by Phil Patton
Kicking Park up the pole was the rocket engine under his rear end. As soon as it quit, he got another kick as the drogue chute opened, and then the seat ejector, the straps they called “butt snappers,” threw him out, the way it was supposed to, but he could see he was pretty close to the ground, and it must have felt like forever before the chute finally opened. Two things seemed to happen at the very same moment. First, he was grabbed by the chest and legs as the chute went taut, drawing him upright. And second, his feet hit the ground. Then he gathered up his chute and began walking toward the end of the runway. It was not the last time Park would eject at the Ranch.
For the test pilots, Dreamland was just the office, their everyday job. They saw very little that was exciting and certainly nothing mysterious about Groom Lake. Secrecy was a burden, a frustration. But the difference between a test pilot and a regular pilot, said Bob Gilliland, is that test pilots have emergencies every day. What caused the most fear? one Blackbird pilot was asked. Fear? He wouldn’t touch the word. “Sure,” he said. “From time to time there were levels of concern.”
The basic mode of life on the Ranch was akin to the mind-numbing tedium characteristic of military installations the world over. One ground-support man tried to liven things up—and, it must be speculated, supplement his salary—by showing pornographic movies. Blue movies for the blue sky boys! But Kelly Johnson got wind of it and put his foot down, albeit softly. “Whatever you’ve got up there, I just want it out,” he told the man.
Bob Gilliland came into the program through his friend pilot Lou Schalk. It came about because of a problem with Bob’s Mercedes. Bob had to drop it off at an auto shop on Sunset Boulevard and he got Schalk to pick him up. Schalk had a red Austin Healey, and on the way back the two pilots, jammed together in the little British sports car, began talking. Schalk told Gilliland that he was flying a new airplane Kelly Johnson was developing and that he needed another test pilot.
Gilliland was having fun flying the F-104, a real hot rod of a fighter, and he was afraid the new plane was some weird settle-on-its-butt thing like the vertical-takeoff-and-landing craft the Skunk Works had dreamed up and Herm Salmon had flown. But he agreed to talk to Kelly Johnson. Johnson told him that the new plane “will be faster and go higher and farther than the 104.” That got Gilliland interested.
“Now, let’s go take a look,” Johnson said. He led Gilliland into the hangar where the next Blackbird still lay in long, sharp pieces. Gilliland could sense an excitement in the very shapes, as Johnson knew a good pilot would. He signed on.
Johnson hated the military test pilots. He always wanted his own pilots to test the new planes thoroughly before the military boys could get their hands on them. It all went back to 1939, when Ben Kelsey, an Army test pilot, lost the prototype of the P-38 trying to fly it across the country to set a new record. It would impress the brass and Congress and the public. But he came in too low on landing, an engine gulped and hesitated, and he ended up in a bank on a golf course.
It set the program back two years. Tony LeVier went so far as to say that that particular piece of grandstanding prolonged the war. So Johnson picked his test pilots carefully, and their succession is as legendary in the aviation world as that of Yankee centerfielders: Milo Burcham on the P-38, Tony LeVier on the XP-80 jet and F-104 Starfighter, Lou Schalk, Jim Eastham, Bob Gilliland, Bill Park.
Security was intense. Lockheed even airbrushed the mountains out of the background of photographs to help disguise the location. The situation was much changed from the early days of the U-2, the surplus Navy structures supplemented with brand-new modern hangars, and a workforce that had grown by five or six times, to 1,100 or so by 1962.
Life at Groom was dull, but Bob Gilliland would go jogging and lift weights sometimes to shed stress. You could play tennis and there was a softball team, but not much else. Lou Schalk found other diversions: He brought the red Austin Healey to the base and raced it across the lake bed against Jim Eastham’s blue one.
But it was exciting learning how to carefully move the inlet spikes, like big missile nose cones, that were the key to engine performance, to make the airplane go higher and faster. It was exciting, Gilliland always felt, because almost every evening meant the end of another day when he had been able to fly faster than any pilot in history. Only no one knew. By the fall of 1963 they were flying the airplane well beyond Mach 3, at 110,000 feet.
There was no television, only radio, at the Ranch, and one day in November 1963 Gilliland came back from flying “the CIA bird,” the A-12, to find that everyone in the hangar was gathered around the radio. “What’s going on?” he asked. “JFK has been shot, LBJ has been shot, Connally has been shot,” someone told him. Bill Park said, “Well, hell, I don’t know what all the excitement’s about. It’s just another Texas shoot-out.” The pilots by then were as dry and hard as the bed of Groom Lake. They seemed to have absorbed the desert itself.
Park was the driest. Ben Rich called him “an outstanding stick man, cool and calm,” but there was more. When there was discussion of basing U-2s on aircraft carriers, it was Park who was called on to see if it could work. He landed one on the pitching deck. Using a special technique he devised himself, in 1958 Park had pushed the F-104 to a world record altitude of 91,985 feet—a record the Skunk Works had to keep secret.
When Kelly Johnson strapped the D-21 drone onto the back of the Blackbird, in the program called Tagboard, he picked Park to fly the dangerous release missions. The idea was to send an unmanned craft over China to take a look at the far western Lop Nor nuclear test area.
After takeoff from Groom Lake, the launch run would begin over Dalhart, Texas, aiming for a release point around Point Mugu in California. The Blackbird took half a continent’s width just to get warmed up to Mach 3 plus, the speed necessary for the D-21’s ramjet to function.
The very first time they got the mother plane up to speed, the D-21 let go all right, but it stuck close to the big airplane as if reluctant to venture off on its own. Then all of a sudden it veered and dropped—the engine gulped and faltered—and hit the tail of the Blackbird, pitching the big plane forward. The long black plane snapped in the middle and, still traveling at Mach 3, began to tumble down, as both Park and Ray Torick, the backseat man in charge of the launch, flipped the levers to arm the ejection seats and pulled the rings. In the Pacific off Point Mugu, Park was picked up by rescue helicopters, but Torick’s pressure suit filled with water and dragged him to his death.
Kelly Johnson immediately canceled the D-21 test program; it would remain secret for more than a decade. The strange black D-21s would make their way to Arizona, where years later, in the boneyard, I would see them—or I wouldn’t.
Park would become the longest-serving pilot at Dreamland. He went on to fly Have Blue, the first Stealth prototype. When he first saw it, Park couldn’t imagine how the thing would ever fly. A lot had been sacrificed to get the right radar cross sections. Thinner and more dartlike than the Stealth fighter to come, it was painted up in a desert camou, a broken pattern of grays and browns. It also had what was known as an “an excessive sink rate,” a tendency to fall like a stone in certain low speeds. Its wings were too small. This could be fixed in a production fighter, but it was something the test pilots had to live with.
Coming in one day in 1976, the plane took a dip on Park and hit hard on the right gear. He pulled up and around, but when he started to lower the gear again, the right would not go down. He even came down on the left and tried to shake the other gear lose, without success. Park took the airplane up to ten thousand feet and burned off most of his remaining fuel. “Unless anyone has a better idea,” he radioed, “I’m bailing out.” That morning, the commander had asked him about letting the base paramedic go for the day. There hadn’t been any problems on earlier flights, and the test series was nearing its end. But Park demurred. He went by the book.
Now he had to pull the ring again, but he struck his head on the headrest, cracked a
vertebra, and was knocked out. Amazingly, the seat lifted him free of the airplane at ten thousand feet, he separated from the seat, and the chute opened as designed. But still unconscious, he hit hard. He broke a leg and his head was dragged along the caliche, where his mouth filled with dry sand. By the time the paramedics got to him, his heart had stopped. He would spend six weeks in intensive care and six months in a cast.
The quintessential Park story is not of any of his bailouts, but of an earlier close call. He was flying a U-2 out of Burbank when it developed fuel problems. The engine quit and he had to dead-stick it home. He barely made it back to base, clearing a chain-link fence by six inches. Ben Rich came out to the airplane. “What happened?” Rich asked. “I don’t know,” Park said. “I just got here myself.”
The secret black planes would challenge SAC, and LeMay. Dreamland was, indirectly, an offspring, too, of the blue-sky, high-noon vision that was SAC. While Dreamland would birth black planes, they would serve SAC’s silver bombers. They would find the targets for the bombers to strike. And they would, the day after doomsday, fly back to see how well the silver planes had done.
One day in 1962, Richard Bissell came to the White House to brief JFK on the new and still very secret Blackbird, the CIA’s A-12. The president was puzzled. He looked at the documents, and listened to Bissell telling him how far and fast the agency’s new plane could fly. “Could Kelly Johnson convert your airplane into a bomber?” the president asked. “That question is more properly addressed to General LeMay,” Bissell diplomatically answered.
But it got Johnson in hot water, and he was not pleased with Bissell. Johnson had carefully not spoken to the Air Force or the Pentagon about the bomber version of the Blackbird. He knew LeMay wouldn’t like a black challenge to his silver planes. But now he hurried to Washington to work his charm on the bypassed generals. Later in 1962, when the B-70 was cut back from ten planned planes to four, LeMay blamed Johnson.
Finally, the two men met at the Skunk Works. Their aides drew back as they walked and conferred, the cigar smoke trailing behind them. By the end of the day, it appeared Johnson’s charm had had an effect. LeMay seemed all set to order bombers and recon Blackbirds—an entire black air force. But by the end of the year, only the SR-71—the reconnaissance version—had been ordered.
With the SR-71, SAC got its own Blackbirds, and while it used them to spy on distant countries—the Soviet Union and China excepted—their ostensible job was something called “post-strike reconnaissance.” The SR-71s came in handy in 1973, when the United States eased tensions in the Mideast by offering the Soviets photographic proof of Israeli positions. The Soviets had threatened intervention; now they backed off.
Primarily, though, the SR-71s were supposed to be part of SAC’s main “deterrent” mission—fighting nuclear wars. The SR-71s’ job would be to fly over the Soviet Union in the event of nuclear war, after the bombs and missiles had fallen, and “assess battle damage.” What they did do was simple intelligence gathering, flying over trouble spots, and, after the A-12s were phased out in 1968, they did it for the CIA as well as the Air Force.
But to keep up the original premise, SR pilots had to go through the monthly ritual of refresher courses in post-nuclear-battle damage assessment, learning to distinguish what cities were in need of additional blows and on which targets another nuke would simply, in the infamous phrase of the overkill era, “bounce the rubble.” The exercise struck the pilots as not only pointless but grim and surreal.
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was looking at different kinds of planes. McNamara—“Mack the Knife,” the contractors called him—was pushing the THX for both the Air Force and the Navy.
Both the Air Force and the Navy hated it—if only because it forced them to share. McNamara not only killed the Blackbird but put in motion the process that would destroy the tooling to produce it. The Skunk Works buffs all know the dark day: On May 5, 1970, Kelly Johnson was ordered to sell the dies and jigs for the fastest, highest-flying airplane in history as scrap for just a few cents a pound.
But the symbolic end had come on June 26, 1968, when a group of high-level CIA officials, pilots, and pilots’ families assembled on the caliche at Groom Lake. Each of the living agency pilots, and the families of those who had died, were presented the agency’s highest award, the Intelligence Star. At last wives got a glimpse of the strange place to which their husbands had been disappearing. But there would be no public acknowledgment of the existence of the CIA Blackbird for another two decades.
12. Low Observables
The Blackbird had succeeded because of the great speed and altitude at which it flew. But before the plane ever took off, the Skunk Works people knew it could never safely fly over the Soviet Union. Constantly improving Soviet radars, such as the one the Pentagon called Tall King, could spot it even if the human eye could not.
The Blackbird looked as if it had been shaped for speed, but the knifelike extensions of its fuselage, called chines, which made it look like a sword with wings, had been designed to elude radar. Future airplanes would take their shapes less from the wind tunnel than from radar test chambers and be sculpted not by shock waves but by electromagnetic ones.
In the 1860s and ’70s, in quiet labs at King’s College London and Cambridge, the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell theorized that light, electricity, magnetism, and what would later be called radio- and microwaves were all related. In his 1873 Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, he told how they shared the properties of reflection and refraction, diffraction and polarization. Here lay the origins of radar.
One day in 1932, with fascism taking hold across Europe, former prime minister Stanley Baldwin stood up in the House of Commons to deliver a warning that there was no longer any question of protecting the man in the street from bombing. During World War I, zeppelins had bombed London, and the British understood that no fleet could provide full defense in the future. The next war would turn on the fact that Britain “was no longer an island.” “The bomber will always get through” was Baldwin’s famous phrase, to be repeated down the decades in the debate over airpower.
“The only defense is in offense,” he went on, “which means that you will have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy.” It was an endorsement of the teachings of the airpower enthusiasts and a foretaste of the doctrines of massive retaliation and assured deterrence.
Not everyone could accept that there was no defense against the bomber, however. Just as Ronald Reagan, a half century later, would look to the dream of Star Wars to break the logjam of mutual destruction, the British air ministry desperately sought new ways to shoot down bombers. They even looked at such exotic ideas as radio-wave weapons—ray guns. How much radio energy would it take to make a man’s blood boil? scientists were asked. How much to blow an airplane out of the sky?
The results were not promising, but something else interesting came out of the discussion: the idea that you could locate, if not destroy, an airplane by beaming radio waves at it and capturing and measuring the reflection. Clerk Maxwell had postulated in 1873, and the German physicist Heinrich Hertz had later shown, that microwaves would behave like light waves. The early radar scientists worked out just how this was so. They had invented a new way of seeing things in the sky. Instead of ray guns, they got radar.
It took an odd character, met with some disdain in the London gentlemen’s clubs where the planning went on, to turn the idea into reality.
Robert Alexander Watson-Watt, a pudgy and loquacious man in the Ministry of Defense, pushed the idea of radio detection and ranging. (The British provided the idea but the Americans would provide the acronym.) He tracked a Dutch airliner crossing the Channel in 1937, and by the time of the Battle of Britain he had laid out a network of stations that fed into the underground war room. By the narrowest of margins, and aided by Hitler’s and Goering’s failure to strike first at airbases rather than at civilians, radar seemed to have won the air war for
the British in 1940. “Britain,” Watson-Watt declared, triumphantly but prematurely, “is an island once more.”
Such security was not long lasting. And America, too, would soon enough no longer be a continent protected from attack by even greater extents of water. With the coming of the atomic bomb, the consequences of bombers crossing the ocean became even more frightening.
Electronics, however, was advancing more rapidly than jet engines or airframes. By the 1960s, the big bomber was an endangered species. By the 1970s, radar had such a lead over even aircraft equipped with their own jamming and spoofing electronics that it seemed unlikely that “the bomber will always get through.” This became specifically clear to the U.S. Air Force in the 1973 Mideast war, when some thirty of the topline fighters it had sold to Israel were shot down by improved radar and SAMs. The Pentagon had been right to kill LeMay’s B-70—new SAMs would have made it obsolete—but smaller, faster planes were vulnerable as well.
In 1975 the Pentagon began convening special conclaves of scientists, engineers, and contractors to consider a response. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was put in charge. Founded in the wake of Sputnik, DARPA served as the Pentagon’s version of Bell Labs, a free-thinking outfit dedicated to exploring the frontiers of technology liberated from bureaucracy and interservice rivalries.