In 1942, a young engineer called Robert Widmer moved from the San Diego operation to Fort Worth to begin work on the B-36, a massive intercontinental bomber that would make even the B-24 look tiny. It had been specified in 1939 to bomb Germany from the United States in the event that Hitler succeeded in invading Britain. It rolled out of Plant 4 in 1946 and went on to become the backbone of Strategic Air Command during the 1950s.
Bob Widmer spent much of the late '40s and early '50s lobbying to save the B-36 from cancellation before going on to design the B-58, SAC's first supersonic bomber. But by the late 1950s, Widmer had also begun throwing his energies into another project — one that was so advanced that the details would still be beyond the public domain four decades later.
The project was called Kingfish and it emerged out of a requirement by the CIA for a very fast high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft to replace the U-2, which was rapidly running out of places to hide from the Soviets' SA-2 Guideline surface-to-air missiles in the rarefied air over the Soviet Union.
As chief engineer of Fort Worth at the time of the Kingfish program and, almost 40 years later, still a consultant for Lockheed Martin Fort Worth, Bob Widmer was someone I very much wanted to meet.
What was so special about Kingfish that it had remained out of the limelight all these years? Questions about this aircraft take on an even more bizarre twist, when you consider the official history of the program that spawned it.
I was interested in Widmer and Kingfish, because to me it appeared to offer a link — one that had been overlooked by everyone else — to Aurora, the large black triangular aircraft that had supposedly been sighted over the North Sea in 1989.
In August 1959, the CIA's contract for a high-flying, super-fast reconnaissance aircraft went not to GD Convair, but to Kelly Johnson's Skunk Works, which went on to deliver an aircraft called the A-12 under a program code-named "Oxcart."
The A-12 flew for the first time in 1962 from the USAF's remote test center at Groom Lake, Nevada, better known today as Area 51. The 15 A-12s that were built conducted three years' worth of operational reconnaissance missions up to the program's cancellation in 1968. By then, an Air Force version of the plane, the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, had entered service.
With a top speed of Mach 3.4, the Blackbird remained the world's fastest operational aircraft until its retirement in the early 1990s. If you exclude the evidence for Aurora, there is, even today, nothing remotely as fast.
In official versions of the Kingfish/A-12 contest (declassified by the CIA only in the early 1990s) the Convair and Lockheed proposals were remarkably evenly matched. Both aircraft were optimized for cruise speeds of Mach 3.2, but the Lockheed proposal beat its rival's by tiny margins on key parameters such as range and operating altitude. On this evidence, then, it was only right that Lockheed got the deal.
But in the same way, as Marckus observed, that there are two kinds of science, so there are two kinds of history.
In 1995, a small photo of a wind-tunnel model of Kingfish appeared for the first time in the pages of an aerospace magazine. Scrutiny showed the model to be much more advanced than the paltry details in the caption suggested.
When I made inquiries at Lockheed Martin, under whose historical aegis both of these programs (Kingfish and the A-12/SR-71) now fell, I discovered that Bob Widmer, Kingfish's designer, was still employed at Fort Worth as a consultant. At 80 years of age, Widmer was busying himself in unmanned combat air vehicle technology. UCAVs — cheap, pilotless fighter planes — are seen very much as the future. It says a great deal about Widmer's skills as a designer that he was still employed at the cutting edge of aerospace and defense engineering almost 60 years after he joined Consolidated; but then Widmer, I was about to learn, was no ordinary engineer. Like Lockheed's Kelly Johnson and other "engineerleaders" of the day, he'd helped to shape the modern U.S. aerospace industry.
His officiai biography describes him as an "innovator and a maverick" and the "first engineering leader to totally integrate airframe, propulsion and avionics into a single weapon system, the B-58."
What it does not say, but what I had gleaned from others, was that he blended these skills with those of a pastor, acting as guide and mentor to his team. In the 1950s, the pressure on GD Convair to outperform its rivals was intense, but the atmosphere inside the plant was informal and shirtsleeves — almost familial. To many of the younger engineers, Bob Widmer wasn't just a brilliant designer, but someone they could turn to for advice — something of a father figure, in fact.
We started by talking about Convair's own black ops capability, a special projects facility that stayed in the shadows, unlike Johnson's entity over at Lockheed, which reveled in its status as black world aviation's one-stop shop for special programs.
"Kelly was the catalyst, the guy who did things differently," Widmer said, "but, hey, we had a 'skunk works,' too; the difference was, we never spoke about it."
Widmer's slight, sinewy body, so much frailer than it had been in the black-and-white shots from the '60s, trembled with excitement. His small eyes shone.
As the talk drifted into the early days of the Cold War, a time when GD Convair came into its own as a reconnaissance specialist, I could see that the minder assigned to me from the PR department was beginning to lose interest. An individual I hadn't come across before, he was there as a matter of routine to ensure that I did not encroach upon matters that would put Lockheed Martin in a bad light or compromise national security. But since this was history, history from way back at that, it hardly constituted a threat to either. It was late and the minder looked tired. His eyes were closed, to focus on the conversation more intently perhaps? But if I hadn't known better, I'd have said he was asleep.
In this atmosphere of near-conviviality, I asked Widmer about Kingfish.
At first, he was reluctant to say a great deal, but seeing that I knew some of the details already, he began to open up. As we talked, I could hear the anger in his voice; anger, I thought, that stemmed from the fact that the CIA had chosen Lockheed's plane, not his, for the contract.
This portrait of Kingfish — the one that Widmer now began to talk about — was markedly different from the official CIA version. And here was one element of the mystery. In its final design form, Kingfish had been at least twice as capable as the variant that is recorded in official agency files.
The final iteration of Kingfish was optimized to cruise at 125,000 feet at a speed of Mach 6.25. It had contained a great many "firsts," including two powerful ramjets — a radical form of power plant that, to this day, has never been deployed on an operational aircraft — a blended, stealthy airframe shape composed of high-temperature steel and a special heatresistant substance called "pyro-ceram" that also acted as a highly effective radar-absorbent material.
Kingfish would have streaked far above the Soviets' air defenses, twice as fast as any aircraft the Russians ever consigned to the drawing board; and it would have been all but invisible to radar.
Kind of chilling, too, was the fact that its specification was a near perfect match for most people's idea of what Aurora should look like— and Widmer had designed the aircraft almost 30 years before rumors of a high-speed Mach 6–8 reconnaissance plane had begun circulating in JDWand Aviation Week. That the CIA bought the A-12 instead of Kingfish is, of course, an enormous tribute to the Lockheed project team, which went on to overcome unprecedented design challenges to make the A-12/SR-71 Blackbird a reality. But while Blackbird is now a museum piece, the finer details of Kingfish, the loser in the CIA contest of 1958-59, will forever remain locked inside Widmer's head.