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.