Ben Rich

American aerospace engineer and Kelly Johnson's successor as director of Lockheed's Skunk Works, who led the development of the F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter — the first operational stealth aircraft — and wrote the definitive Skunk Works memoir.

Championed the theoretical work on electromagnetic stealth from a Soviet physicist's paper and turned it into the F-117 Nighthawk — the first operational stealth aircraft — demonstrating a new paradigm for warfare that made radar-centric air defense obsolete.