Job Stress Catches Up With ‘Dr. Stealth’ of Aerospace : Science: Eccentric genius John Cashen’s departure for Australia has many questioning the technology’s future.

For the last two decades, John Cashen has played a pivotal role in creating the top-secret Stealth technology that makes planes and missiles invisible to enemy radar. But last Friday, he quit his job as chief scientist at Northrop Corp.’s B-2 bomber plant in Pico Rivera and moved to Australia to work at a government defense laboratory.

Cashen, a brilliant and eccentric engineer known to colleagues as “Dr. Stealth,” said he was leaving for personal reasons, citing job stress and the need to reinvigorate himself in a new culture.

“The stress I lived under for 20 years was going to bite me if I didn’t take a break,” Cashen said in a telephone interview from a beachside motel in Australia. “I was becoming testy and irritable. I wasn’t becoming the kind of person I wanted to be at age 55.”

Aerospace experts have no doubts that Cashen, the recipient of numerous government awards, will keep America’s military secrets secure. Nonetheless, his departure--together with the recent retirements of other key Stealth experts--represents a significant loss to national defense and raises disturbing questions about the future of America’s massive investment in Stealth technology.

The Pentagon already has spent tens of billions of dollars to make aircraft and missiles invisible to enemy radar--a capability that has become a cornerstone in America’s arsenal. The B-2 Stealth bomber is still under development, but the F-117 fighter played a major role in the Persian Gulf War.

Even though defense budgets are rapidly falling, the Pentagon is intent on retaining the primacy of U.S. military technology, especially Stealth technology. But maintaining that expertise with less money and fewer key experts may be tough to do.

Cashen belonged to a dwindling inner circle of top-flight experts who possess detailed knowledge of the highly complex Stealth technology. Northrop’s patent on the B-2 is held by Cashen, along with key engineers Irving Waaland and James Kinnu, both of whom have retired. Lockheed Corp., the nation’s other Stealth powerhouse, has experienced its own brain drain with the retirements of Skunk Works President Ben Rich and Engineering Director Alan Brown.

Stealth technology is not contained in textbooks or within any university faculty. Rather, it is held by a select council of industry experts who pass along their knowledge like an arcane art form. Cashen and Rich are privy to some of the Pentagon’s most coveted secrets.

Stealth technology embraces the use of supercomputers to shape and construct aircraft so that enemy radar signals are deflected at oblique angles, as well as the use of certain materials to absorb radar. The science applies to the smallest details of aircraft construction, as well as to the basic shape of aircraft. The result is that Stealth aircraft bear no resemblance to previous aircraft, or even to other Stealth planes.

Until his departure, Cashen was considered the high priest of Stealth--so famous in technical circles that he received 20 letters a week from fellow engineers asking for his autograph, says his former administrative assistant, Lavena LeDay.

“The industry is losing one of its great minds,” said Brad Biegon, director of aeronautics policy at the Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. “But the real threat is that there is not enough money in the pipeline to keep this technology vibrant. The retirement of senior experts and layoffs of younger engineers raise the risk of breaking up the industry technology teams.”

Kent Kresa, chairman of Los Angeles-based Northrop, praised Cashen as a genius. Although he says the company has a group of “new bright people” involved in Stealth research, he is concerned that federal budget cuts will mean fewer opportunities to advance Stealth technology.

“We should all be worried about how we are going to keep that spark alive,” Kresa said. “It comes down to whether the funding will be there.”

Over the years, top Stealth experts competed fiercely on aircraft programs, but they came to know and respect each other, Brown said. During a Stealth aircraft program in the late 1970s at the White Sands missile base, Northrop engineers worked on one side of a black curtain while Lockheed engineers worked on their competing version on the other side. An armed guard made sure nobody peeked, Brown recalled.

When the technology was in its infancy, a dozen experts at Lockheed and Northrop represented America’s brain trust. Today, many more have advanced knowledge of the technology, but none have the experience and know-how of a Cashen or Rich.

Although young engineers could design Stealth aircraft on paper, it is the Cashens and Riches of the world who understand the pitfalls of building multibillion-dollar airplanes using the latest technology.

Cashen’s departure also subtracts one of the more colorful aviation pioneers from an industry once vibrant with personality, but which now seems increasingly bland and bureaucratic. He held numerous titles, including chief scientist of the B-2.

The controversial, $44.5-billion B-2 bomber program, under constant attack by critics in Congress and by industry rivals, created a pressure-cooker atmosphere that took a toll on some of the key people on the program.

Cashen was known as being especially intense and driven, although he was well liked around the Pico Rivera plant. His research involved a lot of hands-on field work rather than a theoretical or academic approach from an office desk.

Cashen spent years working under the cover of darkness in the frigid Mojave Desert, hoisting different aircraft models atop poles to be tested for their stealthiness. By day, he slept in run-down desert motels. The ironclad security on the program prevented him from discussing his work with friends or family.

“For 20 years, I have worked very hard,” Cashen said in an interview this week from Australia. “I stayed healthy--I don’t know why. God was looking after me.”

When Cashen was married last Halloween on Mokai in the Cook Islands before 700 Polynesians, he decided that it would “be nice if we could start out our marriage on a less hectic note.”

He had a deep desire to move to the South Pacific, and the Australian government offered him a job at a military installation in Adelaide. Just before boarding his flight to Australia, Cashen, a chain-smoker, had his last cigarette.

The rough-edged engineer came from East Orange, N.J. His career did not follow the predictable route of top aerospace scientists--from prestigious universities directly into industry.

After high school, he enlisted in the Army in 1955. He later entered vocational school as a radio technician, hardly the highbrow academic start that his future counterparts would have. But he studied at night while working at a factory in Manhattan and eventually earned an engineering degree from the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He went on to work at Bell Laboratories and then earned a doctorate in electrical engineering from UCLA.

Cashen said his departure is not an abdication from Northrop or America.

“It has nothing to do with Northrop or the B-2 program,” he said. “If I return to industry, I will return to Northrop. I am not interested in working for any other firms, certainly not competitors. I have an abiding love for the company.”

Cashen will not be involved in any research involving Stealth technology in Australia, although he will be conducting research on radar and sensors. He said he may return to the United States in a couple of years, but he may “look for new challenges” outside of aerospace: “I am not just interested in stealthy airplanes.”

Northrop’s Kresa, praising Cashen as a fine person, said neither the company nor the government had any grounds to intervene against his emigration plans.

“It is not the company’s or the government’s legal right to stop it, as long as it is within proper grounds,” Kresa said. “This is a friendly country with whom we have many ties. So there is no issue there.”

Biegon, the policy director at the aeronautics institute, said that while younger engineers can replace people like Cashen, very few have background in applying basic principles to building such aircraft.

“We are losing many people who are in the prime of their lives and the prime of their careers,” he said.