BLACKBIRD
The Untouchable Spy Plane
James Hamilton-Paterson
The SR-71 Blackbird was designed to be the world’s fastest and highest-flying aircraft and has never been approached since.
It was conceived as a high-speed reconnaissance aircraft in the late 1950s by Lockheed Martin’s highly secret ‘Skunk Works’ team under one of the most brilliant aero designers of all time, Clarence ‘Kelly’ Johnson. Once fully developed, the Blackbird represented the apogee of jet-powered flight. Built mostly from titanium, the SR-71 was incredibly complex and expensive. It could fly at well over three times the speed of sound above 85,000 feet and had an unrefuelled range of 3,200 nautical miles. Despite extensive use over Vietnam and later battlefields, none was ever shot down (unlike the U2 in the Gary Powers incident).
The Blackbird’s capabilities seem unlikely ever to be exceeded. It was also a strikingly beautiful aircraft. James Hamilton-Paterson’s masterly narrative sets this astonishing machine in the context of Cold War paranoia and aerial espionage.
Welcome Page
About Blackbird
Dedication
1. Paranoia
2. U-2
3. Oxcart
4. Faster and higher
5. Into action at last
6. From mission to museum
7. Apotheosis
Plate Section
Endpapers
Acknowledgements
Bibliography/Sources consulted
Glossary
Notes
Index
About James Hamilton-Paterson
Also by James Hamilton-Paterson
An Invitation from the Publisher
Copyright
This book is dedicated to John Farley, OBE, AFC: consummate engineer, teacher, writer and gentleman, as well as one of the world’s great test pilots.
MOST ACCOUNTS OF the SR-71 family of aircraft are designed for the specialist aero-buff or ‘Haynes Manual’ end of the market. The more popular tend to concentrate on the wow! factor of astonishing performance and often overlook that, like any other aircraft, the ‘Blackbirds’ were expressly designed to perform a specific function. This was to carry an assortment of cameras and sensors over a target at high altitude and speed, collect a mass of information and return safely with it for evaluation. The ability to break speed and other records was merely a by-product of the design and never remotely a goal in itself. Once the top-secret aircraft had been officially ‘revealed’ (in the jargon of the day), this capacity for shattering world records was adroitly used for popular support in bolstering the case for its continued survival in the face of Pentagon moves to terminate the project.
Also generally missing from such accounts is an other-than-cursory attempt to place the Blackbird in the wider context of Cold War geopolitics as well as of 1950s aerodynamic design. This was the period of the adolescent Jet Age, whose increasing speeds entailed a rapid and highly competitive expansion of aerodynamic knowledge. Aero industries on both sides of the Atlantic spawned great numbers of advanced, inventive and occasionally plain silly aircraft designs, all in the hopes of going ever faster and higher. It was a time of obsessive competition between countries and companies, of wastefully duplicated effort and amazing progress. It was also the period of burgeoning nuclear technology and rocketry conducted under conditions of near-hysterical secrecy.
A series of political crises fed into and nourished the mutually sustained paranoia that raged in NATO countries and the Soviet Bloc alike, to be seen at its most obsessive in the United States and the USSR. Among these crises were the downing of Francis Gary Powers in his U-2 spy plane over the USSR on 1 May 1960; the building of the Berlin Wall (1961); the CIA-sponsored fiasco of the Cuban Bay of Pigs invasion (1961); and the Cuban Missile Crisis of late 1962. By 1964 paranoia had intensified to the point where only satire could adequately deal with it – most notably Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant film of that year, Dr. Strangelove.
‘I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids,’ Sterling Hayden remarks in his role as General Jack D. Ripper, commanding officer of an American Strategic Air Command (SAC) bomber base, who has decided off his own bat that his B-52s should carry out a pre-emptive strike against the Soviet Union. Paranoia reached out even to the Shepperton Studios in Surrey where the film was made. When some US Air Force officers were invited to view the set they reportedly went white as they inspected the mock-up of the B-52 cockpit, stunned by its accuracy. Kubrick was obliged to elicit the set designer’s promise that no military secrets had been divulged, that his invention was based entirely on imagination and a photo on the cover of an SAC propaganda book (Mel Hunter’s Strategic Air Command) that showed enough of a cockpit for him to be able to make plausible guesses at the rest of it, including the switchgear for the bomb-arming and recall procedures. ‘Otherwise,’ Kubrick told Ken Adam, the production designer, ‘you and I may shortly be dragged off and investigated by the FBI.’
A B-52 releasing a ‘bomb train’ over Vietnam, March 31 1967, during Operation Rolling Thunder. This now-venerable bomber served SAC from 1955 and will probably still be active in 20 years’ time.
Photo by Everett Historical.
In its post-1945 emergence as a superpower, the United States felt its dominant position threatened solely by the USSR and by the ethos of ‘godless Communism’ it was convinced Russia was disseminating with stealth and guile throughout the less developed nations, especially in South East Asia, China and Latin America. When in November 1956 Nikita Khrushchev addressed some Western ambassadors in Moscow immediately after he had crushed the Hungarian Uprising he promised them, ‘We will bury you!’ This was both melodramatic and chilling and the United States had no doubt that it was in a nuclear arms race with the Soviets. Each side strove to progress from atom bombs to hydrogen bombs, from propeller-driven to jet bombers, from surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) to intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), up through the stratosphere and out into space. Intense secrecy shrouded anything to do with the military, especially any form of experimental aircraft, and above all with nuclear weapons and their delivery systems.
Behind all this lay the constant, nagging fear that all unbeknownst the other side could be stealing a march, might have bigger and better weapons even now being readied under wraps in remote testing grounds. This fear was sedulously fostered by careful propaganda and misinformation that found its way into press and broadcast reports. The crises referred to above were essentially political; but just as bad, if not worse, were those brought on by technological advances. To the arms race was added the space race when in October 1957 the USSR launched the world’s first satellite, Sputnik. This shocked the United States and caused widespread panic throughout the US military and intelligence agencies as they agonised over the Soviets’ apparent technical superiority. Thereafter the lead in various fields fluctuated from one side to the other. Take a single month in 1961:
12 April: Major Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space, orbiting Earth for 108 minutes in the five-ton Vostok. At a press conference later that day President Kennedy lamented seeing the US once again come second to the USSR in the space field, admitting ruefully ‘it will be some time before we catch up’.
21 April: The United States captured the world record speed for controlled flight with the 3,074 mph (4,947 kph) achieved by an X-15 rocket-powered aircraft drop-launched from a B-52 bomber in a joint project of NASA, the Air Force and the Navy.
28 April: The USSR set a new world altitude record for an aircraft taking off and landing conventionally with a height of 113,891 feet (34,714 metres) achieved by G. Mussolov in a Ye-66A. His aircraft was a much-tweaked MiG-21 fighter using a rocket booster to take it beyond the point where its jet engine failed for lack of atmosphere to bite on. This was exactly the same principle that would be used by Chuck Yeager’s equally modified Starfighter, the NF-104A with rocket booster that reached no higher than 108,700 feet on 10 December 1963 in an attempt that very nearly cost him his life.
In short, the atmosphere was grimly competitive as well as grimly secretive. Certainly in the United States much of the anxiety centred around two subjects that journalists, with the help of the military, soon turned into ongoing crises: ‘the bomber gap’ and ‘the missile gap’. Thanks to newspapers and periodicals like Time magazine these took on dread significance. Did the Soviets really have a thousand new bombers that could outnumber as well as outfly their American counterparts? Might they also be racing to produce advanced ballistic missiles commensurate with their apparent superiority in rocketry? From every point of view – and especially from that of the Pentagon, the CIA and the White House – it became vital to know. Traditional ground-based agents and spies had their uses, but the Iron Curtain was drawn very tightly shut and the only clinching information would be that of aerial reconnaissance using cameras that could produce high-resolution images of things the Soviets couldn’t easily hide such as factories, missile launchers, airfields, radar sites and even the Moscow May Day parades.
But there was a complicating behind-the-scenes factor to the United States’ military posture (as there doubtless was in the USSR as well): the often bitter wrangling for budgetary advantage between the three services, not to mention between the companies competing for contracts to supply high-value military hardware such as aircraft. Above all there was the US military’s occasionally fraught relationship with the CIA and other intelligence agencies, not to mention smouldering disagreements between the White House, the Department of Defense and various administration officials.
A Boeing RB-47E Stratojet over Kansas. This was the reconnaissance version of the B-47 bomber that first flew in 1947 and whose swept wings and podded engines became the template for most future airliners.
Photo by Granger Historical Picture Archive / Alamy Stock Photo.
Particularly germane to our story of an American aircraft is the primary importance in the 1950s and 1960s of the United States Air Force and especially of its bomber wing, SAC (pronounced ‘sack’). In the days before ICBMs went into service the delivery of America’s nuclear threat depended on SAC’s immense fleets of B-47s and B-52s. In 1961 a system code-named CHROME DOME came into operation. Under this scheme twelve of SAC’s B-52s fully laden with nuclear bombs were kept on constant airborne alert, flying towards a ‘fail-safe’ point just outside the Soviet border. When they reached it they would automatically turn back unless they received a coded Go signal that meant they were to proceed and bomb their predetermined Russian targets, the exact co-ordinates of which were locked in a safe aboard each aircraft.
The existence and even the very name of CHROME DOME (which remained operative until 1968) were highly classified, making it all the more astonishing that Dr. Strangelove replicated exactly this supposedly top-secret strategy. The film’s brilliant writer, Terry Southern, must have been not just imaginative but remarkably well-informed. His cigar-chomping General Ripper was clearly based on the abrasive figure of Curtis LeMay, the general who commanded SAC throughout the 1950s and then went to the Pentagon as the Air Force Chief of Staff in 1961. LeMay’s meteoric career in the Second World War had left him with a reputation for competence but also for dogged belligerence towards all who opposed him, particularly civilians up to and including the President. He was especially impatient with any idea of negotiating with the Russians (‘the pantywaist option’ to use his phrase), and at moments of crisis he favoured launching a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the USSR to settle their hash once and for all. ‘If I see that the Russians are amassing their planes for an attack,’ he was recorded as saying to Robert C. Sprague of the Office of Defense Mobilization in 1957, ‘I’m going to knock the [expletive] out of them before they take off the ground.’ ‘But General LeMay,’ Sprague replied, ‘that’s not national policy.’ ‘I don’t care,’ LeMay said. ‘It’s my policy. That’s what I’m going to do.’1 It was greatly to John F. Kennedy’s credit that five years later he was able to face down LeMay during the Cuban Missile Crisis when his rogue general was insisting on SAC launching a strike on Soviet nuclear missile sites in Cuba: a strike we now know would have triggered a full-scale nuclear exchange. It was only by pulling rank and reminding LeMay that the President of the United States was also Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces that Kennedy was able to prevail. By some accounts it was a close-run thing.
The importance of this bullish element in the Air Force’s high command will become apparent, together with its often uneasy rivalry with civilian intelligence-gathering agencies such as the CIA over who should command and fly the fleet of American spy planes. Indeed, it was the USAF high command that finally ensured the Blackbirds were axed with years of airframe life still left in them. Similarly, the Pentagon’s and the Air Force’s impatience with President Eisenhower and then with President Kennedy over their frequent suspension of all U-2 spy flights over the USSR in favour of diplomacy led to deep frustration on the part of the military. One can see their point, in that they were in the dark about the exact capabilities of the enemy they faced. They needed hard information about the Russians’ bombers and missiles and thought diplomacy was mere pussyfooting. On the other hand one can appreciate the far subtler difficulty that the President and the CIA faced, which was that of not revealing how much they actually did know – and how they knew it – for fear of compromising the secret U-2 missions.
In 1956 high-altitude U-2 photography confirmed the CIA’s hunch that the Soviets did not in fact have the large bomber fleet that LeMay feared. The bomber gap simply didn’t exist. Similarly, post-Sputnik photo analysis of overflights by the CIA revealed that the missile gap was just as imaginary even though one of its most influential proponents, the celebrated journalist Joseph Alsop, had himself worked for the agency. Robert McNamara, John F. Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense, told the President that he thought the USAF’s intelligence analysis at the time of the missile gap controversy was nakedly self-serving and, as with the bomber gap myth, had been primarily designed to wangle the Air Force a bigger budget. This opinion scarcely endeared him to General LeMay, whose intransigence on the subject was starkly revealed less than three years later when he was called to testify at some Defense Budget Hearings. The exchange went as follows:
CHAIRMAN GEORGE H. MAHON: You were talking about the Russians being able to do this and that. As a result of this philosophy of what the Russians could do, a few years ago we developed the bomber gap, and later we were told there was no bomber gap. As a result of this same reasoning as to what the Russians could do we developed the missile gap. … Now we come along later and everyone says there never was a missile gap. Now, are you by this testimony opening up a so-called megatonnage gap which will never occur and which will be just as phony as the bomber and missile gap?
GENERAL CURTIS LEMAY: That is entirely possible, Mr Chairman.2
It is pure Strangelove. And so behind the scenes the wrangling went on between the highest levels of command from the White House downwards, as various departments sought budgetary control of runaway military spending while vested interests kept it going by judicious appeals to paranoia. Yet in 1959, in conditions of maximum secrecy at the Lockheed Corporation’s works in Burbank, California, one of the world’s most brilliant aircraft designers had finally arrived at the design of arguably the most charismatic aircraft ever built. At the time it could only have been achieved in the United States, with that country’s ability to fund grand projects and with its vast reserve of technical wizards, materials scientists and remote desert landscapes for secretive testing. Plus, of course, the requisite Cold War paranoia. The paranoia was crucial.
FOLLOWING THE SECOND World War both the British and the Americans rather rested on their laurels where radar research was concerned, unintentionally allowing the Soviet Union to catch up and in some respects to overtake them. However, once Washington had decided its former wartime ally was now definitely an enemy, a motley assortment of American aircraft equipped with cameras began regularly overflying those parts of the Soviet Bloc countries they could reach, taking photographs, listening to the Russian pilots’ radio chatter and registering their radar transmissions. At first these suggested the Russians were still using modified Allied equipment left over from the war. But from about 1950 a good few American reconnaissance aircraft simply disappeared, some of which were known to have been shot down. It was clear that with the help of their ever-improving ground-based radar, Russian AAA (anti-aircraft artillery) batteries and early jet fighters were making aerial spying too risky to continue in its present ad hoc form.
In 1951 the Americans reasoned that since the MiG-17, the best Soviet interceptor of the day, struggled to reach a height of 45,000 feet without doing a dive-and-zoom manoeuvre, a reconnaissance aircraft that could easily reach 60,000 feet was required. Coincidentally the USAF badly needed a new jet-powered medium bomber to replace the ageing propeller-driven Douglas B-26 Invader. With nothing home-grown in sight the Americans bought an existing foreign aircraft to build under licence, something they hadn’t done since the First World War when they built their own version of the British S.E.5 biplane fighter. Their new purchase was also British: the English Electric Canberra. It was the twin-jet medium bomber the RAF was already flying in a photo reconnaissance version, the PR3. The Canberra entered USAF service in mid-1953 as the Martin B-57 and was itself quickly modified for reconnaissance. By early 1954 several RB-57As were based in Germany. With their greatly enlarged wings these could reach 64,000 feet and it was generally reckoned this was safely above the range of Russian ground-based radar, let alone of anti-aircraft missiles. Within a year, though, the Soviet MiG-19 entered service, an interceptor that could reliably exceed 50,000 feet, with later versions certain to improve still further. It was obvious that, to be safe, any future photo-reconnaissance aircraft would now need to fly considerably higher. The Air Force’s urgency was compounded by increasing losses of their existing reconnaissance aircraft while overflying Iron Curtain frontiers, none of which was capable of going much above 33,000 feet. The best of these was probably the RB-47, a reconnaissance version of SAC’s basic long-range jet bomber, the B-47. One of these first overflew the USSR in 1952 and since then three had been lost.
The first Martin RB-57A in stealthy black livery in 1953, when it was still virtually unchanged from the Canberra B.2. Later versions would greatly modify the original British design.
Photo by US Air Force.
In late 1952 the National Security Agency came into being with a remit that included responsibility for all overflights of ‘denied territory’, as the Soviet Bloc countries and China would come to be known. The following year the USAF issued an Operational Requirement for an ultra-high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft capable of staying aloft for long overflights of enemy territory. Even as Martin tried different wing shapes and lighter construction to get its RB-57s to fly higher, two other aircraft companies, Fairchild and Bell, were at work on designs to meet the requirement. The Lockheed Corporation soon got wind of this and also began to work on the project. The firm had been building successful aircraft since the 1920s and had produced one of the best and fastest propeller-driven fighters of the Second World War: the twin-boom P-38 Lightning.
A Lockheed Lightning in 1944. Its designer, ‘Kelly’ Johnson learned much from it about the aerodynamics peculiar to high subsonic speeds on the edge of compressibility.
Photo by US Air Force.
The Lightning’s designer was a talented young engineer named Clarence ‘Kelly’ Johnson. The son of Swedish immigrants, Johnson was brought up in the wilds of Michigan in conditions of considerable poverty. Fascinated by aircraft and ashamed of his family’s penury, he studied his way to the University of Michigan as an aeronautical engineer. There he conducted tests on a model of a new aircraft sent by the Lockheed Corporation, which lacked the university’s advanced wind-tunnel facility. Johnson’s work on their project impressed the company, who recognised him as an intuitive engineer. As soon as he graduated Lockheed offered him a job. He moved to California and in the early 1940s became one of the design team that created the beautiful Constellation airliner. In 1943, in conditions of great secrecy, ‘Kelly’ Johnson designed an airframe around a British Halford (later the de Havilland Goblin) turbojet engine, itself one of the most closely guarded of wartime secrets. This, the P-80 Shooting Star, became America’s first jet fighter in squadron service. In time the P-80 was successfully developed into the more advanced F-94 Starfire fighter as well as the extremely successful and ubiquitous T-33 Shooting Star trainer, scattered examples of which are still flying today as proof of the excellence of Johnson’s original design.
Lockheed’s factory in Burbank had the capability of working in conditions that during the war were screened quite literally from inquisitive eyes by a vast acreage of camouflaged netting draped over its buildings so as to look from the air like a rugged patch of terrain dotted with trees. This spirited deception had been rigged in case of Japanese raiders who in the event never materialised. But the tradition of secrecy continued in the secluded ADP (advanced development projects) area of Lockheed’s plant. This was known less formally as the Skunk Works – so named after an illicit still in the syndicated Li’l Abner strip cartoon.
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