High Stakes, Big Bets

Burbage, who was then head of Lockheed's F-22 program, was untroubled by the feedback. He calls the session with Druyun "very good and positive. You need to get direct feedback from your customer." But Druyun's tongue-lashing forced some soul-searching in Lockheed's Bethesda, Maryland headquarters. Lockheed had to win Druyun over.

And so Lockheed took another big risk. In November 2000, just one year before the competition's end, Burbage was tapped to take the reins of the company's JSF effort. He had worked for 10 years in Lockheed's Marietta, Georgia office, where he had built a reputation as a knowledgeable and engaging leader. He had also worked closely with Druyun on Lockheed's F-22 program. (In Blackwell's memo, he quoted Druyun on Burbage's leadership: "I almost lost my cool on F-22 one month and Tom Burbage said, 'Sit down, relax, and we will work it out.' ")

Bringing in Burbage to head the JSF team just when the competition with Boeing was entering its most critical phase amounted to an 11th-hour gamble. Now it was up to Burbage to help make things right with the Pentagon -- and to help shepherd the program through the do-or-die fly off with Boeing.

Big Risk #3: Defying the Law of Gravity

While Lockheed may have been myopic in some of its dealings with the Pentagon, it displayed 20/20 focus on its customers' technical requirements for the JSF. The Lockheed team understood that while the Air Force was the biggest customer, the Marine Corps was the bullish customer -- the one influencing the JSF program. "The Marines are desperate to replace their Harrier jump jet, which is old and tired," says Blackwell. "Plus, the Marines have great political influence in Congress."

It was essential for Lockheed (and Boeing, for that matter) to fulfill one core requirement for the Marines' version of the aircraft: It had to be able to take off in "tight" places and make vertical landings on aircraft carriers and on lighter Navy ships. Knowing this, Lockheed's engineers walked right into a design minefield. They bet Lockheed's entire JSF effort on an untried propulsion system for the Marine aircraft, while Boeing went with an updated version of the direct-lift system used on Harriers.

The laws of physics dictated Lockheed's move. The Marine JSF aircraft, the X-35B (the "X" signifies a test plane), weighs in at about 30,000 pounds. But Lockheed's direct-lift engine generates just 25,000 pounds of thrust. More than 1,000 engineers worked the problem and eventually patented a solution: Augment the thrust by pushing the lift engine to the rear of the plane, adding a thrust-vectoring nozzle to it and mounting a shaft-driven lift fan behind the cockpit. "No one had ever generated enough thrust to vertically lift a 30,000-pound plane," says Burbage. "The hope was that the lift fan would let us break the physics barrier."

An initial test was a near disaster. Lockheed mounted a prototype on a 30-foot-high cement pole. When they fired up the engine, it produced 35,000 pounds of thrust. But within an hour, the bearings' temperature shot up, and it leaked oil at an alarming rate. "There were many fears, especially on the government's part, that the shaft-driven lift fan was too complicated," says Burbage. "This was a high-risk, high-reward proposition. If that lift fan failed, we were done for."

But Lockheed's partnership with BAE, Northrop, and its subcontractors paid off. The Lockheed team took the system down and called in its two partners' top engineers, as well as transmission experts from Bell Helicopter and lubrication specialists from Penn State University's Gear Research Institute. It took them three weeks to solve the problem: a flaw in the lubrication system.

Then came the day of reckoning. In the predawn hours of June 24, a team of Lockheed technicians readied the Marine version of the aircraft for its first-ever vertical flight. Lockheed had built X-35 jets in the high desert outside of Palmdale. Its Air Force and Navy X-35 aircraft had already logged 27 and 58 hours of flight time, respectively. But this was the make-or-break test for Lockheed's entire JSF effort -- the moment that would determine whether the shaft-driven lift fan could produce enough thrust to lift the Marine plane. Planned flight time: 30 seconds. Planned altitude: 24 inches.

Simon Hargreaves, the test pilot, had one thought as he powered up the aircraft's engine: Don't screw up. The plane rocked gently from side to side, and then it lifted. It rose 25 feet before Hargreaves could level off. And there, hovering above a tarmac in the Mojave Desert, was the proof. The Lockheed team had pulled an end run around the laws of gravity.

"Ten years of hard work culminated in that 30-second flight," says Burbage. "When that plane took off, and it generated the thrust that we said it was going to generate, and the control system we had designed for it allowed the plane to be flown nicely, that was it. We had built the better plane. We didn't know whether we would win, but we knew that we should win."