Secrecy was even more intense, if that was possible, with Oxcart than with the U-2. Checks were made out to the dummy C&J corporation. Drawn on the CIA’s reserve funds, free from overzealous congressional or executive auditing, they were sent to anonymous post office boxes scattered around Los Angeles. Once, a suspicious supplier tried to track down the box; he was intercepted by security agents.
The Ranch, Watertown — or “home plate,” as some were now calling it — prepared for a much larger effort than the U-2 had required. The new plane, called the A-12, or Blackbird, would need a longer runway and larger support staff.
Construction began in earnest in September 1960, and continued on a double-shift schedule until mid-1964. The new runway measured 8,500 feet and required pouring over 25,000 yards of concrete. Kelly Johnson was concerned that with the high takeoff speed of the Blackbird, expansion joints could set off dangerous vibrations, so the runway was built of offset slabs, each 150 feet long and layered in tilelike patterns.
The Blackbird would also need about 500,000 gallons of PF-1 aircraft fuel per month. After considering an airlift or a pipeline, the team decided to rely on trucks, but that required paving eighteen miles of highway leading into the base.
SAC again provided support. In late 1961, Air Force colonel Robert J. Holbury became commander of the base, with a CIA manager as his deputy. Support aircraft began arriving in the spring of 1962—including eight F-101s, two T33s, a C-130 for cargo transport, a U-3A for administration purposes, a helicopter for search and rescue, a Cessna-180, and a Lockheed F-104 for chase. The Blackbirds were too big to be loaded onto planes and flown in from Burbank, like the U-2s had been, so they were carted by truck. A pilot truck outfitted with thirty-five-foot bamboo outriggers — the size of the finished airplane — drove the route testing for obstacles, such as signs, branches, and so on. Then the obstacles had to be removed, sometimes through negotiation with local authorities. Road signs were hacksawed and hinged for the passage of the new bird.
Between the high-tech complexities of working with titanium and the lower-tech problems — they tested the ejection seat by towing it with a 1961 Ford Thunderbird convertible, the fastest car they could rent from Hertz — the Skunk Works fell behind schedule on the Blackbird’s first flight, and there were warnings from Richard Bissell.
For the first time, the Skunk Works was falling behind. The initial flight was originally planned for the end of May 1961, but it slipped to August, largely because of Lockheed’s difficulties in procuring and fabricating titanium. Ironically, much of the raw metal would come from the Soviet Union.
Not surprisingly, the manufacturer of the engines, Pratt & Whitney, found it difficult to turn out a power plant to drive the big airplane to three and a half times the speed of sound.
It must have galled Johnson to admit the delay when he got a stern note from Bisselclass="underline"
I have learned of your expected additional delay in first flight from 30 August to 1 December 1961. This news is extremely shocking on top of our previous slippage from May to August and my understanding as of our meeting 19 December that the titanium extrusion problems were essentially overcome. I trust this is the last of such disappointments short of a severe earthquake in Burbank.
But delays could come as no surprise, since the Skunk Works was single-handedly pioneering the use of titanium, learning on the job that the metal had to be carefully protected against contact with chlorine, fluorine, and cadmium, which could make tools unusable. The engineers had discovered that the Burbank water supply was fluoridated, and from then on used only distilled water. A whole new family of lubricants and seals had to be invented, and even so, the airplane literally seeped fuel when it sat on the ground with full tanks. For its whole flying life, the Blackbird had to be “topped off” by in-flight refueling once it was in the air and expansion had tightened the tanks.
Kelly Johnson predicted that the craft would not be matched for the rest of the century. It was like a piece of technology retrieved from the future.
In January 1962, an agreement was reached with the Federal Aviation Administration that extended the restricted airspace around the test area. The first references to Area 51 began to appear around this time, as well as a new name applied to the control tower for the airspace: Dreamland.
A number of FAA air traffic controllers were cleared for the project, and the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) established procedures to prevent their radar stations from reporting the appearance of the Blackbirds on their radar screens. But on the high radar range at Tonopah, operators would soon be seeing things moving much faster than they could explain.
On February 17, construction of the first aircraft was finished, and in the next few days the plane underwent its final tests. It was taken apart and stowed on the special trucks designed to move it to Groom Lake. A famous film clip shows Kelly Johnson planning the movement of the first A-12 to the base. On the chalkboard behind him is this list:
Feb 17 — Aircraft complete
Feb 18 — Aircraft put down on its gear
Feb 19–Feb 22 — Engineering final tests
Feb 23–25 — Disassemble and load on trucks
Feb 26 4:00 AM — Move out to Area 51
On February 26, 1962, at two-thirty in the morning, the convoy bearing the first plane left Burbank. It arrived by the back road to Groom Lake at about one in the afternoon on February 28. The second aircraft struck a Greyhound bus en route; the bus company was quickly and quietly compensated some $4,800 to settle the damage.
Not until April was the plane ready to fly. On April 26, 1962, pilot Lou Schalk flew the plane for about a mile and a half, just twenty feet off the ground. The plane felt like it was wallowing, and he decided to set it back down. From the ground, the crew saw the plane begin a series of lateral oscillations, which terrified Johnson, who later recorded that “it was a horrible sight.”
The tower could no longer hear Schalk, and from the tower and the ground you could see the Blackbird disappear in a great cloud of dust from the lake. It was enveloped for minutes, then finally reemerged in the distance as Schalk made a turn. They were relieved he hadn’t run into the mountains.
The first “official” flight took place on April 30, a year behind schedule, and on the second flight, on May 4, the plane went supersonic. One spectator at the first flight was Richard Bissell. He had been eased out of the CIA in February 1962, a dismissal occasioned by the Bay of Pigs fiasco the previous April and delayed only for the sake of appearances. At Kelly Johnson’s personal invitation, Bissell was standing on the white surface at Groom when the long bird he had championed took off.
Space was the next frontier of espionage, and the first flight of the Blackbird coincided almost exactly with the orbiting of the first Soviet spy satellite. From now on, airplanes at Groom would have to be kept in hangars or covered with camouflage when Soviet satellites passed overhead, as they would be sure to do. In the Kremlin, they already knew about Dreamland.
The pressure to get the Blackbird operational mounted in the fall. In January 1963, Bob Gilliland arrived at the test location, ready to fly the Air Force fighter version of the plane, joining pilots Bill Park and Jim Eastham. On May 24 came the first crash, when the pitot tube iced up and left pilot Ken Collins with no accurate speed indication. He bailed out over Wendover, Utah. A farmer in a pickup truck found him. “I’ve just crashed an F-105 with a nuclear weapon on board,” Collins said. “Let’s get out of here and find a phone.” The farmer quickly complied.