The Golden Age of Aerospace

Aerospace is one of the deepest branches of humanity’s technological tree. It is a telling fact that more countries have produced a nuclear bomb than have mass-produced a jet engine. Recent history illustrates how hard it is to build these capabilities. China has provided an estimated $71 billion dollars in funding to the Commercial Aircraft Corpor... See more

The cost of developing a fighter plane increased by a factor of 100 from the 1950s to the 1980s, which resulted in fewer new planes being built. In the 1950s, the American aerospace industry developed 49 planes; in the 1980s, that number had dropped to seven. Instead of working on 20 or more plane designs over the course of a career, an engineer wh... See more

The Blackbird was based on an earlier prototype called the A-12 because it was the 12th plane designed as part of Skunk Work’s “Archangel” program. All these projects were the result of iterative design improvements and were made possible by the compounding knowledge of a relatively small group of men who worked together for decades.

One of his strongest beliefs was that engineers should be located as close as possible to where their planes were being built. Engineers were expected to live their designs, spending up to a third of their time on the shop floor to see how their ideas were being translated into actual parts. Over time, many of these engineers would work on 20 or mo... See more

Those that remained at Skunk Works were a self-selecting group; you had to love the job because of what it demanded from you. Meeting a deadline for a project could mean working 14-hour days for seven days a week for months on end. And because many of these projects were classified, your work couldn’t be discussed at home.

The contrast between the outcomes of Operations FIAT and Paperclip tells us something about the nature of technical knowledge. There are huge chunks of technical knowledge that cannot be acquired by reading texts. And history has shown that it is only possible to access this knowledge through the humans who possess it.