Skunk Works

10 GETTING OFF THE GROUND

THE BLACKBIRD was a wild stallion of an airplane. Everything about it was daunting and hard to tame—building it, flying it, selling it. It was an airplane so advanced and awesome that it easily intimidated anyone who dared to come close. Those cleared to see the airplane roar into the sky would remember it as an experience both exhilarating and terrifying as the world shook loose. Richard Helms, then a high-level CIA executive, recalled watching a Blackbird take off on a night flight from our secret base in the 1960s, with the roar of an oncoming tornado and the ground shaking under his feet like an eight-point earthquake, as the engines spouted blinding diamond-shaped shock waves. “I was so shaken,” Helms told me recently, “that I invented my own name for the Blackbird. I called it the Hammers of Hell.”

A few months after the first successful Blackbird test flight in April 1962, test pilot Bill Park appeared at my desk and dropped his plastic flight helmet in my lap. “Goddam it, Ben, take a look at that,” he said, pointing to a deep dent near the crown. As Bill described it, he was cruising at sixty-five thousand feet on a clear, crisp morning above New Mexico, when suddenly, with his airplane blistering at 2.7 Mach, he was deafened by a loud bang and violently flung forward in his harness, smashing his head against the cockpit glass and almost knocked unconscious. “It felt like a couple of the L.A. Rams shaking me as hard as they could,” Bill said. The problem was called an “unstart.” It occurred when air entering one of the two engines was impeded by the angle of the airplane’s pitch or yaw and in only milliseconds decreased its efficiency from 80 percent to 20 percent. The movable-spike inlet control could correct the problem in about ten seconds, but meanwhile the pilot was flung around helplessly, battered all over the cockpit. Bill Park and Lou Schalk and several of our other pilots were experiencing these awful “unstarts” as much as twenty times in ten minutes. The damndest part was that the pilot often couldn’t tell which engine was affected and sometimes he turned off the wrong one to get a relight and was left with no power at all. This happened to a Blackbird over West Virginia. The pilot struggled to relight both engines as the airplane plunged toward earth. Finally at thirty thousand feet, the two engines came alive with a tremendous sonic boom that shattered windows for miles and toppled a factory’s tall chimney, crushing two workers to death.

“Fix it!” the pilots demanded. Easier said than done, I discovered. In spite of my best efforts I never really solved the unstart problem per se. The best I could do was invent an electronic control that was basically a sympathetic unstart. If one engine was hit with an unstart, this control ensured that the second engine dropped its power too, then relit both engines automatically. In the cockpit, the pilot would be spared a near heart attack by a loud bang followed by a series of severe jolts that marked an unstart. When the new system functioned he would not even be aware that an unstart had occurred. But before I could solve the problem, I took a lot of heat. Bill Park insisted that I get off my duff and see firsthand what he and the rest of our test crew were going through. Kelly, with a diabolical glint in his cold eyes, eagerly agreed.

“Rich, goddam it, suit up and get out there and fix that goddam thing before one of our pilots breaks his goddam neck,” the boss decreed. In a crazy moment of weakness, I actually agreed to fly. I got as far as the high-compression chamber, which simulated ejection, as part of my preflight briefing. In order to fly at ninety thousand feet I had to be checked out in the pressure suit in an altitude chamber, in case we lost cabin pressure or I was forced to eject in an emergency. The chances that I would experience such calamities were near zero since I would have already dropped dead from fright. Nevertheless, I found myself inside a heavy helmet and pressure suit, and the minute that chamber door slammed shut I experienced an immediate claustrophobic panic. I was sucking oxygen like a marathon runner and screaming, “Get me out of here!” Call me a coward. Call me hopeless. Call me a taxi. I bugged out.