Skunk Works

Other Voices

Norman Nelson

I was the CIA’s engineer inside the Skunk Works, the only government guy there, and Kelly gave me the run of the place. Kelly ran the Skunk Works as if it was his own aircraft company. He took no crap and did things his own way. None of this pyramid bullshit. He built up the best engineering organization in the world. Kelly’s rule was never put an engineer more than fifty feet from the assembly area. But the payoff came watching that Blackbird take off on sixty-four thousand pounds of thrust blasting out from those two giant engines. We all knew it was the greatest airplane ever built and it carried the world’s greatest cameras. From ninety thousand feet—sixteen miles up—you could clearly see the stripes on a parking lot. Baby, that’s resolution! The main camera was five feet high. The strip camera was continuous, and the framing camera took one picture at a time. Both took perfect pictures while zipping past at Mach 3. An unbelievable technical achievement. The window shielding the cameras was double quartz and one of the hardest problems confronting us. We also had awful reflection problems and heat problems, you name it.

Because of the tremendous speed and sonic boom, we were very limited to where we could overfly the United States during training missions. We had to pick the least-populated routes. After President Johnson’s public announcement about the airplane in the fall of 1964, Kelly began receiving all kinds of complaints and threats of lawsuits from communities claiming the Blackbird had shattered windows for miles around. A few times we announced a bogus flight plan and then sat back and watched the phony complaints pour in. But some complaints were for real. One of the guys boomed Kelly’s ranch in Santa Barbara as a joke that backfired because he knocked out Kelly’s picture window. Another of our pilots got in engine trouble over Utah and flamed out. The Blackbird had as much gliding capacity as a manhole cover, and it came barreling in over Salt Lake, just as our pilot got a restart and hit those afterburners right above the Mormon Tabernacle. There was hell to pay.

We had to clear FAA controllers along the flight paths, otherwise they’d think they were seeing flying saucers at Mach 3 plus on their radar screens. In the amount of time it took to sneeze, a pilot flew the length of ten football fields.

We couldn’t overfly dams, bridges, Indian ruins, or big cities. We had to clear and train the tanker crews of the KC-135s that carried our special fuel. Air-to-air refuelings were very tricky because the tanker had to go as fast as it could while the Blackbird was throttled way back, practically stalling out while it filled its tanks. During a typical three-to-five-hour training exercise, our pilot might witness two or three sunrises, depending on the time of day.

Another weird thing was that after a flight the windshields often were pitted with tiny black dots, like burn specks. We couldn’t figure out what in hell it was. We had the specks lab tested, and they turned out to be organic material—insects that had been injected into the stratosphere and were circling in orbit around the earth with dust and debris at seventy-five thousand feet in the jet stream. How in hell did they get lifted up there? We finally figured it out: they were hoisted aloft from the atomic test explosions in Russia and China.

That airplane pushed all of us to our limits in dealing with it. A pilot had to have tremendous self-confidence just to set foot inside the cockpit knowing he was about to fly two and a half times faster than he ever had before. I know that Kelly was determined to spread the Blackbird technology onto the blue-suiters and make the whole damned Air Force sit up and pay attention to what he had produced. But I never gave him much chance to sell a lot of these airplanes because they were so far ahead of anything else flying that few commanders would feel comfortable leading a Blackbird wing or squadron. I mean this was a twenty-first-century performer delivered in the early 1960s. No one in the Pentagon would know what to do with it. That made it a damned tough sell even for Kelly.