Skunk Works

Kelly took our design to Washington in February 1963. His reception at the CIA was still unenthusiastic, mostly because the agency was already overextended on a huge secret budget for hardware, involving Blackbirds and spy satellites and feeling heat from congressional oversight committees. In fact, the Bureau of the Budget was rumored to be taking a hard look at the CIA’s air wing, with an eye toward eliminating it entirely, which finally occurred by presidential command in 1966.

But Air Force Secretary Harold Brown was definitely interested in the drone concept, as much as for a way of delivering a nuclear bomb as for spying: they could deploy a nuclear weapon by drone three thousand miles from a hotly defended target and be impossible to stop. Apparently, the CIA got serious about our drone after learning about the Air Force interest. With General Geary acting as our champion, the agency decided to climb on board the drone project. On March 20, 1963, we were awarded a letter contract from the CIA, which would share funding and operational responsibilities with the Air Force. Ultimately, we built fifty drones for only $31 million before the project ended in 1971.

Tagboard now became the most classified project at the Skunk Works, even more secret than the Blackbird airplanes being assembled. So Kelly decided to wall off a section of the huge assembly building housing Blackbird, which already was as guarded as Fort Knox, to accommodate the new drone project. To get inside that walled-off section required special access passes and the shop workers immediately dubbed it Berlin Wall West. Unfortunately, I found myself spending more time inside that walled section than I had ever anticipated. But the technical problems were formidable, especially the attempt to launch a piggybacked drone from a mothership launch platform flying at three times the speed of sound. The drone would be sitting toward the top rear of the fuselage on a pylon. Expecting a drone to launch through the mothership’s Mach 3 shock wave presented a monumental engineering challenge. And Kelly insisted that we launch at full power.

It took us nearly six months to work out some of the shock wave and engine problems with models in the wind tunnel, while other problems concerned with perfecting the guidance system, the cameras, the self-destruction system, the parachute deployment system, all loomed before us like monsters let out of some evil sorcerer’s dungeon. But to Kelly the biggest sweat was guaranteeing a safe launch. I had never seen him so spooked. “Goddam it, I don’t want to lose a pilot and an airplane testing this system. This will be the most dangerous maneuver in any airplane that I’ve ever worked on. And I don’t want that damned drone flying out of control and crashing into the middle of downtown Los Angeles or Portland.”

He kept postponing test launches and finally aimed for the first one on his birthday—February 27, 1965. But that first flight did not occur until we had solved dozens of complicated problems, thirteen months later. Bill Park finally took off in a Blackbird from our secret base with a drone sitting on top of his fuselage. Out over the California coast at 80,000 feet and at Mach 3.2, Bill ignited the drone, which launched perfectly and flew 120 miles out to sea before running out of fuel and crashing. One month later, a second launch was spectacularly successful. The drone flew 1,900 nautical miles at Mach 3.3, holding to its course all the way, and finally fell out of the sky when a hydraulic pump burned out.

On June 16, 1966, we attempted the third test launch of the drone piggybacking on an SR-71 Blackbird, a two-seater. Bill Park was our pilot, and in the second cockpit was Ray Torick, the launch operator. The Blackbird took off and headed for the California coast, just north of L.A., to launch over the naval tracking station at Point Mugu. The flight was a dandy. The drone flew 1,600 nautical miles, making eight programmed turns while taking pictures of the Channel Islands, San Clemente, and Santa Catalina from 92,000 feet at 4,000-plus mph. It did everything but eject the film package, due to electronic failure, which was a very fixable problem. So a few weeks later, on July 30, 1966, we repeated the same test flight over Point Mugu, just up the coast from Malibu. This time we launched at 3.25 Mach and—catastrophe.

The drone crashed into the fuselage of the Blackbird, which spun wildly out of control. Park and Torick both ejected with their pressure suits inflated. Bill Park was picked up in a life raft 150 miles at sea. Torick splashed down nearby, but rashly opened the visor of his helmet while he was paddling in the ocean, so that water flooded into his pressure suit through the neck ring and he sank like a stone. Our flight director, Keith Beswick, who was flying chase, had to go to a local mortuary and cut him out of the pressure suit so that the body could be properly prepared for burial.