by Ben R Rich
A few months after the first successful Blackbird test flight in April 1962, test pilot Bill Park appeared at my desk and dropped his plastic flight helmet in my lap. “Goddam it, Ben, take a look at that,” he said, pointing to a deep dent near the crown. As Bill described it, he was cruising at sixty-five thousand feet on a clear, crisp morning above New Mexico, when suddenly, with his airplane blistering at 2.7 Mach, he was deafened by a loud bang and violently flung forward in his harness, smashing his head against the cockpit glass and almost knocked unconscious. “It felt like a couple of the L.A. Rams shaking me as hard as they could,” Bill said. The problem was called an “unstart.” It occurred when air entering one of the two engines was impeded by the angle of the airplane’s pitch or yaw and in only milliseconds decreased its efficiency from 80 percent to 20 percent. The movable-spike inlet control could correct the problem in about ten seconds, but meanwhile the pilot was flung around helplessly, battered all over the cockpit. Bill Park and Lou Schalk and several of our other pilots were experiencing these awful “unstarts” as much as twenty times in ten minutes. The damndest part was that the pilot often couldn’t tell which engine was affected and sometimes he turned off the wrong one to get a relight and was left with no power at all. This happened to a Blackbird over West Virginia. The pilot struggled to relight both engines as the airplane plunged toward earth. Finally at thirty thousand feet, the two engines came alive with a tremendous sonic boom that shattered windows for miles and toppled a factory’s tall chimney, crushing two workers to death.
“Fix it!” the pilots demanded. Easier said than done, I discovered. In spite of my best efforts I never really solved the unstart problem per se. The best I could do was invent an electronic control that was basically a sympathetic unstart. If one engine was hit with an unstart, this control ensured that the second engine dropped its power too, then relit both engines automatically. In the cockpit, the pilot would be spared a near heart attack by a loud bang followed by a series of severe jolts that marked an unstart. When the new system functioned he would not even be aware that an unstart had occurred. But before I could solve the problem, I took a lot of heat. Bill Park insisted that I get off my duff and see firsthand what he and the rest of our test crew were going through. Kelly, with a diabolical glint in his cold eyes, eagerly agreed.
“Rich, goddam it, suit up and get out there and fix that goddam thing before one of our pilots breaks his goddam neck,” the boss decreed. In a crazy moment of weakness, I actually agreed to fly. I got as far as the high-compression chamber, which simulated ejection, as part of my preflight briefing. In order to fly at ninety thousand feet I had to be checked out in the pressure suit in an altitude chamber, in case we lost cabin pressure or I was forced to eject in an emergency. The chances that I would experience such calamities were near zero since I would have already dropped dead from fright. Nevertheless, I found myself inside a heavy helmet and pressure suit, and the minute that chamber door slammed shut I experienced an immediate claustrophobic panic. I was sucking oxygen like a marathon runner and screaming, “Get me out of here!” Call me a coward. Call me hopeless. Call me a taxi. I bugged out.
Other Voices
Norman Nelson
I was the CIA’s engineer inside the Skunk Works, the only government guy there, and Kelly gave me the run of the place. Kelly ran the Skunk Works as if it was his own aircraft company. He took no crap and did things his own way. None of this pyramid bullshit. He built up the best engineering organization in the world. Kelly’s rule was never put an engineer more than fifty feet from the assembly area. But the payoff came watching that Blackbird take off on sixty-four thousand pounds of thrust blasting out from those two giant engines. We all knew it was the greatest airplane ever built and it carried the world’s greatest cameras. From ninety thousand feet—sixteen miles up—you could clearly see the stripes on a parking lot. Baby, that’s resolution! The main camera was five feet high. The strip camera was continuous, and the framing camera took one picture at a time. Both took perfect pictures while zipping past at Mach 3. An unbelievable technical achievement. The window shielding the cameras was double quartz and one of the hardest problems confronting us. We also had awful reflection problems and heat problems, you name it.
Because of the tremendous speed and sonic boom, we were very limited to where we could overfly the United States during training missions. We had to pick the least-populated routes. After President Johnson’s public announcement about the airplane in the fall of 1964, Kelly began receiving all kinds of complaints and threats of lawsuits from communities claiming the Blackbird had shattered windows for miles around. A few times we announced a bogus flight plan and then sat back and watched the phony complaints pour in. But some complaints were for real. One of the guys boomed Kelly’s ranch in Santa Barbara as a joke that backfired because he knocked out Kelly’s picture window. Another of our pilots got in engine trouble over Utah and flamed out. The Blackbird had as much gliding capacity as a manhole cover, and it came barreling in over Salt Lake, just as our pilot got a restart and hit those afterburners right above the Mormon Tabernacle. There was hell to pay.
We had to clear FAA controllers along the flight paths, otherwise they’d think they were seeing flying saucers at Mach 3 plus on their radar screens. In the amount of time it took to sneeze, a pilot flew the length of ten football fields.
We couldn’t overfly dams, bridges, Indian ruins, or big cities. We had to clear and train the tanker crews of the KC-135s that carried our special fuel. Air-to-air refuelings were very tricky because the tanker had to go as fast as it could while the Blackbird was throttled way back, practically stalling out while it filled its tanks. During a typical three-to-five-hour training exercise, our pilot might witness two or three sunrises, depending on the time of day.
Another weird thing was that after a flight the windshields often were pitted with tiny black dots, like burn specks. We couldn’t figure out what in hell it was. We had the specks lab tested, and they turned out to be organic material—insects that had been injected into the stratosphere and were circling in orbit around the earth with dust and debris at seventy-five thousand feet in the jet stream. How in hell did they get lifted up there? We finally figured it out: they were hoisted aloft from the atomic test explosions in Russia and China.
That airplane pushed all of us to our limits in dealing with it. A pilot had to have tremendous self-confidence just to set foot inside the cockpit knowing he was about to fly two and a half times faster than he ever had before. I know that Kelly was determined to spread the Blackbird technology onto the blue-suiters and make the whole damned Air Force sit up and pay attention to what he had produced. But I never gave him much chance to sell a lot of these airplanes because they were so far ahead of anything else flying that few commanders would feel comfortable leading a Blackbird wing or squadron. I mean this was a twenty-first-century performer delivered in the early 1960s. No one in the Pentagon would know what to do with it. That made it a damned tough sell even for Kelly.
Kelly was his own salesman. He traveled to Washington pitching those in high places at the Pentagon and on the Hill. He was plugged in at the CIA and knew what the top Pentagon brass were worrying most about at any given moment, and in the early months of the Kennedy administration many officials were popping Valium.
There were storm warnings flapping over Red Square. The Russians seemed eager to severely test our new young president and backed up that belligerency with worrisome crash weapons projects. The CIA had intercepted Russian telemetry data on what they thought was a missile test in Soviet Siberia in the spring of 1961. They sent this data to the Skunk Works for our analysis and verification. Our telemetry experts reported back a chilling contradiction: that was no missile being tested but a prototype supersonic bomber, the so-called Backfire, rumored to have been in the works for several years. We were likely looking at an aircraft capable of sustained Mach 2 speeds, flying at sixty thousand feet and with an impressive r
ange of three thousand miles. If we were right, this was a major upset of the then current military balances of power: the Soviets were building a bomber that could come and get us, and the brass at the Air Defense Command in Colorado Springs could only look up and shake a fist because we had nothing flying that could intercept it, or any missile to shoot it down.
But fitted on the jigs of Assembly Building 82 was the frame of our Mach 3 Blackbird, being built as a CIA spy plane, which could be adapted as a high-performance interceptor that would stop the Russian bombers long before they could reach any American targets. Once the U.S. early-warning radar net (so powerful, it could track a baseball-size object from five thousand miles away) picked up a Soviet bomber force streaking toward North America, our Blackbirds could race to meet and intercept them over the Arctic Circle, beyond range of their nuclear-tipped missiles targeted against U.S. cities.
That was Kelly Johnson’s Pentagon sales pitch in the dawning of the Kennedy years: the Blackbird was exactly what the brass of the fighter command should have been looking for, but, unfortunately, our airplane was so secret and knowledge of this project so limited that very few Air Force commanders knew of its existence and Kelly could not pitch anyone who wasn’t on a very select list of those cleared to know about this top secret airplane. He was so constrained by security that he was practically talking to himself.
Among a few, highly placed Air Force brass who did know about our airplane there were mixed feelings about Blackbird’s $23 million cost (the technology was not bargain bin) because a general would always prefer commanding a large fleet of conventional fighters or bombers that provides high visibility and glory. By contrast, buying into Blackbird would mean deep secrecy, small numbers, and no limelight. In the military, less was definitely not more. Most military officers were assigned commands or Pentagon desk jobs for three to five years, before moving on. The future uses of a revolutionary airplane like the Blackbird as a fighter or bomber was a question they would gladly leave for their successors to mull over; they aimed to make their mark quickly by putting as much new rubber at the ramp as soon as possible and earn commendations and promotion up the chain of command. Kelly Johnson’s technological triumphs were thrilling to hear about but not immediately advantageous to an ambitious colonel lusting for his first star.
Kelly knew what he was up against, but he tried to improve the odds by producing the kinds of “add-ons” that no blue-suit customer could resist. For example, he put me in charge of a feasibility study for using the Blackbird as a platform for launching ICBM missiles. Launched from, say, sixty thousand feet, a missile could travel six to eight thousand miles by eliminating the tremendous fuel consumption of a ground-based launch. We even dreamed up the creation of an energy bomb that used no explosive device. Flying at Mach 3 and eighty-five thousand feet, we’d drop a two-thousand-pound weight of high-penetrating steel that would hit the ground with the force of a meteor—at about one million foot-pounds of energy and blast a hole 130 feet deep. The Air Force was interested, but fretted about the absence of a guidance system to assure pinpoint accuracy and resisted our suggestions to try to develop such a system. To the new secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, an energy bomb was futuristic drivel. McNamara had enough to worry about in the present tense.
Soviet military operations were at a higher level of alert than we had seen in years. Increasing numbers of long-range transcontinental flights by Soviet Bear bombers, capable of dropping nuclear weapons, were being made nonstop from bases in southern Russia to Havana, Cuba. The Bear was their version of our B-52. The journey was about six thousand miles, with probably two air-to-air refuelings. The Soviets insisted that these were merely long-duration training exercises. But the gut-churning fact was that if the Soviet Bears could reach Havana, they sure as hell could reach New York or Washington or Chicago. That message was like a brick hurled through McNamara’s office window.
An even bigger worry was Soviet submarines with Polaris-type nuclear-tipped missiles on board that were brazenly operating in international waters off our major cities on both coasts. We figured that their primary target would be our SAC bases, which was why none of our bomber wings were located east of the Mississippi but were scattered throughout the Great Plains in central states like Nebraska and Montana. This location gave SAC a few extra minutes to get our B-52s safely into the air before enemy missiles hit. Every time a Soviet sub was spotted off our coast, our entire U.S.-based bomber fleet went on alert.
The first time Kelly met McNamara he found him haughty and cold. “That guy will never buy into a project that he hasn’t thought up himself,” Kelly remarked at a staff meeting soon after. “He’s petty, the kind who will throw out any project begun under Eisenhower. He just doesn’t believe that anyone else has his brains and he’d love to stick it to an old-timer like me just to show the entire aerospace industry who’s boss.”
Our contract to build the new Blackbird spy plane for the CIA was rock solid, even though our original budget estimate was now almost doubled by delays, expensive materials, and technical problems to $161 million. To compensate for these increased costs the agency had scaled back its original purchase order from twelve airplanes to ten. So it seemed unlikely that McNamara, nicknamed Mac the Knife in the corridors of the Pentagon for his slashing budget cuts, would want to put more money into a Blackbird supersonic bomber. The Air Force was already spending millions developing the North American B-70, a huge triangular-shaped monster, capable of Mach 2 speeds. The B-70 was the favorite project of Kennedy’s gruff Air Force chief of staff, General Curtis LeMay, who usually got his way simply because few civilian officials (or uniformed generals for that matter) found the courage to try to face him down. Kelly was one of the rare exceptions. He told LeMay flat out that from what he had seen of the plans the B-70 would be obsolete before it was even off the drawing board. LeMay was furious, but a lot of blue-suiters privately agreed with Kelly. The B-70 had six engines to the Blackbird’s two. Our airplane was nearly twice as fast, but LeMay told Kelly he didn’t know beans about bombers, to stick to spy planes and mind his own business.
But then Dick Bissell got into the act. Bissell briefed President Kennedy on the CIA Blackbird project and told him the spy version of the airplane would be operational in less than a year. When he learned how fast and how high it would fly, the new president was astonished. He asked Bissell, “Could Kelly Johnson convert your spy plane into a long-range bomber?”
Bissell replied that Kelly aimed to do precisely that. “Then why are we going ahead with the B-70 program?” Kennedy asked. Bissell shrugged. “Sir,” he replied, “that’s a question more properly addressed to General LeMay.”
The president nodded sheepishly. But Kelly was embarrassed by Bissell’s indiscretion. As he noted in his private journal, “Bissell recounted his conversation about a bomber version of the Blackbird with the President. It was not right. The President asked for our proposal for the bomber before the Air Force had even seen one and I felt obligated to rush to Washington and present it as quickly as possible to our Air Force friends and showed the proposal to Gen. Thomas White. Lt. Gen. Bernard Shriever was there and they were all very upset, as was Gen. LeMay, about losing B-70s to our airplane. But at least they fully understood that that was not my doing and they cannot control Dick Bissell’s approach to the President.”
But who would have guessed that Bissell’s days were numbered? By April 1961, he was on his way out, his brilliant career shattered by the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Bissell had been overseeing the invasion attempt, staged by the agency using Cuban exiles trained in secret Florida camps. It was a botched mission from start to finish, and all of us were deeply depressed that Bissell had to fall on the sword along with his boss, Allen Dulles. Bissell was godfather to the Skunk Works. He started the U-2 and that really put us in business to stay. But he took his fall gracefully, and in April 1962, even though he was out of government by then, Kelly invited him out to the secret base to watch the first
flight of the Blackbird. Both men were as tough as titanium, but both were clearly moved watching our test pilot, Lou Schalk, gun those two tremendous engines and rip into the early-morning cloudless sky. It was one of those unmatched moments when all the pain and stress involved in building that damned machine melted away in the most powerful engine roar ever heard.
Kelly worried that, with Bissell gone, Mac the Knife might convince the president to cut out the expensive Blackbird CIA operation altogether and cancel us before we had a chance to prove our worth collecting radar and electronic intercepts along the borders of the Soviet Union. From our great heights we could penetrate hundreds of miles into Russia with side-looking radar without actually crossing their borders. But in June 1961, the new president attended his first summit, in Vienna with Khrushchev, trying to de-escalate tensions with the Russians over the future status of Berlin. The meeting with the Russian leader was so unnervingly hostile that JFK came away privately convinced that we and the Russians were on the brink of war.
At the Skunk Works we sensed those mounting tensions immediately, when Air Force Chief of Staff LeMay made his first trip to Burbank to see the Skunk Works for himself. The trip itself was highly unusual because Kelly and Curtis were not exactly buddies and had pretty well avoided each other. The word we got was that Curtis LeMay wasn’t paying a courtesy call, but was bringing his checkbook.
Still, Kelly was wary. LeMay blamed Kelly for the administration’s decision to suddenly cut back on the B-70 program from ten bombers to only four. He thought Kelly and Bissell had connived to sabotage his B-70 with Kennedy. LeMay was also sore about our close relationship to the CIA because in his view the agency had no right to have its own independent air wing, furnished by the Skunk Works. But now LeMay whisked in with his entourage and a shopping list that included converting the Blackbird into an extended-range deep-penetration bomber that the Russians could not stop. LeMay had fathered the SAC strategy called MAD—Mutual Assured Destruction. That said it all. Our Blackbird would nuke ’em back to the Stone Age.