by Ben R Rich
Ed Yeilding
(Air Force pilot)
When Congress approved the decision to retire the SR-71, the Smithsonian Institution requested that a Blackbird be delivered for eventual display in the Air and Space Museum in Washington and that we set a new transcontinental speed record delivering it from California to Dulles. I had the honor of piloting that final flight on March 6, 1990, for its final 2,300-mile flight between L.A. and D.C. I took off with my backseat navigator, Lt. Col. Joe Vida, at 4:30 in the morning from Palmdale, just outside L.A., and despite the early hour, a huge crowd cheered us off. We hit a tanker over the Pacific then turned and dashed east, accelerating to 2.6 Mach and about sixty thousand feet. Below stretched hundreds of miles of California coastline in the early morning light. In the east and above, the hint of a red sunrise and the bright twinkling lights from Venus, Mars, and Saturn. A moment later we were directly over central California, with the Blackbird’s continual sonic boom serving as an early wake-up call to the millions sleeping below on this special day. I pushed out to Mach 3.3.
From Kansas City eastward we were high above a cirrus cloud undercast but savored this view from above 97 percent of the earth’s atmosphere—enjoyed witnessing for one final time the curvature of the earth, the bright blue glow just above the horizon, and the pitch-dark daytime sky directly overhead. High above the jet stream, the winds blew at only five mph, and we cruised smooth as silk.
We averaged 2,190 mph from St. Louis to Cincinnati, covering the distance in eight minutes, thirty-two seconds, a new city-to-city aviation record.
When we were abeam Washington at eighty-four thousand feet, I terminated the supersonic afterburner and began our descent. We had set two records: L.A. to D.C. in only sixty-four minutes and Kansas City to D.C. in twenty-six minutes. And we had set a new transcontinental speed record, covering 2,404 statute miles in only sixty-seven minutes, fifty-four seconds. It was also the first time that a sonic boom had traversed the entire length of our great country. Through the haze I saw the Dulles tower and flew above the waiting crowd at eight hundred feet, resisting the temptation to really go down on the deck for fear of blowing out the Dulles terminal windows with our powerful engine vibrations. I felt both tremendous elation and tremendous sadness. When we landed and climbed out, Ben Rich, head of the Skunk Works, was waiting below to shake my hand. I had met him once before, when I worked with him to plan a fly-by of this airplane directly over the Skunk Works on December 20, 1989, celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Blackbird.
I made three low passes over the complex of hangars and buildings that comprise the famous Skunk Works operation at Burbank, and Ben had trotted out every single worker to cheer and experience the thrill of seeing this incredible machine they had built sweeping in low over their heads. There were several thousand workers down below waving at us. On the last pass I performed a short, steep afterburner climb and rocked my wings in a salute. I heard later that men had cried.
12
THE CHINA SYNDROME
THE MOST SENSITIVE project during my years at the Skunk Works was begun in 1962 and code-named Tagboard. Inside the Skunk Works and out, fewer than one hundred people were involved or knew about it, even though the program began under President Kennedy and became operational under Richard Nixon. To this day, Tagboard remains mist-shrouded, in part because it was basically a failure. But still, the operations were truly spectacular: flying spy drones over Communist China’s most remote and secret nuclear test facilities.
I was fascinated by drones. To me, a remote-controlled or preprogrammed pilotless vehicle was the pragmatic solution to spying over extreme hostile territory without worrying about loss of life or political embarrassments of the Francis Gary Powers variety. If the drone traveled high enough and fast enough, the enemy could not stop it—indeed might not even spot it. Several of us in the analytical section were drone boosters and from time to time tried to lobby Kelly Johnson into joining our fan club. But Kelly resisted. Drones, he argued, were too big and complex to be economically feasible or operationally successful. But over the years he gradually changed his mind. He was aware of the ominous crash development of nuclear and rocket weapons on the Chinese mainland and the loss of four Taiwanese U-2s, shot down while trying to film those sensitive sites. The most significant of these development facilities was Lop Nor, two thousand miles inland, practically to the Chinese border with Mongolia. Lop Nor was situated inside a two-thousand-foot depression twenty miles wide on an otherwise four-thousand-foot plateau. This rugged, isolated test facility was the primary target of U.S. intelligence, especially in the face of an aggressive and increasingly hostile Chinese foreign policy. The Chinese had split with Moscow, triggered border clashes with India and Tibet, and were causing major concerns in nearly every foreign capital around the world.
Lop Nor was two thousand miles away and a very tough round-trip for even the most experienced U-2 pilot. Those of us promoting the drone idea inside the Skunk Works argued with Kelly that it was the best way to overfly forbidding places like Lop Nor. We envisioned a delivery system where a drone would be piggybacked on top of the Blackbird and launched off the China coast, rocket up to 100,000 feet, and zip over Lop Nor at speeds faster than Mach 3, take its pictures, then turn around and fly back to the launch point, where on electronic command it would drop its film package by parachute to a waiting naval frigate in the sea below. The drone would then self-destruct. The technology involved was not only feasible but within our grasp.
Kelly got a negative reception to the drone idea from John Parangosky, who had replaced Dick Bissell at the CIA. The Air Force was only slightly more receptive. Nevertheless, Kelly found an ally in Brig. Gen. Leo Geary, director of special projects in the Air Force, who coordinated programs between the CIA and the blue-suiters. Geary obtained half a million dollars in seed money from “black project” contingency funds, and we put together a small team to plot and plan a design. I was the propulsion man. “This is a most peculiar situation,” Kelly told us. “The agency has turned its back, so Lockheed might wind up launching this damned thing ourselves. I have no instructions from anyone in Washington, but I think I know what they want: we will try to get six-inch ground resolution photographically, a range of at least three thousand nautical miles, a camera payload of 425 pounds, and a guidance system of about 400 pounds. We should detach the payload bay holding the camera, film, and guidance system and float it down by parachute. Make it reusable and save a bundle of money that way. That’s it. Go to it.”
The drone we designed had the flat triangular shape of a manta ray, was forty feet long, weighed about seventeen thousand pounds, would be built from titanium, powered by the same kind of Marquardt ramjet we once used for an experimental ground-to-air missile developed in the 1950s, called Bomarc. The drone had the lowest radar cross section of anything we had ever designed and could cruise faster than three times the speed of sound. It was equipped with a star-tracker inertial guidance system that could be constantly updated via computer feeds from the system aboard the mothership until the moment of launch. The system was fully automated, and the drone’s steering was directed by stored signals to its hydraulic servo actuators. It was capable of a sophisticated flight plan, making numerous turns and twists to get where it was going, then repeating them in reverse to return to where it came from. The payload was detached on radio command after the mission and parachuted to a waiting cargo plane equipped with a Y-shaped catching device. After the nose detached, the drone self-exploded.
Kelly took our design to Washington in February 1963. His reception at the CIA was still unenthusiastic, mostly because the agency was already overextended on a huge secret budget for hardware, involving Blackbirds and spy satellites and feeling heat from congressional oversight committees. In fact, the Bureau of the Budget was rumored to be taking a hard look at the CIA’s air wing, with an eye toward eliminating it entirely, which finally occurred by presidential command in 1966.
But Air Force Secretary
Harold Brown was definitely interested in the drone concept, as much as for a way of delivering a nuclear bomb as for spying: they could deploy a nuclear weapon by drone three thousand miles from a hotly defended target and be impossible to stop. Apparently, the CIA got serious about our drone after learning about the Air Force interest. With General Geary acting as our champion, the agency decided to climb on board the drone project. On March 20, 1963, we were awarded a letter contract from the CIA, which would share funding and operational responsibilities with the Air Force. Ultimately, we built fifty drones for only $31 million before the project ended in 1971.
Tagboard now became the most classified project at the Skunk Works, even more secret than the Blackbird airplanes being assembled. So Kelly decided to wall off a section of the huge assembly building housing Blackbird, which already was as guarded as Fort Knox, to accommodate the new drone project. To get inside that walled-off section required special access passes and the shop workers immediately dubbed it Berlin Wall West. Unfortunately, I found myself spending more time inside that walled section than I had ever anticipated. But the technical problems were formidable, especially the attempt to launch a piggybacked drone from a mothership launch platform flying at three times the speed of sound. The drone would be sitting toward the top rear of the fuselage on a pylon. Expecting a drone to launch through the mothership’s Mach 3 shock wave presented a monumental engineering challenge. And Kelly insisted that we launch at full power.
It took us nearly six months to work out some of the shock wave and engine problems with models in the wind tunnel, while other problems concerned with perfecting the guidance system, the cameras, the self-destruction system, the parachute deployment system, all loomed before us like monsters let out of some evil sorcerer’s dungeon. But to Kelly the biggest sweat was guaranteeing a safe launch. I had never seen him so spooked. “Goddam it, I don’t want to lose a pilot and an airplane testing this system. This will be the most dangerous maneuver in any airplane that I’ve ever worked on. And I don’t want that damned drone flying out of control and crashing into the middle of downtown Los Angeles or Portland.”
He kept postponing test launches and finally aimed for the first one on his birthday—February 27, 1965. But that first flight did not occur until we had solved dozens of complicated problems, thirteen months later. Bill Park finally took off in a Blackbird from our secret base with a drone sitting on top of his fuselage. Out over the California coast at 80,000 feet and at Mach 3.2, Bill ignited the drone, which launched perfectly and flew 120 miles out to sea before running out of fuel and crashing. One month later, a second launch was spectacularly successful. The drone flew 1,900 nautical miles at Mach 3.3, holding to its course all the way, and finally fell out of the sky when a hydraulic pump burned out.
On June 16, 1966, we attempted the third test launch of the drone piggybacking on an SR-71 Blackbird, a two-seater. Bill Park was our pilot, and in the second cockpit was Ray Torick, the launch operator. The Blackbird took off and headed for the California coast, just north of L.A., to launch over the naval tracking station at Point Mugu. The flight was a dandy. The drone flew 1,600 nautical miles, making eight programmed turns while taking pictures of the Channel Islands, San Clemente, and Santa Catalina from 92,000 feet at 4,000-plus mph. It did everything but eject the film package, due to electronic failure, which was a very fixable problem. So a few weeks later, on July 30, 1966, we repeated the same test flight over Point Mugu, just up the coast from Malibu. This time we launched at 3.25 Mach and—catastrophe.
The drone crashed into the fuselage of the Blackbird, which spun wildly out of control. Park and Torick both ejected with their pressure suits inflated. Bill Park was picked up in a life raft 150 miles at sea. Torick splashed down nearby, but rashly opened the visor of his helmet while he was paddling in the ocean, so that water flooded into his pressure suit through the neck ring and he sank like a stone. Our flight director, Keith Beswick, who was flying chase, had to go to a local mortuary and cut him out of the pressure suit so that the body could be properly prepared for burial.
We were shaken, but no one more so than Kelly Johnson, who was so upset at Torick’s death that he impulsively and emotionally decided to cancel the entire program and give back the development funding to the Air Force and the agency. Several of us urged him to reconsider. The drone project was actually doing well. But Kelly seemed adamant: “I will not risk any more test pilots or Blackbirds. I don’t have either to spare.” Kelly could now turn to the SAC B-52 bomber as the vehicle to carry the drone. The B-52 was subsonic, which would decrease the dangers of an air launch. And it could launch our drone from about forty-five thousand feet, which would not cut very deeply into our bird’s extended range.
Kelly flew to Washington and, shortly after Christmas 1966, met for over an hour with LBJ’s deputy defense secretary, Cyrus Vance, who was enthusiastic about Tagboard and authorized the use of B-52s as the mothership. Vance told Kelly, “We need this project to work because our government will never again allow a Francis Gary Powers situation to develop. All our overflights over denied territory will either be with satellites or drones.”
The Air Force supplied two specially equipped H Model B-52s, an eight-engine mothership that would carry a drone under each wing on a sixteen-and-a-half-hour, seven-thousand-nautical-mile flight, from Beale Air Force Base in central California to a launch point west of the Philippines, over the South China Sea. The drone’s mission was to overfly China. It would launch from forty thousand feet and fire its solid-propellant booster rocket for eighty-seven seconds, soaring it to eighty thousand feet at Mach 3.3 plus, before falling away. The drone’s guidance system would direct its three-thousand-mile journey. On the return leg of the mission, the drone was programmed to descend to sixty thousand feet and slow to Mach 1.6 before automatically ejecting a hatch containing its film, camera, and expensive telemetry and flight control components, which could be used again after successful parachute recovery.
By the winter of 1968 the Skunk Works and the Air Force teamed up to launch long-range test flights using the mighty B-52, which carried two drones, one under each wing, for a total carrying payload of twenty-four tons. The tests were conducted in Hawaii, with the drones launched thousands of miles across the open Pacific, overflying such places as Christmas Island or Midway, taking pictures of preprogrammed targets on these islands, then looping back toward Hawaii and culminating three thousand miles of precise flying with a rendezvous point above a recovery team of picket ships and cargo planes. Our track record on these so-called Captain Hook test flights was five successes and two failures over fourteen months. And by the fall of 1969 a special committee of CIA and Air Force analysts began recommending hot missions to the EXCOM (Executive Committee of the National Security Council). EXCOM approved and forwarded its recommendation to President Nixon. We received a go for a first mission over Lop Nor nuclear test range on November 9, 1969. A lone B-52 took off from Beale Air Force Base in the predawn hours carrying two Tagboard drones, one under each wing—in case one failed to ignite. After a single air-to-air refueling some twelve hours later, it reached its launch point at the fourteen-hour mark, and Tagboard successfully fired beyond range of Chinese early-warning radar nets.
The next day Kelly told us, “Well, the damned thing came out of China, but was lost. It wasn’t spotted or shot down, but it must’ve malfunctioned and crashed on us.”
Those monitoring the flight said Chinese radar never detected it, so we concluded the guidance had screwed up and the drone just kept on chugging until it ran out of gas, probably after crossing the Sino-Soviet border into Siberia.
About eleven months later, the Nixon White House again approved a flight against Lop Nor. This time the drone performed the mission perfectly, arriving back right on rendezvous point, but after dropping its camera and photo package, the chute failed to open and the package plummeted into the sea and was lost.
In March 1971, Nixon approved a third flight over t
he same area. This one also functioned perfectly; the drone separated its camera package on schedule and it parachuted into the sea where a Navy frigate was on station awaiting a pickup. Unfortunately, the seas were heavy and the Navy botched the recovery, allowing the package to be pulled beneath the ship with the parachute on one side and the hatch on the other. The package sank before they could get cables around it.
The final flight occurred two weeks later. This time our bird was tracked nineteen hundred miles into China and then disappeared from the screen. The reason was never determined. No other flights were attempted. The complex logistics surrounding each flight, involving recovery ships and rendezvous aircraft, cost a bloody fortune to stage. We were canceled in mid-1972.
And Kelly was bitter about it. “I’m not one to find scapegoats,” he told me at the time, “but one reason why we had failures over China is that the birds we used had been stored up at Beale Air Force Base for nine months before the missions were authorized. The blue-suiters had 160 people there assigned to this program. Each of them had a salary to justify and took our drone apart frequently after our final checkouts here, just to put it back together again. And by so doing, they screwed up the works. We should have had the Skunk Works doing complete field service and even fly the actual missions and launch those birds. I’m telling you, Ben, that would have made all the difference in the world.”
The end came in the form of a Defense Department telegram to Kelly on July 8, 1971, informing him that Tagboard had been canceled and ordering him to destroy all of its tooling. Still, we felt pride in the high degree of performance obtained for such a low cost.
On a February day fifteen years later, a CIA operative came to see me at the Skunk Works carrying a panel, which he plopped down on my desk. “Ben, do you recognize this?”
I grinned. “Sure I do. Where did you get it?”