Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed

by Ben R Rich

  Time and again, the airplane and its counter-measure equipment proved their worth over North Vietnam, Cuba, and northern Russia. But mostly we could just outspeed any homing missile that would have to be led at least thirty miles ahead of its target to reach the Blackbird’s altitude of sixteen miles high and at 2,000 mph–plus speeds. Most missiles exploded harmlessly two to five miles behind the streaking SR-71. Often the crew was not even aware they had been fired upon.

  The Blackbirds flew 3,500 operational sorties over Vietnam and other hostile countries, had more than one hundred SAM SA-2 missiles fired at them over the years, and retired gracefully in 1990 after twenty-four years of service as the only military airplane never to be shot down or lose a single crewman to enemy fire. Which was truly amazing because the Blackbird and its crews continuously drew the most dangerous missions. At such tremendous flying speeds, the margin for judgmental or mechanical error was zero, and at times crews flew fourteen-hour round-trip flights more than half-way around the world, from their base in Okinawa, for example, to the Persian Gulf, providing fast, urgently needed intelligence estimates on missile emplacements along the Iranian coast.

  The complexity and duration of some of these missions defied belief—with ten or more air refuel rendezvous strung out along the tens of thousands of miles of the typical long-range Blackbird route. One screwup could result in tanks going dry, a crashed airplane, and a lost crew. But it never happened. Not once during a total of 65 million miles of flying, mostly at three times the speed of sound.

  Like the U-2, the Blackbird was not an easy airplane to fly. It demanded a pilot’s total concentration and was unforgiving of even smallish mistakes. The recollections of pilots and crews attest to the awe and challenge of flying at speeds almost beyond human comprehension. Personnel were assigned to the 9th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing out of Beale Air Force Base, near Sacramento, California, composed of thirteen two-man crews flying nine active Blackbirds and supported closely by a fleet of twenty-five KC-135s, the huge fuel tankers that fanned out across the world to rendezvous with thirsty Blackbirds for air-to-air refueling. The crews who flew these missions were selected by SAC from the top of their list: of the first ten pilots chosen, nine ultimately became generals. To a man, all the pilots and their Reconnaissance Systems Officers (RSOs) in the second cockpit regarded their tours as members of the elite Blackbird unit as the highlight of their Air Force careers.

  Other Voices

  Colonel Jim Wadkins

  (Pilot)

  I had 600 hours piloting Blackbird, and my last flight was just as big a thrill as my first. At 85,000 feet and Mach 3, it was almost a religious experience. My first flight out of Beale in ’67, I took off late on a winter afternoon, heading east where it was already dark, and it was one of the most amazing and frightening moments going from daylight into a dark curtain of night that seemed to be hung across half of the continent. There was nothing in between—you streaked from bright day and flew into utter black, like being swallowed up into an abyss. My God, even now, I get goosebumps remembering. We flew to the east coast then turned around and headed back to California and saw the sun rising in the west as we reentered daylight. We were actually outspeeding the earth’s rotation!

  Nothing had prepared me to fly that fast. A typical training flight, we’d take off from Beale, then head east. I’d look out and see the Great Salt Lake—hell of a landmark. Then look back in the cockpit to be sure everything was okay. Then look out again and the Great Salt Lake had vanished. In its place, the Rockies. Then you scribbled on your flight plan and looked out again—this time at the Mississippi River. You were gobbling up huge hunks of geography by the minute. Hell, you’re flying three thousand feet a second! We flew coast to coast and border to border in three hours fifty-nine minutes with two air-to-air refuelings. One day I heard another SR-71 pilot calling Albuquerque Center. I recognized his voice and knew he was flying lower than me but in the vicinity, so I called and said, “Tony, dump some fuel so I can see you.” In only a couple of blinks of an eye, fuel streaked by underneath my airplane. He was like one hundred and fifty miles ahead of me.

  One day our automatic navigation system failed. Ordinarily that’s an automatic abort situation, but I decided to try to fly without the automatic navigation. I advised the FAA I was going to try this and to monitor us and let us know where we were if we got lost. I quickly learned that if we started a turn one second late, we were already off course, and if my bank angle wasn’t exact, I was off by a long shot. I started a turn just below L.A. and wound up over Mexico! I realized right then that we couldn’t navigate by the seat of our pants. Not at those incredible speeds.

  I remember when a new pilot flying the SR-71 for the first time out of Beale began shouting “Mayday, Mayday” over Salt Lake City. “My nose is coming off!” My God, we all panicked and cranked out all the emergency vehicles. The guy aborted, staggered back to Beale. All that really happened was that the airplane’s nose wrinkled from the heat. The skin always did that. The crew smoothed it out using a blowtorch. It was just like ironing a shirt.

  My favorite route was to refuel over the Pacific right after takeoff, then come in over Northern California going supersonic, flying just north of Grand Forks, North Dakota, then turn to avoid Chicago, swing over Georgia, then coast out over the Atlantic, then refuel over Florida, west of Miami, then head straight back to Beale. Total elapsed time: three hours twenty-two minutes. Take off at nine or ten in the morning and land before two in the afternoon, in time to play tennis before cocktail hour.

  As time went on we were being routed over least-populated areas because of growing complaints about sonic booms. One of them came straight from Nixon. One of our airplanes boomed him while he was reading on the patio of his estate at San Clemente. He got on the horn to the chief of staff and said, “Goddam it, you’re disturbing people.” One little community named Susanville, in California, sat right in a valley and was in the path of our return route to Beale. The sonic boom would echo off the hills and crack windows and plaster. We had the townspeople in, showed them the airplane, appealed to their patriotism, and told them the boom was “the sound of freedom.” They lapped it up.

  Walt W. Rostow

  (President Johnson’s national security adviser from 1966 to 1968)

  The Blackbird reconnaissance missions over North Vietnam, which began in late 1966, were invaluable to the president. We learned precisely the locations of missile and antiaircraft batteries, what ships were in the harbor unloading, and obtained up-to-date targeting intelligence for our bombing missions. Without these Blackbird overflights of Haiphong and Hanoi, President Johnson would never have allowed any tactical air operations in the North because he was extremely sensitive—I think in some ways, overly sensitive—to the possibilities of a bomb accidentally hitting a Chinese or Russian ship while it was unloading in the harbor, and he also was determined to keep civilian damage and casualties to a minimum. So he demanded frequent Blackbird missions—two or three every week—to supply him with the latest intelligence, since he usually chose the targets personally and insisted on approving each and every raid in the North. The military offered their priorities for targets, and the questions he raised about proposed targets were always the same: What were the military consequences of taking out that particular target? What were the expected losses in men and airplanes on this particular raid? And how much secondary civilian damage was anticipated? Before signing off on a mission he calculated in his own mind whether the anticipated losses were worth the anticipated gains. And the Blackbird photos were the decisive factors in helping him to make up his mind.

  On January 23, 1968, the North Koreans caught us by surprise by boarding a naval surveillance ship called the Pueblo while it was in international waters. We were really caught short not knowing the fate of the crew or the ship. We figured they planned that incident to divert us at the time of the Tet Offensive in South Vietnam, but we would be damned if we’d let them get away
with it. The whole country was up in arms over this incident. The president was considering using air-power to hit them hard and try to shake our crewmen loose. But when we cooled down, we had to suck in our gut and hold back until we were certain about the situation. Dick Helms, the director of the CIA, urged the president to authorize Blackbird flights to try to locate the missing ship. LBJ was reluctant to overfly North Korea and offer the tempting target of the Blackbird, possibly provoking an even greater international incident. But he was assured that Blackbird could photograph the whole of North Korea, from the DMZ to the Yalu River, in less than ten minutes, and probably do so unobserved by air defense radar. Which is precisely what happened. The Blackbird quickly located the captured Pueblo at anchor in Wonson harbor only twenty-four hours after it was boarded by the North Koreans. So we had to abandon any plans to hit them with airpower. All that would accomplish would be to kill a lot of people, including our own. But the Blackbird’s photo take provided proof that our ship and our men were being held. The Koreans couldn’t lie about that, and we immediately began negotiations to get them back.

  Captain Norbert Budzinske

  (Air Force RSO)

  We trained a year, acquired a hundred hours of flying time, before we flew out to giant Kadena Air Base at Okinawa in early 1968. The trip took about six hours by SR-71, fourteen hours if you flew over in a tanker. This was for real. The slower and lower U-2s couldn’t make it flying over North Vietnam with all those SAM sites. That mission became ours. We flew five times a week on average. Also, missions over North Korea and to Soviet naval facilities, north of Japan. We operated three airplanes and lived isolated from the main base population in a remote corner of Kadena that had been set up for the original CIA pilots and crew. But very quickly the islanders learned we were there and would go up on the hill overlooking the base to catch a glimpse of our bird, which shook the whole island taking off. The islanders nicknamed our airplane Habu, after a black, extremely deadly pit viper. Habu, like the Blackbird, was indigenous to Okinawa and the name stuck. We carried that name on our shoulder patches. To this day, that hill is still called Habu Hill by the islanders.

  The minute we showed up at Kadena, so did two Soviet trawlers, which fed our takeoff times and position to their friends in North Vietnam and put them on the alert. But we were cocky. We timed our flights not for surprise, but to achieve the most favorable sun angle for our pictures, usually taking off between ten in the morning and noon. We made a big turn and banked to head for Hanoi, exposing ourselves on the side to those giant Tall King long-range radars that the Chinese installed on Hainan Island. They knew we had two primary targets—Haiphong and Hanoi—so it was just a matter of timing us and waiting for us to fly over their missile sites. We collected so much photo and electronic intelligence data from each mission that our intelligence people were swamped by it and simply couldn’t keep up. We photographed 100,000 square miles of terrain per hour, from which selected target images could be blown up more than twenty times. Some of the cameras were operated by me as the RSO in the backseat and others were automatic. The cameras were very fast and preprogrammed. We could provide both horizon-to-horizon coverage and close-up telescopic work that would let you see down a flea’s throat.

  Okinawa is one hell of a long way from Vietnam. Our missions averaged more than six thousand miles and took more than four hours. The logistics involved were staggering because we had refueling tankers strung out from Kadena to Thailand. So we usually flew two airplanes, using one as a spare in case the mission plane had to crap out. Having all those tankers in the sky was expensive. Typically, we’d hit a tanker fifteen minutes after takeoff, head on down between Taiwan and the Philippines, to Cam Ranh Bay, then turn north over North Vietnam. We’d overfly the north in eight to twelve minutes, take in both Haiphong and Hanoi, staying out of range of the SA-2 missile batteries down below. Then we’d do a double-looper, going over the north again, before refueling over Thailand. We overflew both north and south in Vietnam, did Laos and Cambodia, flew over both north and south in Korea.

  Sometimes after a mission, I’d get a look at our photo take to see how well we did. It was unbelievable! You could actually see down the open hatches of a freighter unloading in Haiphong’s harbor. In fact, the photo interpreters claimed that they could tell what was down in those hatches, it was that sharp and clear from 85,000 feet. They’d blow up our photos to the size of a table.

  Frankly, I had the feeling that there were things the hostiles made no effort to hide. For example, North Korea. Took us about ten minutes to overfly then hit a tanker and do it again at a different latitude. These missions had to be cleared at the highest level. We concentrated on missile sites, port facilities, any unusual movement. Those folks never moved their missile sites. They wanted us to see them, record them. Not cause tensions or apprehensions by hiding them or moving them around. Same with the Chinese. We overflew them two or three years, but only with direct orders from the commander in chief. Those guys wanted us to know they had the bomb. That was clear.

  We knew we’d probably get shot at, but it wasn’t a big worry because at our height an SA-2 missile simply didn’t have the aerodynamic capability to maneuver once we started twisting and turning to get away from it. Still, when a little warning light came on in my cockpit to report that the boys downstairs had launched one up at me, I tightened up for sure. I personally never saw a missile coming up, but others did. One of our pilots, Bill Campbell, saw three missiles explode at his altitude, but a couple of miles behind. He actually watched them being launched and caught it on film. He said those damn missiles looked as big as telephone poles as they lifted off.

  Later on, in the late 1970s, when the Russians developed their powerful SA-5 ground-to-air missile that could have knocked us down, they never tried to use it against the Blackbird. That missile was so enormous it looked like a medium-range intercontinental ballistic missile sitting on its pad. Made me queasy just looking down at it through my telescopic sight. But my theory was that the hostiles realized that reconnaissance flights were actually stabilizing. We knew what they were looking at and they knew what we were looking at. If they denied us, we’d deny them. And then everyone would get the jitters. In this game, you didn’t deny access unless you were ready to get serious about preventing it.

  Lt. Colonel Buz Carpenter

  (Air Force pilot)

  We were flying over North Vietnam at 82,000 feet when suddenly I had to do a quick maneuver to keep us from colliding with a weather balloon that whisked past us just off my wingtip. At that very moment, we experienced an unstart in the left engine, which knocked me and my RSO all over our respective cockpits. My RSO looks out and sees the left engine trailing fuel, and he thinks we’ve been hit by a SAM. “Buz, we’ve been hit,” he shouts into his open mike. I always suspected that we were more closely monitored on these flights than we probably realized by special RC-135 snooper airplanes packed with powerful electronics. And now, I’m certain, because by the time we made our second pass over the North, the White House Situation Room had already been wrongly notified that my SR-71 had been hit over Hanoi.

  Major Butch Sheffield

  (Air Force RSO)

  Just before I deployed to Kadena in the fall of ’69, we were tasked to fly up to the Arctic Circle and check on some suspicious activity on a tiny Russian island. I was then stationed at Beale, living at home with my wife. We took off after breakfast, refueled over Alaska, headed north for fifteen hundred miles. It was scary being over the most forbidding area of the world. If you had to eject, you were finished. Anyway, we reached this island, turned on the recorders and the cameras, then turned around, hit another tanker, and flew back into Beale. I was home in time for dinner and my wife never knew where I’d been that day. She assumed it was just another day at the office. At dinner, I almost burst out laughing thinking of her reaction if she had known I’d spent the day flying up and back to the Arctic Circle!

  I had another very odd miss
ion, like that one, in the early 1970s, while stationed at Kadena. We were tasked to fly against the very formidable and new Soviet SA-5 missile site that had been constructed at Vladivostok, their big naval base in the Sea of Japan, at a time when the Russians were conducting a huge naval exercise right off the coast. We were to fly to this dangerous site late Sunday night, hoping that we would find their most junior officers on duty, who would snap at the bait and turn on their radar and we could measure the frequency, the pulse repetition intervals, and a lot of other vital technical details that could be used to develop counter-electronics against this monster. A more experienced officer might figure out what we were really up to and stay dark.

  The National Security Agency put aboard a special recording package for this particular mission, and we flew right down the throat of that site, so that it seemed certain that we were going to overfly Soviet territory. As we came in, radars from dozens of Soviet naval ships on that training exercise switched on. And at the last second, we pulled a sharp turn and avoided any overflight of Soviet airspace. But the take was awesome. In all, we got nearly three hundred different radar transmissions recorded, including the first SA-5 signals obtained by our side. Meanwhile, I had plenty of problems to cope with before we landed safely.

  After turning, we headed toward Japan. During that big turn, the oil pressure on the left engine began falling and rapidly dropped to zero. We stayed on a southern heading but shut down that engine and flew on one engine against awful head-winds at fifteen thousand feet as we approached the North Korean coastline. We were just struggling to maintain altitude and didn’t realize it until later that the North Koreans had scrambled fighters against us, and that the South Koreans had scrambled their fighters to get between us and the North Koreans and defend us. We had no choice but to put in to a South Korean air base at Taegu. I called the field, but they refused permission to land. Field closed, they said. I said, “I’ve got to land. Turn on your lights.” We came in and just sat there, surrounded by dozens of people in black pajamas with machine guns. My pilot said to me, “Butch, you sure we landed in South Korea?”