Following the failure of both his small stealthy and non-stealthy designs, Johnson returned to his Archangel I concept of a purely performance-driven design with no concessions to reducing RCS. The A-10 and A-11 designs were the results of pursuing that philosophy.
Utilizing the J93 turbojet, the A-10 was 16,000lb lighter than Archangel I and was therefore able to gain an additional 2,500ft at mid-mission altitude. It was able to cruise at Mach 3.2 at 90,500ft and had an operational radius of 2,000nm. However, it transpired that the J93 engines were 18 months behind the development of the J58; so in March 1959 the Lockheed team began work on what they believed would be their final major design, the A-11. Designed specifically to utilize air refueling, it would therefore have a range of over 13,000 miles and be able to complete an eight-hour round-robin mission from the United States, thus negating the inherent political and security issues associated with operating such aircraft from a foreign base.
By the end of May 1959 the SEI team at Cambridge had completed a comparison evaluation between the A-11 and FISH and their report, recommending the A-11, was forwarded to the Land Committee, who again met independently the two competing teams in Boston on 9 June. The Committee adjourned without making a definitive decision; however they did conclude that sporadic detection and tracking by radar was inevitable regardless of the platform. On the flight back to Burbank, Johnson was convinced that Lockheed was now out of the competition.
In the event, it wasn’t the Land Committee that decided the fate of the two designs that they had been deliberating over, but SAC. In an interesting turn of events, Widmer accompanied his corporate boss, J. T. McNarney, and other senior Convair directors to a presentation in June that included Gen Curtis LeMay, Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force. Convair’s objective was to sell the capabilities of the B-58B to the Air Force. However, to make the earlier B-58A commercially viable, the company needed first to sell more A-models. The presentation seems to have gone well; LeMay liked what he saw and asked, “When can I have this?” Unfortunately for Convair, he didn’t like the answer; and when McNarney told the notoriously fiery general that the B-58B would be available after SAC had purchased another three wings of B-58As, LeMay stormed out. Consequently the B-58B was never ordered by the Air Force and without its mother ship, the parasite FISH would not be built either.
The final competition
In early July, and much to Johnson’s surprise, Lockheed was instructed to redesign the A-11 incorporating RCS reduction techniques, even to the detriment of cruise altitude. In contrast, Convair was instructed to undertake a colossal amount of work completely redesigning FISH as a single-stage platform, not reliant upon a mother ship and utilizing two J58 turbojets instead of ramjets. They called their new design KINGFISH.
The Convair team now pulled out all the stops, working through three or four design variations. Remarkably, in just over two weeks they had not only decided upon the basic design, but had also considerably modified the FISH radar model being used for RCS testing at Indian Springs AFB in Nevada, to the larger KINGFISH configuration. The KINGFISH model then undertook a series of 70 MHz radar tests from August 15 — the results of which would turn out to be similar to those achieved by the A-12.
“LD” MacDonald and Ed Lovick advised Dick Fuller how best to modify the A-11 design into the reduced RCS A-12. This included using chines, suggested by Frank Rodgers during the A-4 series of designs. Once these were applied a cross-section of the fuselage forebody resembled a two-dimensional flying saucer! The wings were blended into both the fuselage and engine nacelles, whilst the twin tails were made of composite material and also canted inboard at 15 degrees. Other more subtle RCS reduction innovations included incorporating Ed Lovick’s serrations that were applied to the wing leading and trailing edges as well as to the chines, which were then filled with dielectric material, as explained earlier. The A-11’s rectangular inlets were replaced with round, axisymmetric units; and the two translating spikes, used to regulate mass airflow into each inlet, not only helped to shield the front of the compressor face from incident radar energy, but also were covered in RAM.
On July 14, Bissell and the Land Committee together with James Killian met and discussed the pros and cons of FISH, KINGFISH, the A-11, and A-12, in addition to reports speculating about the possible capabilities of the new Soviet Bar Lock radar. Like the June 9 meeting, a final decision regarding which design to recommend wasn’t made; however, those present did begin to formulate a briefing to be taken by Dulles and others to President Eisenhower six days later.
Final proposals from both Convair and Lockheed were submitted on August 20 and nine days later Lockheed received official notification that their design had been selected by the Committee, and that consequently the company would receive $4.5 million by way of an advanced feasibility contract, covering the period September 1, 1959 to January 1, 1960. The name of the new program was to be Oxcart and Project Gusto was to be terminated. On August 31, 1959, Lockheed began building a full-scale RCS model with which to validate their RCS claims. However it was decided that the site at Indian Springs AFB couldn’t provide the required level of security to test a full-size A-12 model, so Johnson instructed that these tests would instead be conducted at the radar target scatter (or Rat Scat) range, located at Area 51.
Area 51, or “Watertown Strip” as it had been known to the U-2 community, offered exceptional remoteness. Located about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, the site would also be home for Oxcart. However, a vast amount of work was necessary both at the airfield and the Rat Scat facility to bring them up to the standards required for this new advanced program.
In December 1959, John Parangosky was appointed as the CIA’s program manager of Oxcart. Following validation of the A-12’s RCS tests, a contract worth $96.6 million was signed between the Agency and Lockheed on February 11, 1960, for the manufacture and testing of 12 A-12s, including one two-seat conversion trainer. The CIA had included a clause within the contract providing for periodic re-evaluation of costs — a clause that had to be invoked a number of times in the coming five years due to spiraling costs attributed to technical difficulties.
Mayday
Despite misgivings, Eisenhower continued to sanction a limited number of U-2 Soviet overflights on the basis of the continuing need to collect such intelligence and the ongoing failure of the Corona satellite reconnaissance program to plug the gap. But on May 1, 1960, Soviet radar and SAM technology finally caught up with Project Chalice, when the U-2 being flown by Gary Powers was shot down near Sverdlovsk, deep within the Soviet Union. Two days later, assuming that Powers had been killed, approval was given by Eisenhower to put out a prearranged cover story in which NASA claimed that one of their U-2 research aircraft “apparently went down” after the pilot “reported that he was experiencing oxygen difficulties.” This played perfectly into Premier Khrushchev’s hands and on Saturday, May 7, having returned to the Supreme Soviet, he revealed to the world the truth: “We have the remnants of the plane — and we also have the pilot, who is quite alive and kicking!” The wreckage, maps and even film were recovered proving, beyond dispute, the precise reason behind the flight. A subsequent mid-May summit meeting in Paris was a disaster, during which Khrushchev walked out after Eisenhower refused to apologise publicly for sanctioning the U-2 overflights (despite having assured the Soviet Premier that there would be no more such flights during the remaining eight months of his administration).