Kelly Johnson was a Swedish-American aerospace engineer who worked for Lockheed for decades starting in the 1930s.
He was incredibly talented (in the words of Hal Hibbard, his boss, ”That damned Swede can actually see air!”) and also a skilled organizer, who ended up becoming the first team leader of the now-legendary Skunk Works.
His most famous designs are probably the U-2 and SR-71 reconnaissance jets, but among the famous aircraft that he helped develop were the P-38 Lightning (known as the “Fork-tailed devil” by German pilots), the P-80 Shooting Star (the first American jet fighter), and the F-104 Starfighter.
As for the cocaine thing that was more a reference to how people always joke that Cold War aero engineers must have been on the stuff given what they designed. And that many were.
(I wrote this more with the assumption some of my followers wouldn’t know about the guy, you might!)
