Skunk Works

One of the participants later wisecracked that it was like the Russian and American soldiers joining up on the banks of the Elbe River during the last days of World War II. It took us a day and a half; Ed Baldwin did the basic design and Ed Martin the systems. Henry Combs and Ray McHenry did the structures. Merv Heal figured the weights and Lorne Cass the loads. Dan Zuck designed the cockpit, and Dave Robertson handled the fuel system requirements. Dave Campbell and I weighed in with propulsion and Dick Fuller and Dick Cantrell with the aerodynamics. Everyone chipped in with changes and modifications from previous designs. The airplane weighed 96,000 pounds without fuel—keeping it light to maximize fuel consumption and minimize cost—and was 108 feet long with an extremely thin double delta wing attached at mid-fuselage. The wing edge was designed so razor-thin that it could actually cut a mechanic’s hand. We took the long sheet of paper to Kelly Johnson and unrolled it on his desk. We told him, “Kelly, everything is now exactly where it should be—the engines, the inlets, the twin tails. This is probably as close to the best we can come up with.”

It was our twelfth design, number A-12, which would later become its official CIA project designation. Kelly took the design and ran with it to Washington. Throughout midsummer 1959, he shuttled back and forth to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, nearly a dozen times, meeting with Bissell, Land, Allen Dulles, and others, noting at one point in his private journal, “There is a good deal of concern that Speedy Gonzales [Ike] will cancel. Too expensive.”

But the deal was finally nailed on August 28: “Saw Mr. Bissell alone. He told me that we had the project and that Convair was out of the picture. The agency accepts our conditions that our method of doing business will be identical to that of the U-2. Mr. Bissell agreed very firmly to this latter condition and said that unless it was done this way he wanted nothing to do with the project either. He and Allen Dulles stated following conditions: (1) We must exercise the greatest possible ingenuity, an honest effort in the field of radar. (2) The degree of security on this project is, if possible, even tighter than on the U-2, and (3) We should make no large commitments, large meaning in terms of millions of dollars.”

We were being funded to build five A-12 spy planes over the next two years at a quoted price of $96.6 million.

God help us, we were in business.

The CIA code-named the project Oxcart, an oxymoron to end all: at Mach 3, our spy plane would zip across the skies faster than a high-velocity rifle bullet.

Kelly had sold the idea brilliantly, but now it was up to us peons to deliver the goods. One of the great strengths of the place was the combined experience of Kelly’s most senior and trusted engineers and designers, who, among other attributes, were walking parts catalogs. But suddenly we were all operating in the dark, struggling by trial and error, like Cro-Magnons trying to look beyond the cooking fire to the first steam engine.

All the fundamentals of building a conventional airplane were suddenly obsolete. Even the standard aluminum airframe was now useless. Aluminum lost its strength at 300 degrees F, which for our Mach 3 airplane was barely breaking a sweat. At the nose the heat would be 800 degrees—hotter than a soldering iron—1,200 degrees on the engine cowlings, and 620 degrees on the cockpit windshield, which was hot enough to melt lead. About the only material capable of sustaining that kind of ferocious heat was stainless steel.

For security and convenience, Kelly kept those of us working on his airplane jammed together in one corner of our old Building 82, a remnant of the bomber factory from World War II, in which we had built the U-2 and the F-104 Starfighter before it. From the original four he had approached on this project, we had now grown to a modest fifty or so, seated at back-to-back desks, where, like the early U-2 days, privacy surrendered to incessant kibitzing, teasing, brainstorming, and harassment. Some wag hung the sign PRIVACY SUCKS. My three-man thermodynamics and propulsion group now shared space with the performance and stability control people. Through a connecting door was the eight-man structures group, who designed the strength and load characteristics of the airplane. Their “dean” was that irascible genius Henry Combs, who had been with Kelly since World War II and helped him build the classic two-engine P-38 Lightning interceptor. Henry and I could have reached through the doorway and shaken hands. And, of course, he relished offering his unsolicited advice and opinions to the young whippersnapper running thermodynamics and propulsion.

“Ben Rich,” he teased, “how in hell do you propose getting our stainless-steel monstrosity up to speed at Mach 3? You’ll need inlets the size of the Holland Tunnel.” Then he chuckled sardonically.