On August 7, 1962, the AF-12, the fighter version of the Blackbird, first flew. A whole family of Blackbirds was hatching in the desert, and they could not be kept hidden much longer.
Shortly after he became president, Lyndon Johnson, briefed about the Blackbirds, ordered that preparations be made to reveal their existence. It was an election year and crucial for the president to appear tough on defense. The leading Republican candidate, Barry Goldwater, had already begun to criticize administration defense policy.
At a press conference on February 24, 1964, Johnson read a statement that described the new “A-11” as “an advanced experimental jet aircraft.” (For some reason, Johnson said A-11 instead of A-12. Similarly, when he announced the SAC version of the Blackbird, Johnson misstated the assigned name — RS-71, for “reconnaissance strike,” instead of SR-71. The brass and contractor scrambled to invent “Strategic Reconnaissance” to back up the reversed initials.)
There was no mention of the first Blackbird, the CIA spy version. And, of course, there were no “A-11s”—the Lockheed design number for the fighter version of the Blackbird — at Edwards, so some were quickly flown from Dreamland to the base. As the “Oxcart Story,” the official CIA history of the project, reported, “So rushed was this operation, so speedily were the aircraft put into hangars upon arrival, that heat from them activated the hangar sprinkler system, dousing the reception team which awaited them.”
In July 1964, pilot Bill Park nearly lost his life when a servo locked up and set his plane rolling just five hundred feet above the runway. In December of the next year, Mele Vojvodich ejected safely at an altitude of 150 feet on takeoff: An electrician had reversed the yaw and pitch gyros — in effect flipped the controls — and the result was another fireball on the lakebed.
In November 1964, the airplane was pronounced ready for use. As early as October 1962, the agency had been eager to offer the still-adolescent Blackbird for spying on Cuba, where the U-2s were vulnerable to SAMs. And in the fall of 1964, Khrushchev threatened to shoot down U-2s over Cuba after the presidential election. At Dreamland, hasty preparations were made to ready A-12s for the job if the Soviet premier carried out his threat.
The Blackbirds were not black at first, but metallic, except in front of the canopy and on the edges, where they were painted dark, like the greasepaint on a football player’s cheekbones to cut the glare. Now Ben Rich had the idea to paint them black, to deal with the heat of high-speed flight.
To showcase the new plane’s abilities, on December 21, 1966, pilot Bill Park flew 10,198 statute miles in six hours. Taking off from Dreamland, he started north toward Yellowstone National Park, then eastward to Bismarck, North Dakota, and on to Duluth, Minnesota. Turning south, Park passed Atlanta en route to Tampa, Florida, then back northwest to Portland, Oregon, and southeast to Nevada. The flight continued eastward, passing Denver and St. Louis. Turning around at Knoxville, Tennessee, Park slipped by Bob Gilliland’s hometown of Memphis in the home stretch back to Nevada. This flight established a record unapproachable by any other aircraft.
The guys on the start carts — the big twin Buick and Chevy V-8s they would roll up to “crank” the engines on the Blackbirds — really liked Bill Park. So it was especially tough for them to watch, from the south end of the Groom runway, as the long black plane, just five hundred feet above the lake, went careening to one side and began rolling steadily like a boat going over, until they could see only the bottom of the airplane, with its landing-gear doors and streaks and smears, finally plunging down. The lake filled with an ugly orange balloon of flame, blackening at its edges. They were talking on the phone to the guys back at the hangar trying to figure out what the hell had happened when Park walked up, the picture of calm.
Park hadn’t had much time to think. He couldn’t get the plane to respond. It wouldn’t stop rolling. It was down to two hundred feet when he flicked the arm switch for the seat, then leaned forward and grabbed the big D-ring between his legs — like some big, loopy luggage handle — and leaned back, putting his weight into it. And suddenly the top was gone, the air rushing cleanly through the cockpit, and in another fraction of a second, still in the seat, he was sailing up into the rangy mountains around Dreamland.
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.