by Ben R Rich
Kelly briefed LeMay personally and invited several of us who were experts on various components of the airplane to sit in just in case the general had technical questions. I was intrigued watching the big, two-fisted LeMay puffing on a thick cigar, his shrewd eyes focused in concentration as Kelly zipped through a classified slide show detailing all the performance characteristics of the new airplane.
“Could you fire air-to-ground missiles from that airplane while going at Mach 3 speed?” the general asked Kelly. Kelly replied affirmatively. “We’ve done the theoretics on this, General, and we feel confident that we could do this successfully.”
“Could you guide a missile to within two hundred feet of a target?” LeMay asked. Kelly again said yes, theoretically, and added that if the missiles were nuclear, pinpoint accuracy was unnecessary. Used as a deep-penetration tactical bomber, the Russians couldn’t stop us. Used as an interceptor, we were also unstoppable. Using look-down, shoot-down air-to-air missiles, our high-flying interceptor could defend all of North America against any long-range bomber force that would be expected to fly low to the deck to avoid radar detection. “With our speed,” Kelly insisted, “fewer interceptors would be needed to cover the entire North American continent. We’d look down at the Soviet bomber fleet and pick them off like fish in a barrel.” Kelly declared, “General, the fellow who gains the high ground takes the battle. Our speed gives us our height. We’re king of the mountain.”
LeMay suddenly raised his hand as a signal for Kelly to stop talking. Then he stood up, grabbed Kelly by the arm, and led him to the far corner of Kelly’s huge office for a private, whispered conference that lasted nearly ten minutes, while the rest of us sat transfixed, watching these two titans of military aviation cooking up some sort of scheme or scenario.
Kelly told us later that LeMay was enthusiastic about using the Blackbird as an interceptor but resisted the idea of using it as a bomber. The B-70 was still very much on his mind. “Johnson, I want a promise out of you that you won’t lobby any more against the B-70.” Kelly agreed—a promise he would deeply regret in the years ahead. “We’ll buy your interceptors. I don’t have a number yet but I’ll get back to you soon.”
Kelly asked, “What about the reconnaissance aircraft we built for the agency? Can’t the Air Force use any?” LeMay looked dismayed. “You mean, we haven’t ordered any?” He wrote a note to himself and promised Kelly he would forward an Air Force contract for the two-seater version of the spy plane within a few weeks.
The very next day, Kelly was tipped off by a colonel on LeMay’s staff that on the trip back to Washington aboard his jet, LeMay revised his thinking rather sharply and ordered his staff to develop a proposal for building ten Blackbird interceptors and ten tactical bombers a month!
For once, Kelly was speechless. “If this really comes to pass,” he told me, “our whole concept of operation will have to change. This would be such a staggering operation, when you consider it means building one airplane every other working day, that I doubt we could do it successfully using our Lockheed facilities here in Southern California. I could be wrong, but let’s do a study and see precisely what it would take.”
The size of LeMay’s shopping list reinforced our feeling that the administration was quietly and quickly gearing up for a major military showdown with the Russians. That conviction grew a few weeks later when Secretary McNamara himself arrived at our doorstep under a tight lid of secrecy, to be briefed by Kelly, review our management methods on the project, and see the Blackbird for himself. He brought with him all his top people: Secretary of the Air Force Joseph Charyk, Assistant Defense Secretary Roswell Gilpatric, and the Air Force’s future secretary, Harold Brown. Kelly briefed, while McNamara took copious notes and asked several questions about the airplane’s unique navigational system. It was the first astro-navigational system that actually used a small computer-driven telescope to find approximately sixty stars in its database. The telescope looked through a small window toward the rear of the airplane and was extremely accurate and reliable locking onto stars. It was so sensitive that it once locked onto a rivet hole in the hangar roof when the system was accidentally turned on during airplane servicing.
McNamara wanted to know all about it. “This is the most accurate navigational system we can devise,” Kelly said. “Remember, we are traveling at twice the speed of a sixteen-inch shell, and we don’t turn on a dime. A tight turn takes between sixty and a hundred nautical miles, and if a pilot gets a little sloppy he could start a turn over Atlanta and end up over Chattanooga.”
Several of us escorted the official party during the inspection tour of the Blackbird inside the giant assembly building. One of the generals on the secretary’s staff took me aside. “Mr. Rich,” he said, “I don’t understand why you’re building those large spikes to block air coming into the inlet. What is the principle here? It seems to me you’d want the air unimpeded.” I couldn’t believe that an Air Force general would ask such a naive question. I said, “General, the object is to build up pressure at high altitudes. Did you ever try to squirt water from a hose by placing your thumb over the opening?” His nod showed a glimmer of understanding.
By the time McNamara and his party boarded their jet for a red-eye flight back to Washington, Kelly was practically dancing a polka. The briefing could not have gone better. We expected purchase orders to follow. And we weren’t disappointed. As an immediate follow-up, Lew Meyer, the Air Force assistant secretary for finance, flew out the following week and informed us that we would probably get orders for ten Blackbird reconnaissance aircraft for the Air Force, in addition to the ten we were building for the CIA. They wanted a larger two-seater version, with a pilot up front and a navigator-electronics specialist called the Reconnaissance Systems Officer in a separate rear cockpit, working the routing, as well as operating all the special avionics for capturing enemy radar frequencies and electronic intercepts. We would also be receiving a contract for ten fighter-interceptor versions of the Blackbird and twenty-five tactical bombers. These orders would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars and seemed to defy the longtime Pentagon quasi-socialistic policy of never putting all their purchases in one manufacturer’s shopping cart.
Spreading the profits among the key manufacturers was the usual military-industrial game, but it really seemed that the era of the Blackbird was at hand: Blackbird spy planes, Blackbird interceptors, and Blackbird bombers. The Blackbird so outmatched any other airplane in the world with its speed and altitude, it would dominate air warfare for at least a decade or more.
Before 1962 ended, Kelly had obtained approval from Lockheed management to construct a million-dollar engineering building on the strength of the proposed expansion of the Blackbird programs. Our in-house study, meanwhile, indicated we would need $22 million in additional funds to increase production facilities to meet the large production quotas of Mach 3 Blackbird fighters and bombers the Air Force expected to order.
All of us began counting our big bonuses long before the check was in the mail. And all of us were in for one big let-down. I remember my producer brother telling me once about a young filmmaker who had been courted by a big studio, actually being kissed on both cheeks by the reigning mogul and declared a genius, and his script given the top priority for quick production. But a month later, that same young genius could not even get his calls returned. He had gone from hot to cold with no apparent explanation. That typical Hollywood story became the metaphor for the Blackbird scenario as played out by the Kennedy administration. Suddenly, Kelly could not get calls returned from key administration players making decisions about Blackbird bombers and interceptors. A few top generals began ducking him, too, and the word drifting back to us from the Pentagon was that McNamara’s young Turks advising him on cost-effectiveness refused to believe that the Russians were actually developing a supersonic Backfire bomber. Without that threat, the Blackbird was not a necessary deterrent. McNamara’s Turks insisted we could get by using the ol
d standby fighter, the Convair F-106. This was the updated version of the F-102 delta-wing fighter that was the backbone of the Air Defense Command. Both of these airplanes had only supersonic dash (Mach 1.8) capability, their fuel capacity limited to a scant five minutes of supersonic flight.
Kelly thought Mac the Knife had taken leave of his senses. But he was not in the loop about planning for possible U.S. military intervention in Vietnam and the secret preparations for air and ground action by our forces. As a first step, McNamara approved a new classified prototype for the first swing-wing tactical fighter, called the TFX (Tactical Fighter Experimental), that would specialize in ground attack. Built by General Dynamics, it was destined to be one of the most controversial airplanes of the era, involving tens of millions in cost overruns, as its designers struggled to solve the horrendous problems of a movable wing—parallel on takeoff and becoming swept-back as the airplane gained Mach 2 speed. The Air Force wanted the F-111, as it was officially designated, to come in on the deck, evading radar by hiding in the ground clutter, to support local troop action in hostile ground action. But the first F-111s used in Vietnam took tremendous losses because their terrain-following radar, which allowed them to skim over treetops in the dead of night, acted like a powerful beacon for enemy radar to home in on. Even worse, most of us in the Skunk Works thought that the minute look-down, shoot-down radar fire control systems were perfected, airplanes like the F-111 would become obsolete. A higher-flying MiG pilot looking down on a squadron of F-111s could become a combat ace in seconds.
To prove the Blackbird’s tremendous performance capabilities to McNamara, we launched a flight in May 1962, from Edwards Air Force Base outside Los Angeles to Orlando, Florida, that blazed across the country in one hour and twenty-eight minutes. And if he wasn’t paying attention, we sent another Blackbird winging east from San Diego, which arrived over Savannah Beach, Georgia, only fifty-nine minutes later. We also started development of a weapons system for the Blackbird that would demonstrate how easily an airplane like the F-111 could be shot down while flying at the treetops.
This weapon was look-down, shoot-down radar and air-to-air missiles. Developing it, we were twenty-five years ahead of anyone else. We took an existing $80 million air-to-air missile developed by Hughes, called the GAR-9, and a Westinghouse ASG-18 radar system, both created for the Navy, and augmented them with our own special fire control system. The result stunned the blue-suiters, who thought it was impossible to successfully fire a missile from an airplane speeding at three times the speed of sound. Most air-to-air missiles traveled five, ten, fifteen miles to targets locked on at the same altitude or slightly below or above. We locked onto targets more than a hundred miles away and tens of thousands of feet below. From 80,000 feet, we knocked out drones flying on the deck at 1,500 feet. From 87,000 feet, we hit a drone flying at 40,000 feet.
To keep the missile from hitting our own airplane, we added a trapeze device to the missile launch system and used ejection cartridges to drop the missile nose down before it fired and sped off to the target at Mach 6. Our first test of the new system occurred in March 1965. We hit a drone from 36 miles away at a closing rate of 2,000 mph. A few weeks later, we fired the missile from 75,000 feet, while traveling at Mach 3.2, and hit a drone flying at 40,000 feet, 38 miles away. But a few months later we really rocked the Air Force. From 75,000 feet, we hit a low-altitude remote-controlled B-47 flying over the Gulf of Mexico at 1,200 feet from 80 miles off.
Kelly was overjoyed. Our testing was a superlative twelve hits out of thirteen attempts—firing from all heights and ranges. It was the most successful new weapons test in history. Our missile should have blasted a big hole in the administration’s backing of the F-111, which now was proven by our tests to be obsolete before it even flew. We knew the Russians were crashing a program to develop this kind of look-down, shoot-down system. Once it was in place aboard their newest MiG interceptors, life would be hell for any pilot in a low-flying aircraft like the F-111.
Our message to the blue-suiters: tell McNamara he’s backing the wrong bomber. Their message back: tell him yourself; he won’t listen to us. Kelly flew to Washington in the winter of 1966 and stormed in on Air Force Secretary Harold Brown, who was also rather blunt, and the two went head to head. Kelly called the F-111 a national scandal if the administration forced it on the Air Force in spite of the evidence of its vulnerability to our missile system. There was no justification for building this dog except maybe because it was being built in LBJ’s backyard, Fort Worth, Texas.
In fairness to McNamara, the Air Force was pushing for the TFX. They wanted a tactical fighter-bomber that could be used in big numbers in a ground war like Vietnam. The Blackbird was too revolutionary and too costly to fly regularly in harm’s way. The Air Force high command worried that it would be shot down and its technological secrets fall into enemy hands. But General LeMay won a partial concession from McNamara, and we received a contract for six two-man reconnaissance versions of the Blackbird to be built exclusively for the Air Force. The plane would be ultimately designated as the SR-71. It was larger and heavier than the CIA one-pilot model that carried only cameras. The Air Force model would be packed with both cameras and supersophisticated electronic eavesdropping equipment. The Skunk Works eventually would build thirty-one of them before this amazing airplane was finally, and some would say prematurely, retired in the winter of 1990.
By then the Blackbird had become a legend as an incredibly effective operational surveillance aircraft that could safely overfly the most hostile and dangerous territory at will. But the airplane and its operations were kept so secret that few inside or outside our government knew it was flying. But the Russians knew. So did the North Koreans, North Vietnamese, and Chinese. And there was nothing they could do to stop it.
11
REMEMBERING HABU
MORE THAN THIRTY YEARS after its first flight, the Blackbird’s records will not soon be surpassed: New York to London in one hour and fifty-five minutes; London to L.A. in three hours and forty-seven minutes; L.A. to Washington in sixty-four minutes. The Blackbird was 40 percent faster than the Concorde, which first flew seven years later, and in 1964, its creation won Kelly Johnson his second Collier Trophy, aviation’s most prestigious award. He had won his first Collier five years earlier, for building the world’s first supersonic fighter, the F-104. No one else in the industry had ever won two Collier trophies, and that record will probably endure, too.
President Johnson awarded Kelly the Medal of Freedom, our nation’s highest civilian award, in 1967, not long after authorizing the first Blackbird overflights of North Vietnam in May of that year. The president wanted hard evidence to back up rumors that the North was receiving surface-to-surface long-range ballistic missiles from the Russians that could reach Saigon. Two CIA-piloted Blackbirds, flown by the agency out of Kadena Air Base in Okinawa that summer, were dispatched by presidential command to find out what was really happening. They covered the whole of North Vietnam photographically and found no evidence whatever of the presence of ground-to-ground missiles. Kelly joked that LBJ bestowed the Medal of Freedom on him more in expression of his relief than in gratitude.
For budgetary purposes LBJ ordered the CIA out of the spy plane business in May 1968, and from then on all the missions involving Blackbirds were conducted entirely by the Air Force in its two-seater Blackbird, the SR-71. The second man, assisting the pilot in the first cockpit, was the Reconnaissance Systems Officer, seated in the separate rear cockpit, who operated all the avionics, as well as the nonautomatic cameras and radar frequency recording systems.
I won the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Award in 1972 for designing the Blackbird’s propulsion system. But because the airplane operated in such secrecy for the Air Force, and its training flights were conducted over least-populated areas at tremendously high altitudes, few Americans ever saw it fly and the public was only vaguely aware of its existence. After LBJ officially announced
the Blackbird’s creation in 1964, the Air Force was allowed to fly the airplane for official speed and altitude records over closed courses in 1965. The Blackbird established a new speed record of 2,070 mph and an altitude record of 80,257 feet, even though, over the twenty-five years it was operational, it routinely broke these records many times over while outclimbing and outspeeding missile attacks. On one operational flight in 1976, a Blackbird actually reached 85,068 feet while flying at 2,092 mph.
Even now, many years after the fact, the public remains oblivious to the harrowing and dangerous missions the airplane flew on an almost daily basis for more than a quarter century. Many rumors still surround the “routine” penetration overflights by the Blackbirds over such heavily defended denied territories as North Korea, North Vietnam, Cuba, Libya, and the whole of the Soviet and Eastern bloc border, including intensive surveillance of the Russian nuclear submarine pens in the far frozen north. The Blackbird also performed a daily surveillance flight across the length of the demilitarized zone in Korea. General Larry Welch, as the blue-suiters’ chief of staff, recalled having lunch with his South Korean counterpart near the DMZ when suddenly all the dishes rattled and the room rocked with a loud kaboom from the Blackbird’s sonic boom. The Korean general smiled at Welch and sighed with satisfaction, “Ah, so.”
We in the Skunk Works believed that the airplane’s height and speed, as well as its pioneering stealthy composite materials applied to key areas of its wings and tail, would keep it and its crew safe, but we fortified that belief by adding a special fuel additive, which we nicknamed “panther piss,” that ionized the furnace-like gas plumes streaming from the engine exhausts. The additive caused enemy infrared detectors to break up incoherently. We also implanted a black box electronic counter-measure in the airplane’s tail called Oscar Sierra (the pilots called it “Oh, Shit,” which is what most of them exclaimed when an ECM system activated at the start of an enemy missile attack). This ECM confused and distracted missile radar and kept it from locking on.