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Rich is survived by his wife, Hilda, of Oxnard a son, Michael, of Santa Monica, and a daughter, Karen, of Santa Barbara. He became senior engineer for advanced programs in 1963, vice president for fighter programs and preliminary design in 1972, vice president and general manager of the Lockheed Skunk Works in 1975, and president of the Lockheed Advanced Development Co.-the formal name the informal engineering unit adopted in 1990.
He joined Lockheed in 1950 and helped design the F-104 bomber and the U-2 spy plane, among others. In 1968, he graduated from Harvard University’s advanced management program. “In the end, Lockheed’s Skunk Works demonstrated the awesome capabilities of American inventiveness when free to operate under near ideal working conditions.”īorn in Manila, Rich earned his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from UC Berkeley and his master’s degree in the same discipline from UCLA. “By applying the most common-sense methods to develop new technologies, we saved tremendous amounts of time and money, while operating in an atmosphere of trust and cooperation both with our government customers and between our white-collar and blue-collar employees,” Rich wrote. “We encouraged our people to work imaginatively, to improvise and try unconventional approaches to problem-solving, and then got out of their way,” he stated in the book co-written by Leo Janos. During Rich’s tenure, the operation moved to Palmdale. It got its folksy name because it was originally housed in a tent in Burbank near a plastics factory that emitted a noxious odor. The Skunk Works was created by Lockheed at the end of World War II to come up with the United States’ first operational jet fighter.
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