Skunk Works

This weapon was look-down, shoot-down radar and air-to-air missiles. Developing it, we were twenty-five years ahead of anyone else. We took an existing $80 million air-to-air missile developed by Hughes, called the GAR-9, and a Westinghouse ASG-18 radar system, both created for the Navy, and augmented them with our own special fire control system. The result stunned the blue-suiters, who thought it was impossible to successfully fire a missile from an airplane speeding at three times the speed of sound. Most air-to-air missiles traveled five, ten, fifteen miles to targets locked on at the same altitude or slightly below or above. We locked onto targets more than a hundred miles away and tens of thousands of feet below. From 80,000 feet, we knocked out drones flying on the deck at 1,500 feet. From 87,000 feet, we hit a drone flying at 40,000 feet.

To keep the missile from hitting our own airplane, we added a trapeze device to the missile launch system and used ejection cartridges to drop the missile nose down before it fired and sped off to the target at Mach 6. Our first test of the new system occurred in March 1965. We hit a drone from 36 miles away at a closing rate of 2,000 mph. A few weeks later, we fired the missile from 75,000 feet, while traveling at Mach 3.2, and hit a drone flying at 40,000 feet, 38 miles away. But a few months later we really rocked the Air Force. From 75,000 feet, we hit a low-altitude remote-controlled B-47 flying over the Gulf of Mexico at 1,200 feet from 80 miles off.

Kelly was overjoyed. Our testing was a superlative twelve hits out of thirteen attempts—firing from all heights and ranges. It was the most successful new weapons test in history. Our missile should have blasted a big hole in the administration’s backing of the F-111, which now was proven by our tests to be obsolete before it even flew. We knew the Russians were crashing a program to develop this kind of look-down, shoot-down system. Once it was in place aboard their newest MiG interceptors, life would be hell for any pilot in a low-flying aircraft like the F-111.

Our message to the blue-suiters: tell McNamara he’s backing the wrong bomber. Their message back: tell him yourself; he won’t listen to us. Kelly flew to Washington in the winter of 1966 and stormed in on Air Force Secretary Harold Brown, who was also rather blunt, and the two went head to head. Kelly called the F-111 a national scandal if the administration forced it on the Air Force in spite of the evidence of its vulnerability to our missile system. There was no justification for building this dog except maybe because it was being built in LBJ’s backyard, Fort Worth, Texas.

In fairness to McNamara, the Air Force was pushing for the TFX. They wanted a tactical fighter-bomber that could be used in big numbers in a ground war like Vietnam. The Blackbird was too revolutionary and too costly to fly regularly in harm’s way. The Air Force high command worried that it would be shot down and its technological secrets fall into enemy hands. But General LeMay won a partial concession from McNamara, and we received a contract for six two-man reconnaissance versions of the Blackbird to be built exclusively for the Air Force. The plane would be ultimately designated as the SR-71. It was larger and heavier than the CIA one-pilot model that carried only cameras. The Air Force model would be packed with both cameras and supersophisticated electronic eavesdropping equipment. The Skunk Works eventually would build thirty-one of them before this amazing airplane was finally, and some would say prematurely, retired in the winter of 1990.

By then the Blackbird had become a legend as an incredibly effective operational surveillance aircraft that could safely overfly the most hostile and dangerous territory at will. But the airplane and its operations were kept so secret that few inside or outside our government knew it was flying. But the Russians knew. So did the North Koreans, North Vietnamese, and Chinese. And there was nothing they could do to stop it.

11 REMEMBERING HABU

MORE THAN THIRTY YEARS after its first flight, the Blackbird’s records will not soon be surpassed: New York to London in one hour and fifty-five minutes; London to L.A. in three hours and forty-seven minutes; L.A. to Washington in sixty-four minutes. The Blackbird was 40 percent faster than the Concorde, which first flew seven years later, and in 1964, its creation won Kelly Johnson his second Collier Trophy, aviation’s most prestigious award. He had won his first Collier five years earlier, for building the world’s first supersonic fighter, the F-104. No one else in the industry had ever won two Collier trophies, and that record will probably endure, too.