Skunk Works

Other Voices

Bill Park

Most people think of test-flying from old movies, where the girl and the pilot’s best friend are watching the skies as he adjusts his goggles and starts the fatal dive. If the movie was a romance, the pilot usually made it. One way or another the flight test of a new airplane was over after one hair-raising dive.

It should only be that easy. We built two Have Blue prototypes in record time, only twenty months from the day the contract was awarded until I made the first flight. But the intensive flight testing of these two revolutionary airplanes took us two years. We needed a year or more to work out all the kinks—thoroughly evaluating the structural loads, performance characteristics, flight controls, avionics—and then make all the fixes. The next phase would be to test Have Blue against highly calibrated radar systems and precisely measure its stealthiness from every angle and altitude and be challenged by the most sophisticated radar systems in the world. That phase too would take more than a year. Then the Air Force would evaluate the results and determine whether or not to go ahead with full-scale production.

The Skunk Works gave its flight test group unique responsibilities: we had our own engineers, who had worked side by side with fuel systems engineers, hydraulic specialists, the landing gear team, as the airplane was being assembled. We knew every nut and bolt long before first flight—a big edge when the time finally came to push that throttle.

I was the principal pilot on Have Blue. My backup was a blue-suiter, Lt. Colonel Ken Dyson. We didn’t know very much about the airplane in the beginning. It was built on the cheap all the way. It was just a demonstrator that was to be junked, so the brakes were god-awful, the cockpit too small and too crammed. All the avionics were surplus store red tags. I remember this Air Force colonel came down to the test site and asked me how much we spent on this program. I told him $34 million. He said, “No, I don’t mean one airplane. I mean both airplanes—the entire program.” I repeated the figure. He couldn’t believe it.

The airplane was officially called the XST—the experimental stealth technology testbed. It was a dynamic laboratory in a controlled environment. Everyone briefed on the program knew full well the potential implications of this prototype for the Air Force’s future. If this airplane lived up to its billing, we were making history. Air warfare and tactics would be changed forever. Stealth would rule the skies. So everyone involved in the testing was impatient to get test data, but it was my ass on the line if something went wrong. And I wasn’t about to risk it by cutting any corners or rushing into test flights prematurely.

A helicopter with a paramedic on board was always airborne whenever I was doing test flights. And by May 1978, a year and a half into the program, with about forty flights under my belt, we were on the verge of graduating into the next phase and beginning actual testing against radar systems. On the morning of May 4, 1978, Colonel Larry McClain, the base commander, stopped me at breakfast to say he would be flying chase for me that day and wanted to scrub the paramedic from the test flight because he needed him at the base clinic. I shook my head. I told him, “I’d rather you didn’t do that, Colonel. We’re not entirely out of the woods yet with Have Blue, and I’d just feel better knowing that paramedic is standing by if I happen to need him.”

As it turned out, I had just saved my own life.

A couple of hours later I was completing a routine flight and coming in for a landing. I came in at 125 knots, but a little high. I was just about to flare and put the nose down when I immediately lost my angle of attack and the airplane plunged seven feet on one side, slamming onto the runway. I was afraid I’d skid off the runway and tear off the landing gear, so I decided to gun the engines and take off and go around again. I didn’t know that that hard landing had bent my landing gear on the right side. When I took off again, I automatically raised my landing gear and came around to land. Then I lowered the gear, and Colonel McClain, my chase, came on the horn and told me that only the left gear was down.

I tried everything—all kinds of shakes, rattles, and rolls—to make the right gear come down. I had no way of knowing it was hopelessly bent. I even came in on one wheel, just kissed down on the left side, hoping that jarring effect would spring the other gear loose—a hell of a maneuver if I have to say so—but it proved useless.

By then I was starting to think serious thoughts. While I was climbing to about 10,000 feet, one of my engines quit. Out of fuel. I radioed, “I’m gonna bail out of here unless anyone has any better idea.” Nobody did.

I would’ve preferred to go a little higher before punching out, but I knew I had to get out of there before the other engine flamed out too, because then I had all of two seconds before we’d spin out of control.

Ejecting makes a big noise—like you’re right up against a speeding train. There was flame and smoke as I got propelled out. And then everything went black. I was knocked unconscious banging my head against the chair.

Colonel McClain saw me dangling lifelessly in the chute and radioed back, “Well, the fat’s in the fire now.” I was still out cold when I hit the desert floor face down. It was a windy day and I was dragged on my face by my chute about fifty feet in the sand and scrub. But the chopper was right there. The paramedic jumped out and got to me as I was turning blue. My mouth and nose were filled with sand and I was asphyxiating. Another minute or two and my wife would’ve been a widow.

I was flown to a hospital. When I came to, my wife and Ben Rich were standing over my bed. Ben had flown her in from Burbank on the company jet. I had been forced to bail out four times over fifteen years of flight testing for the Skunk Works, and I never suffered a scratch. This time I had an awful headache and a throbbing pain in my leg, which was in a cast. A broken leg was not fatal in the test flight business but my pounding headache was. I had suffered a moderate concussion and that was the end of the line for me. The rules were very strict about the consequences of head injuries to professional pilots. My test-flying days were over. Ben named me chief pilot, putting me in charge of administrating our corps of test pilots. Lt. Colonel Ken Dyson took over the Have Blue tests. He flew sixty-five sorties against the radar range with the one remaining prototype. On July 11, 1979, he got two hydraulic warning lights about thirty-five miles from base. Knowing he was flying a plane with no stability if the power went, he got out before it spun out of control. Ken parachuted safely to the desert floor. At the time of the crash, he had only one more scheduled flight and most of the test results were already in.

Have Blue flew against the most sophisticated radars on earth, I think, and broke every record for low radar cross section. At one point we had flown right next to a big Boeing E-3 AWACS, with all its powerful electronics beaming full blast in all directions. Those guys liked to brag that they could actually find a needle in a haystack. Well, maybe needles were easier to find than airplanes.