Guy visits all SR-71 Blackbird planes - photos

[bruce.desertrat]

Well, to be fair, by the time the skunkworks was established, Kelly Johnson had a very well established track record https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_..._contributions

Famously 3M lets (or used to, at least) engineers have unsupervised 'play time' to work on projects; and it's paid off for them, too, witness the Post-It.

A co-worker (ex Air Force Master Sgt) worked in the field with the SR-71s in the Vietnam era, they used to fly in and out of the base he was stationed at (IIRC it was the Phillipines, or it may have been Thailand.) They were too hot to work on for about for hours after landing.