War demands instant solutions. Kelly Johnson understood that if the US military wanted a jet fighter immediately, the engineering had to come first.
Clarence ‘Kelly’ Johnson seemed born to do aeronautical engineering, winning his first aircraft design prize aged just 13. All that could possibly have held him back was his attitude. In a famously collaborative vocation, Johnson was a little, well, brusque. Indeed, he got the nickname Kelly at junior school after breaking the leg of a child who had the temerity to call him ‘Clara’. Yet this rather forthright attitude would prove his making.
In particular, he didn’t have much time for onerous management or ‘groupthink’ – as he demonstrated as a student, when he had the confidence to tell his professor that the Lockheed Model 10 Electra airliner they were testing was poorly designed and had dangerous stall characteristics. Most would have shied away and kept their mouths shut. Johnson didn’t, and his outspokenness (he was right about the Model...