Beyond the Horizons: The Lockheed Story

The author of Beyond the Wild Blue explores the many factors that led Lockheed from near bankruptcy in the 1930s to become one of the most successful and innovative aerospace corporations in the world. 25,000 first printing.

Although less broadly geared than Beyond the Wild Blue, Boyne's latest is remarkable for its depth of research. Boyne, a retired air force colonel and former director of the National Air and Space Museum, leaves scarcely a wingflap unchecked, tracing in painstaking detail the fortunes of the company founded by Lockheed brothers Allan and Malcolm. He shows how the company rode the high tide of WWI-era military aviation, plunged into bankruptcy during the 1930s and eventually emerged as an industry heavyweight. Along the way, Boyne introduces familiar figures and machines: Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh; Lockheed aircraft such as the Vega and the SR-71. One section presents an intriguing portrait of the legendary Clarence "Kelly" Johnson, an engineer who was the force behind the creation of Lockheed's highly secretive Skunk Works plant, which recently produced the stealth bomber. While Johnson was at the helm, the Skunk Works refunded $2 million on the $22-million U-2 project, which actually ran under budget. Elsewhere, Boyne presents marvelous listsAof missile and aircraft specifications and of every test pilot to fly for LockheedAand delves into cutting-edge projects, like reusable launch vehicles and the forthcoming F-22 Raptor, set to be the primary fighter jet of the next century. Aviation enthusiasts will snap up this most thorough record of a dominant force in the defense industry. Photos.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Historian Boyne (a retired colonel in the air force and author of Beyond the Wild Blue, 1997, etc.) offers a long and laudatory history of Lockheed (now Lockheed-Martin), a mainstay of the military-industrial complex. Founded at the dawn of commercial flying, with aircraft made of fabric and sticks, the business of the brothers Loughead (pronounced ``Lockheed'') soon made fuselages of molded plywood, then planes of metal, and, later, spy satellites. Now producing space vehicles, stealth aircraft, and vehicles too secret to discuss, the firm has survived the Depression and the US's Cold War victory - a victory that Boyne credits in very large measure to Lockheed for its spy planes and satellites, missiles, and transports. The military, of course, is how Lockheed always made its money. ``The military-industrial complex's existence,'' Boyne asserts, ``is not based on the profit motive,'' but throughout he makes it clear that profits couldn't be made with commercial airliners alone. Lockheed's claim to a special corporate culture is supported by the establishment of its fabled Skunk Works, producer of some remarkable weaponry in secret and in record time. Indeed, Lockheed has developed some memorable aircraft, like the P-38, the Constellation, the U-2, and the C-130 (still in production after nearly half a century), and a curious reader will learn how Lockheed's distinctive tail assemblies evolved and how a stealth fighter got its shape. With enough technology for most buffs, but too much for casual readers (we are told of ``bypass doors, bleed ports, suck-in doors'' and ``full-chord leading edge flaps, ailerons, and flaperons''), the technicalities are probably more than sufficient for anyone who isn't transported by tales of Fowler flaps and ullage rockets. The text is filled with names, statistics, and lost test pilots, but ``back to the old drawing board'' was the watchword. A perhaps overly comprehensive encomium for an American firm, this volume carries a heavy payload that limits performance. (illustrations) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Beyond the Wild Blue (1997), Boyne's most recent previous work, is a history of the U.S. Air Force. Lockheed, the aerospace giant with huge military contracts, is, therefore, a natural subject for Boyne now to consider. Boyne repeatedly refers to the company as "the Lockheed family," and this book in every sense is a family album. Boyne describes the rise of the company from its beginning in 1926, its survival of the Great Depression, and its growth during World War II, the cold war, and America's ventures into space. Boyne ends his narrative with Lockheed's merger with Martin Marietta in 1995. Though "the Lockheed family" has its share of dirty linen, Boyne's account is an admiring and somewhat sanitized one. Management and financial problems in the early 1970s and Lockheed's bribery scandal of the late 1970s, laid bare in David Boulton's The Grease Machine (1978), get only brief coverage. Because of Lockheed's significant role in both military and commercial history, Boyne's book is still quite worthwhile. David Rouse

This historical profile of Lockheed, which gave us the U-2 and SR-71, is truly the story of American aerospace itself. Boyne traces the "family" history of the aviation giant from its 1913 founding by three brothers named Loughead. (LJ
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.