Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed

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.

Kelly was his own salesman. He traveled to Washington pitching those in high places at the Pentagon and on the Hill. He was plugged in at the CIA and knew what the top Pentagon brass were worrying most about at any given moment, and in the early months of the Kennedy administration many officials were popping Valium.

There were storm warnings flapping over Red Square. The Russians seemed eager to severely test our new young president and backed up that belligerency with worrisome crash weapons projects. The CIA had intercepted Russian telemetry data on what they thought was a missile test in Soviet Siberia in the spring of 1961. They sent this data to the Skunk Works for our analysis and verification. Our telemetry experts reported back a chilling contradiction: that was no missile being tested but a prototype supersonic bomber, the so-called Backfire, rumored to have been in the works for several years. We were likely looking at an aircraft capable of sustained Mach 2 speeds, flying at sixty thousand feet and with an impressive range of three thousand miles. If we were right, this was a major upset of the then current military balances of power: the Soviets were building a bomber that could come and get us, and the brass at the Air Defense Command in Colorado Springs could only look up and shake a fist because we had nothing flying that could intercept it, or any missile to shoot it down.

But fitted on the jigs of Assembly Building 82 was the frame of our Mach 3 Blackbird, being built as a CIA spy plane, which could be adapted as a high-performance interceptor that would stop the Russian bombers long before they could reach any American targets. Once the U.S. early-warning radar net (so powerful, it could track a baseball-size object from five thousand miles away) picked up a Soviet bomber force streaking toward North America, our Blackbirds could race to meet and intercept them over the Arctic Circle, beyond range of their nuclear-tipped missiles targeted against U.S. cities.

That was Kelly Johnson’s Pentagon sales pitch in the dawning of the Kennedy years: the Blackbird was exactly what the brass of the fighter command should have been looking for, but, unfortunately, our airplane was so secret and knowledge of this project so limited that very few Air Force commanders knew of its existence and Kelly could not pitch anyone who wasn’t on a very select list of those cleared to know about this top secret airplane. He was so constrained by security that he was practically talking to himself.

Among a few, highly placed Air Force brass who did know about our airplane there were mixed feelings about Blackbird’s $23 million cost (the technology was not bargain bin) because a general would always prefer commanding a large fleet of conventional fighters or bombers that provides high visibility and glory. By contrast, buying into Blackbird would mean deep secrecy, small numbers, and no limelight. In the military, less was definitely not more. Most military officers were assigned commands or Pentagon desk jobs for three to five years, before moving on. The future uses of a revolutionary airplane like the Blackbird as a fighter or bomber was a question they would gladly leave for their successors to mull over; they aimed to make their mark quickly by putting as much new rubber at the ramp as soon as possible and earn commendations and promotion up the chain of command. Kelly Johnson’s technological triumphs were thrilling to hear about but not immediately advantageous to an ambitious colonel lusting for his first star.

Kelly knew what he was up against, but he tried to improve the odds by producing the kinds of “add-ons” that no blue-suit customer could resist. For example, he put me in charge of a feasibility study for using the Blackbird as a platform for launching ICBM missiles. Launched from, say, sixty thousand feet, a missile could travel six to eight thousand miles by eliminating the tremendous fuel consumption of a ground-based launch. We even dreamed up the creation of an energy bomb that used no explosive device. Flying at Mach 3 and eighty-five thousand feet, we’d drop a two-thousand-pound weight of high-penetrating steel that would hit the ground with the force of a meteor — at about one million foot-pounds of energy and blast a hole 130 feet deep. The Air Force was interested, but fretted about the absence of a guidance system to assure pinpoint accuracy and resisted our suggestions to try to develop such a system. To the new secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, an energy bomb was futuristic drivel. McNamara had enough to worry about in the present tense.

Soviet military operations were at a higher level of alert than we had seen in years. Increasing numbers of long-range transcontinental flights by Soviet Bear bombers, capable of dropping nuclear weapons, were being made nonstop from bases in southern Russia to Havana, Cuba. The Bear was their version of our B-52. The journey was about six thousand miles, with probably two air-to-air refuelings. The Soviets insisted that these were merely long-duration training exercises. But the gut-churning fact was that if the Soviet Bears could reach Havana, they sure as hell could reach New York or Washington or Chicago. That message was like a brick hurled through McNamara’s office window.

An even bigger worry was Soviet submarines with Polaris-type nuclear-tipped missiles on board that were brazenly operating in international waters off our major cities on both coasts. We figured that their primary target would be our SAC bases, which was why none of our bomber wings were located east of the Mississippi but were scattered throughout the Great Plains in central states like Nebraska and Montana. This location gave SAC a few extra minutes to get our B-52s safely into the air before enemy missiles hit. Every time a Soviet sub was spotted off our coast, our entire U.S.-based bomber fleet went on alert.

The first time Kelly met McNamara he found him haughty and cold. “That guy will never buy into a project that he hasn’t thought up himself,” Kelly remarked at a staff meeting soon after. “He’s petty, the kind who will throw out any project begun under Eisenhower. He just doesn’t believe that anyone else has his brains and he’d love to stick it to an old-timer like me just to show the entire aerospace industry who’s boss.”

Our contract to build the new Blackbird spy plane for the CIA was rock solid, even though our original budget estimate was now almost doubled by delays, expensive materials, and technical problems to $161 million. To compensate for these increased costs the agency had scaled back its original purchase order from twelve airplanes to ten. So it seemed unlikely that McNamara, nicknamed Mac the Knife in the corridors of the Pentagon for his slashing budget cuts, would want to put more money into a Blackbird supersonic bomber. The Air Force was already spending millions developing the North American B-70, a huge triangular-shaped monster, capable of Mach 2 speeds. The B-70 was the favorite project of Kennedy’s gruff Air Force chief of staff, General Curtis LeMay, who usually got his way simply because few civilian officials (or uniformed generals for that matter) found the courage to try to face him down. Kelly was one of the rare exceptions. He told LeMay flat out that from what he had seen of the plans the B-70 would be obsolete before it was even off the drawing board. LeMay was furious, but a lot of blue-suiters privately agreed with Kelly. The B-70 had six engines to the Blackbird’s two. Our airplane was nearly twice as fast, but LeMay told Kelly he didn’t know beans about bombers, to stick to spy planes and mind his own business.

But then Dick Bissell got into the act. Bissell briefed President Kennedy on the CIA Blackbird project and told him the spy version of the airplane would be operational in less than a year. When he learned how fast and how high it would fly, the new president was astonished. He asked Bissell, “Could Kelly Johnson convert your spy plane into a long-range bomber?”

Bissell replied that Kelly aimed to do precisely that. “Then why are we going ahead with the B-70 program?” Kennedy asked. Bissell shrugged. “Sir,” he replied, “that’s a question more properly addressed to General LeMay.”

The president nodded sheepishly. But Kelly was embarrassed by Bissell’s indiscretion. As he noted in his private journal, “Bissell recounted his conversation about a bomber version of the Blackbird with the President. It was not right. The President asked for our proposal for the bomber before the Air Force had even seen one and I felt obligated to rush to Washington and present it as quickly as possible to our Air Force friends and showed the proposal to Gen. Thomas White. Lt. Gen. Bernard Shriever was there and they were all very upset, as was Gen. LeMay, about losing B-70s to our airplane. But at least they fully understood that that was not my doing and they cannot control Dick Bissell’s approach to the President.”

But who would have guessed that Bissell’s days were numbered? By April 1961, he was on his way out, his brilliant career shattered by the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Bissell had been overseeing the invasion attempt, staged by the agency using Cuban exiles trained in secret Florida camps. It was a botched mission from start to finish, and all of us were deeply depressed that Bissell had to fall on the sword along with his boss, Allen Dulles. Bissell was godfather to the Skunk Works. He started the U-2 and that really put us in business to stay. But he took his fall gracefully, and in April 1962, even though he was out of government by then, Kelly invited him out to the secret base to watch the first flight of the Blackbird. Both men were as tough as titanium, but both were clearly moved watching our test pilot, Lou Schalk, gun those two tremendous engines and rip into the early-morning cloudless sky. It was one of those unmatched moments when all the pain and stress involved in building that damned machine melted away in the most powerful engine roar ever heard.

Kelly worried that, with Bissell gone, Mac the Knife might convince the president to cut out the expensive Blackbird CIA operation altogether and cancel us before we had a chance to prove our worth collecting radar and electronic intercepts along the borders of the Soviet Union. From our great heights we could penetrate hundreds of miles into Russia with side-looking radar without actually crossing their borders. But in June 1961, the new president attended his first summit, in Vienna with Khrushchev, trying to de-escalate tensions with the Russians over the future status of Berlin. The meeting with the Russian leader was so unnervingly hostile that JFK came away privately convinced that we and the Russians were on the brink of war.

At the Skunk Works we sensed those mounting tensions immediately, when Air Force Chief of Staff LeMay made his first trip to Burbank to see the Skunk Works for himself. The trip itself was highly unusual because Kelly and Curtis were not exactly buddies and had pretty well avoided each other. The word we got was that Curtis LeMay wasn’t paying a courtesy call, but was bringing his checkbook.

Still, Kelly was wary. LeMay blamed Kelly for the administration’s decision to suddenly cut back on the B-70 program from ten bombers to only four. He thought Kelly and Bissell had connived to sabotage his B-70 with Kennedy. LeMay was also sore about our close relationship to the CIA because in his view the agency had no right to have its own independent air wing, furnished by the Skunk Works. But now LeMay whisked in with his entourage and a shopping list that included converting the Blackbird into an extended-range deep-penetration bomber that the Russians could not stop. LeMay had fathered the SAC strategy called MAD — Mutual Assured Destruction. That said it all. Our Blackbird would nuke ’em back to the Stone Age.

Kelly briefed LeMay personally and invited several of us who were experts on various components of the airplane to sit in just in case the general had technical questions. I was intrigued watching the big, two-fisted LeMay puffing on a thick cigar, his shrewd eyes focused in concentration as Kelly zipped through a classified slide show detailing all the performance characteristics of the new airplane.

“Could you fire air-to-ground missiles from that airplane while going at Mach 3 speed?” the general asked Kelly. Kelly replied affirmatively. “We’ve done the theoretics on this, General, and we feel confident that we could do this successfully.”

“Could you guide a missile to within two hundred feet of a target?” LeMay asked. Kelly again said yes, theoretically, and added that if the missiles were nuclear, pinpoint accuracy was unnecessary. Used as a deep-penetration tactical bomber, the Russians couldn’t stop us. Used as an interceptor, we were also unstoppable. Using look-down, shoot-down air-to-air missiles, our high-flying interceptor could defend all of North America against any long-range bomber force that would be expected to fly low to the deck to avoid radar detection. “With our speed,” Kelly insisted, “fewer interceptors would be needed to cover the entire North American continent. We’d look down at the Soviet bomber fleet and pick them off like fish in a barrel.” Kelly declared, “General, the fellow who gains the high ground takes the battle. Our speed gives us our height. We’re king of the mountain.”

LeMay suddenly raised his hand as a signal for Kelly to stop talking. Then he stood up, grabbed Kelly by the arm, and led him to the far corner of Kelly’s huge office for a private, whispered conference that lasted nearly ten minutes, while the rest of us sat transfixed, watching these two titans of military aviation cooking up some sort of scheme or scenario.

Kelly told us later that LeMay was enthusiastic about using the Blackbird as an interceptor but resisted the idea of using it as a bomber. The B-70 was still very much on his mind. “Johnson, I want a promise out of you that you won’t lobby any more against the B-70.” Kelly agreed — a promise he would deeply regret in the years ahead. “We’ll buy your interceptors. I don’t have a number yet but I’ll get back to you soon.”

Kelly asked, “What about the reconnaissance aircraft we built for the agency? Can’t the Air Force use any?” LeMay looked dismayed. “You mean, we haven’t ordered any?” He wrote a note to himself and promised Kelly he would forward an Air Force contract for the two-seater version of the spy plane within a few weeks.

The very next day, Kelly was tipped off by a colonel on LeMay’s staff that on the trip back to Washington aboard his jet, LeMay revised his thinking rather sharply and ordered his staff to develop a proposal for building ten Blackbird interceptors and ten tactical bombers a month!

For once, Kelly was speechless. “If this really comes to pass,” he told me, “our whole concept of operation will have to change. This would be such a staggering operation, when you consider it means building one airplane every other working day, that I doubt we could do it successfully using our Lockheed facilities here in Southern California. I could be wrong, but let’s do a study and see precisely what it would take.”

The size of LeMay’s shopping list reinforced our feeling that the administration was quietly and quickly gearing up for a major military showdown with the Russians. That conviction grew a few weeks later when Secretary McNamara himself arrived at our doorstep under a tight lid of secrecy, to be briefed by Kelly, review our management methods on the project, and see the Blackbird for himself. He brought with him all his top people: Secretary of the Air Force Joseph Charyk, Assistant Defense Secretary Roswell Gilpatric, and the Air Force’s future secretary, Harold Brown. Kelly briefed, while McNamara took copious notes and asked several questions about the airplane’s unique navigational system. It was the first astro-navigational system that actually used a small computer-driven telescope to find approximately sixty stars in its database. The telescope looked through a small window toward the rear of the airplane and was extremely accurate and reliable locking onto stars. It was so sensitive that it once locked onto a rivet hole in the hangar roof when the system was accidentally turned on during airplane servicing.

McNamara wanted to know all about it. “This is the most accurate navigational system we can devise,” Kelly said. “Remember, we are traveling at twice the speed of a sixteen-inch shell, and we don’t turn on a dime. A tight turn takes between sixty and a hundred nautical miles, and if a pilot gets a little sloppy he could start a turn over Atlanta and end up over Chattanooga.”

Several of us escorted the official party during the inspection tour of the Blackbird inside the giant assembly building. One of the generals on the secretary’s staff took me aside. “Mr. Rich,” he said, “I don’t understand why you’re building those large spikes to block air coming into the inlet. What is the principle here? It seems to me you’d want the air unimpeded.” I couldn’t believe that an Air Force general would ask such a naive question. I said, “General, the object is to build up pressure at high altitudes. Did you ever try to squirt water from a hose by placing your thumb over the opening?” His nod showed a glimmer of understanding.

By the time McNamara and his party boarded their jet for a red-eye flight back to Washington, Kelly was practically dancing a polka. The briefing could not have gone better. We expected purchase orders to follow. And we weren’t disappointed. As an immediate follow-up, Lew Meyer, the Air Force assistant secretary for finance, flew out the following week and informed us that we would probably get orders for ten Blackbird reconnaissance aircraft for the Air Force, in addition to the ten we were building for the CIA. They wanted a larger two-seater version, with a pilot up front and a navigator-electronics specialist called the Reconnaissance Systems Officer in a separate rear cockpit, working the routing, as well as operating all the special avionics for capturing enemy radar frequencies and electronic intercepts. We would also be receiving a contract for ten fighter-interceptor versions of the Blackbird and twenty-five tactical bombers. These orders would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars and seemed to defy the longtime Pentagon quasi-socialistic policy of never putting all their purchases in one manufacturer’s shopping cart.

Spreading the profits among the key manufacturers was the usual military-industrial game, but it really seemed that the era of the Blackbird was at hand: Blackbird spy planes, Blackbird interceptors, and Blackbird bombers. The Blackbird so outmatched any other airplane in the world with its speed and altitude, it would dominate air warfare for at least a decade or more.

Before 1962 ended, Kelly had obtained approval from Lockheed management to construct a million-dollar engineering building on the strength of the proposed expansion of the Blackbird programs. Our in-house study, meanwhile, indicated we would need $22 million in additional funds to increase production facilities to meet the large production quotas of Mach 3 Blackbird fighters and bombers the Air Force expected to order.

All of us began counting our big bonuses long before the check was in the mail. And all of us were in for one big let-down. I remember my producer brother telling me once about a young filmmaker who had been courted by a big studio, actually being kissed on both cheeks by the reigning mogul and declared a genius, and his script given the top priority for quick production. But a month later, that same young genius could not even get his calls returned. He had gone from hot to cold with no apparent explanation. That typical Hollywood story became the metaphor for the Blackbird scenario as played out by the Kennedy administration. Suddenly, Kelly could not get calls returned from key administration players making decisions about Blackbird bombers and interceptors. A few top generals began ducking him, too, and the word drifting back to us from the Pentagon was that McNamara’s young Turks advising him on cost-effectiveness refused to believe that the Russians were actually developing a supersonic Backfire bomber. Without that threat, the Blackbird was not a necessary deterrent. McNamara’s Turks insisted we could get by using the old standby fighter, the Convair F-106. This was the updated version of the F-102 delta-wing fighter that was the backbone of the Air Defense Command. Both of these airplanes had only supersonic dash (Mach 1.8) capability, their fuel capacity limited to a scant five minutes of supersonic flight.

Kelly thought Mac the Knife had taken leave of his senses. But he was not in the loop about planning for possible U.S. military intervention in Vietnam and the secret preparations for air and ground action by our forces. As a first step, McNamara approved a new classified prototype for the first swing-wing tactical fighter, called the TFX (Tactical Fighter Experimental), that would specialize in ground attack. Built by General Dynamics, it was destined to be one of the most controversial airplanes of the era, involving tens of millions in cost overruns, as its designers struggled to solve the horrendous problems of a movable wing — parallel on takeoff and becoming swept-back as the airplane gained Mach 2 speed. The Air Force wanted the F-111, as it was officially designated, to come in on the deck, evading radar by hiding in the ground clutter, to support local troop action in hostile ground action. But the first F-111s used in Vietnam took tremendous losses because their terrain-following radar, which allowed them to skim over treetops in the dead of night, acted like a powerful beacon for enemy radar to home in on. Even worse, most of us in the Skunk Works thought that the minute look-down, shoot-down radar fire control systems were perfected, airplanes like the F-111 would become obsolete. A higher-flying MiG pilot looking down on a squadron of F-111s could become a combat ace in seconds.

To prove the Blackbird’s tremendous performance capabilities to McNamara, we launched a flight in May 1962, from Edwards Air Force Base outside Los Angeles to Orlando, Florida, that blazed across the country in one hour and twenty-eight minutes. And if he wasn’t paying attention, we sent another Blackbird winging east from San Diego, which arrived over Savannah Beach, Georgia, only fifty-nine minutes later. We also started development of a weapons system for the Blackbird that would demonstrate how easily an airplane like the F-111 could be shot down while flying at the treetops.

This weapon was look-down, shoot-down radar and air-to-air missiles. Developing it, we were twenty-five years ahead of anyone else. We took an existing $80 million air-to-air missile developed by Hughes, called the GAR-9, and a Westinghouse ASG-18 radar system, both created for the Navy, and augmented them with our own special fire control system. The result stunned the blue-suiters, who thought it was impossible to successfully fire a missile from an airplane speeding at three times the speed of sound. Most air-to-air missiles traveled five, ten, fifteen miles to targets locked on at the same altitude or slightly below or above. We locked onto targets more than a hundred miles away and tens of thousands of feet below. From 80,000 feet, we knocked out drones flying on the deck at 1,500 feet. From 87,000 feet, we hit a drone flying at 40,000 feet.

To keep the missile from hitting our own airplane, we added a trapeze device to the missile launch system and used ejection cartridges to drop the missile nose down before it fired and sped off to the target at Mach 6. Our first test of the new system occurred in March 1965. We hit a drone from 36 miles away at a closing rate of 2,000 mph. A few weeks later, we fired the missile from 75,000 feet, while traveling at Mach 3.2, and hit a drone flying at 40,000 feet, 38 miles away. But a few months later we really rocked the Air Force. From 75,000 feet, we hit a low-altitude remote-controlled B-47 flying over the Gulf of Mexico at 1,200 feet from 80 miles off.

Kelly was overjoyed. Our testing was a superlative twelve hits out of thirteen attempts — firing from all heights and ranges. It was the most successful new weapons test in history. Our missile should have blasted a big hole in the administration’s backing of the F-111, which now was proven by our tests to be obsolete before it even flew. We knew the Russians were crashing a program to develop this kind of look-down, shoot-down system. Once it was in place aboard their newest MiG interceptors, life would be hell for any pilot in a low-flying aircraft like the F-111.

Our message to the blue-suiters: tell McNamara he’s backing the wrong bomber. Their message back: tell him yourself; he won’t listen to us. Kelly flew to Washington in the winter of 1966 and stormed in on Air Force Secretary Harold Brown, who was also rather blunt, and the two went head to head. Kelly called the F-111 a national scandal if the administration forced it on the Air Force in spite of the evidence of its vulnerability to our missile system. There was no justification for building this dog except maybe because it was being built in LBJ’s backyard, Fort Worth, Texas.

In fairness to McNamara, the Air Force was pushing for the TFX. They wanted a tactical fighter-bomber that could be used in big numbers in a ground war like Vietnam. The Blackbird was too revolutionary and too costly to fly regularly in harm’s way. The Air Force high command worried that it would be shot down and its technological secrets fall into enemy hands. But General LeMay won a partial concession from McNamara, and we received a contract for six two-man reconnaissance versions of the Blackbird to be built exclusively for the Air Force. The plane would be ultimately designated as the SR-71. It was larger and heavier than the CIA one-pilot model that carried only cameras. The Air Force model would be packed with both cameras and supersophisticated electronic eavesdropping equipment. The Skunk Works eventually would build thirty-one of them before this amazing airplane was finally, and some would say prematurely, retired in the winter of 1990.

By then the Blackbird had become a legend as an incredibly effective operational surveillance aircraft that could safely overfly the most hostile and dangerous territory at will. But the airplane and its operations were kept so secret that few inside or outside our government knew it was flying. But the Russians knew. So did the North Koreans, North Vietnamese, and Chinese. And there was nothing they could do to stop it.