist for the project.
Later, as Johnson's successor as leader of the Skunk Works, Rich championed the early prototypes of stealth technology and led the development of the F-117 stealth fighter
A member of the
National Academy of Engineering, he won numerous awards during his career, including the
Collier Trophy. In 2005 he was inducted into the
National Aviation Hall of Fame.
In 1950, he married the former Faye Mayer, a fashion model, who died in 1980. In 1982, he married Hilda Elliot. He died of cancer in
Ventura, California, on January 5, 1995. His son,
Michael, is an official with the
RAND Corporation and his daughter, Karen, is a botanist.
Ben Rich made the statement in one of his last lectures before he passed away; "We already have the means to travel among the stars, but these technologies are locked up in black projects and it would take an act of God to ever get them out to benefit humanity.... Anything you can imagine, we already know how to do."
*
F-104*
C-130*
F-90*
U-2*
SR-71*
F-117*
F-22* Rich, Ben; Janos, Leo. (1996)
Skunk Works. Little, Brown & Company, ISBN 0316743003
*
F-117a.com biography of Ben Rich*
Rich's biography in the National Aviation Hall of Fame
