I drove past old ranches, with corrals jury-rigged from wire and discarded doors, looking for a very different kind of airplane. I was heading for El Mirage. The dry lake there had long been a favored spot for hotrodders and motorcyclists, who cut loops and doughnuts into its surface. For artists, too, it was a useful canvas. In the late sixties and early seventies, earth artists had created temporary sculptures here. Inspired in part by the vast canvas of the desert, one had poured strips of asphalt on El Mirage in an X shape that looked from the air like the little x of the airstrips at Dreamland when Kelly Johnson and Tony LeVier had first flown over them. Another artist had sliced long trenches into the lake bed to define “negative space” and what were called “nonsites.” Weren’t the Air Force and CIA into “nonsites” too when they ran bases they wouldn’t acknowledge?
I had just parked next to an old aircraft boneyard when I caught sight of it: a tiny fleck that came closer, turning into what looked like a giant white paper plane, with wing tabs turned down, wheeling over the small airfield. But the strangest thing was its nose — it had no cockpit, no windows. It looked blind.
There were no windows because there was no pilot. This was Predator, the most recent UAV, flying for the CIA and the military, being tested at the El Mirage desert airstrip of its builder, General Atomics, Inc.
For a long time, we didn’t even have a good name for these things. Once, they were dismissively called “drones,” then “remotely piloted vehicles.” By the mid-nineties, the term of choice had become UAVs, and in the Pentagon the field was chic. A new generation of UAVs was arriving, relying on advances in electronics and computing, miniaturized sensors and cameras and relay systems. Today’s UAVs are spy planes; tomorrow’s will be fighters.
For years, UAVs inhabited a world of their own, a shadow of a shadow. Overlooked, ignored, they never attracted the kind of attention the black planes did. Before they became fashionable, how long had they been flying out of Dreamland?
Even the most famous of imagined Dreamland projects may have been a UAV: The “Glossary of Aerospace Terms and Abbreviations” in the September 1994 issue of Air International claimed Aurora is an acronym for AUtomatic Retrieval Of Remotely-piloted Aircraft. And the builder of the huge Perseus UAV for NASA was a company called… Aurora.
Hovering high above unfriendly countries, their proponents say, UAVs can relay via satellite to distant ground stations video, radar, or infrared images of anything that moves. “Lingering” is the favored term. The Predator, for instance, can fly three hundred miles and “linger” for up to two days in the air, where it is virtually invisible to the human eye and difficult for radar to spot. (Despite a fifty-foot wingspan, it shows up only as a square meter radar “signature.”)
Proponents have proclaimed the dawn of a new era in aviation and a new kind of pilot — the right stuff of the future. The joystick in the cockpit may be replaced by one on the desktop, and Top Gun may be replaced by Captain Nolo — traditional Air Force lingo for “no live operator.”
Like robots of any sort, UAVs have the advantage of requiring no room and board, no training or food. They can pull more G’s than human pilots (fighter aircraft are limited in their acceleration and deceleration not by the strength of their airframes but by the G-tolerance of the human body). Cases of “temporary interruption of consciousness”—blackouts — have been suspected in several crashes over the last few years, including General Bond’s. UAVs cannot be held hostage or suffer torture. Politically, UAVs benefit from the new post — Cold War/post — Gulf War emphasis on inexpensive high-tech weapons that avoid putting human lives at risk. And of course UAVs cost less than manned aircraft. Predator was tagged at just $1.6 million per craft.
A couple of days after I saw it in the air, four Predators were on their way to the former Yugoslavia to conduct round-the-clock observation of forces on the ground. Predator, a so-called Tier II UAV, follows the Tier I “Gnat 750,” which was less successful when tried out by the CIA from Albanian bases.
That afternoon I drove back west, straight up to the gray and blue buildings of the Lockheed Skunk Works — it was the post — Cold War Skunk Works now, as neatly groomed and carefully patrolled as any Hollywood set, properly outfitted as the high holy of American aviation. I had come to watch the unveiling of Darkstar.
Inside the hangar called Building 602, we were given press kits in neat black folders. Representatives were there to brief us. Until 2:28, when the curtain was to be pulled back, “the configuration was sight sensitive” and therefore officially classified. Lockheed, Boeing, DARPA, and DARO, the Defense Airborne Reconnaissance Office, were all partners in the project, and the craft, they told us, would go from drawing board to first flight in an unprecedentedly short twelve months.
“How,” I asked later, “was such rapid development possible? Were there other programs that helped?”
They were, the DARPA man said, able to rely on experience from other programs.
“Could you tell what those programs were?”
“I could,” he said, “but I won’t.” General laughter ensued.
The room was darkened. There was a great rumbling sound from above. I looked up and saw that the yellow roof crane that spanned the whole hangar was sliding slowly in the dark, a cluster of orange lights on its center, pulling back the black curtain. As stirring music played, dry ice spread a soft and ghostly fog around the craft: a white object that looked like nothing so much as a flying saucer with a large porthole. It took a few seconds to see that narrow wings grew from the saucer. It was just like the rollouts I had seen in Detroit for new cars — music, stage effects, lights: technology as theater.
One eager young PR person running around seemed to have nothing to do. I collared him and asked what music was playing. He disappeared and returned in a few minutes with the answer: It was from the Disney film The Rocketeer, based on a comic book about a man with a rocket backpack. The film and the music evoked the romantic days of aviation, when Howard Hughes was setting flight records and making movies, and the alliance of Hollywood and aerospace was being formed. The name Darkstar was taken from John Carpenter’s mid-seventies film about the crew of a roving spaceship.
Darkstar was the new so-called Tier III Minus UAV. The “Tier” designations are DARPA project names, bestowed by a law, the “Section 845—Other Agreements Authority,” that gave DARPA special powers for prototype development outside the normal channels of Pentagon procurement procedures. The Tier designations had been dreamed up to delineate the pecking order of UAVs by size, cost, and stealthiness. No one knew how, but Lockheed had managed to develop Darkstar in a matter of months. Rumor held that Darkstar was the son of a UAV called Tier III. By interesting coincidence, that name echoed “TR3A,” the name of the Manta, the craft Steve believed he had spotted in Roswell. Tier 3—TR3. Was there a secret meaning? Or just a general confusion?
Predator is Tier I; Tier II Plus or “Global Hawk” was being constructed by Teledyne Ryan in San Diego and could fly at 65,000 feet for twenty-four hours or more. Darkstar was Tier III Minus. It cruised at 180 miles per hour using a single jet engine buried inside what looks like a porthole. It could fly as high as 45,000 feet and survey some 1,600 square miles with synthetic aperture radar or electro-optical cameras. But its flying-saucer-like shape would make it more stealthy than the Tier II Plus. It had been, the briefers said, “optimized for low observables”; in other words, made to look like a saucer to avoid radar detection.