Lockheed Martin Corporation

Allan and Malcolm Loughead — brothers who had grown up in California — founded the Alco Hydro-Aeroplane Company in 1912, building seaplanes. The Loughead name was consistently mispronounced as "log-head" rather than "lock-heed." When Allan refounded the company in 1926 after a bankruptcy, he changed the spelling to Lockheed to match the pronunciation. The company produced innovative aircraft throughout the 1920s and 1930s, including the Vega monoplane that Amelia Earhart used for her solo transatlantic flight in 1932.

Lockheed established a secret advanced development division in 1943 — later nicknamed "Skunk Works" after the moonshine distillery in the Li'l Abner comic strip. The division operated with extraordinary secrecy and autonomy, answering directly to Lockheed's CEO. Its first project was the P-80 Shooting Star — America's first operational jet fighter, designed and built in 143 days. Skunk Works became the most productive advanced aircraft design organisation in history, responsible for some of the most significant aircraft ever built.

Skunk Works designed and built the U-2 reconnaissance aircraft in 1955 — a high-altitude spy plane that could fly above Soviet air defences and photograph military installations. The programme was so secret that most Lockheed employees did not know it existed. U-2 flights over the Soviet Union provided the United States with intelligence unavailable through any other means. When a U-2 was shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960, piloted by Francis Gary Powers, it triggered an international crisis and ended the Paris Summit between Eisenhower and Khrushchev.

The SR-71 Blackbird, designed by Skunk Works and first flown in 1964, remains the fastest air-breathing manned aircraft ever built — capable of exceeding Mach 3.2 (2,200 mph) at altitudes above 85,000 feet. The aircraft was so fast that it outran surface-to-air missiles by simply accelerating away from them. The SR-71 was designed with stealth characteristics decades before the term "stealth" existed in aviation. It was retired in 1998; no replacement has been publicly acknowledged, though classified successors are widely assumed to exist.

Lockheed merged with Martin Marietta in 1995 to form Lockheed Martin — the largest defence contractor in the world. The merger was driven by post-Cold War defence budget cuts that forced consolidation in the defence industry. Lockheed Martin subsequently won the F-35 Lightning II contract — the most expensive weapons programme in history, with an estimated lifetime cost of $1.7 trillion. The F-35 became both Lockheed Martin's greatest commercial success and the most criticised defence procurement in American history — years late, over budget, and plagued by technical problems that its advocates argued would eventually be resolved.