Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed

I had 600 hours piloting Blackbird, and my last flight was just as big a thrill as my first. At 85,000 feet and Mach 3, it was almost a religious experience. My first flight out of Beale in ’67, I took off late on a winter afternoon, heading east where it was already dark, and it was one of the most amazing and frightening moments going from daylight into a dark curtain of night that seemed to be hung across half of the continent. There was nothing in between — you streaked from bright day and flew into utter black, like being swallowed up into an abyss. My God, even now, I get goosebumps remembering. We flew to the east coast then turned around and headed back to California and saw the sun rising in the west as we reentered daylight. We were actually outspeeding the earth’s rotation!

Nothing had prepared me to fly that fast. A typical training flight, we’d take off from Beale, then head east. I’d look out and see the Great Salt Lake — hell of a landmark. Then look back in the cockpit to be sure everything was okay. Then look out again and the Great Salt Lake had vanished. In its place, the Rockies. Then you scribbled on your flight plan and looked out again — this time at the Mississippi River. You were gobbling up huge hunks of geography by the minute. Hell, you’re flying three thousand feet a second! We flew coast to coast and border to border in three hours fifty-nine minutes with two air-to-air refuelings. One day I heard another SR-71 pilot calling Albuquerque Center. I recognized his voice and knew he was flying lower than me but in the vicinity, so I called and said, “Tony, dump some fuel so I can see you.” In only a couple of blinks of an eye, fuel streaked by underneath my airplane. He was like one hundred and fifty miles ahead of me.

One day our automatic navigation system failed. Ordinarily that’s an automatic abort situation, but I decided to try to fly without the automatic navigation. I advised the FAA I was going to try this and to monitor us and let us know where we were if we got lost. I quickly learned that if we started a turn one second late, we were already off course, and if my bank angle wasn’t exact, I was off by a long shot. I started a turn just below L.A. and wound up over Mexico! I realized right then that we couldn’t navigate by the seat of our pants. Not at those incredible speeds.

I remember when a new pilot flying the SR-71 for the first time out of Beale began shouting “Mayday, Mayday” over Salt Lake City. “My nose is coming off!” My God, we all panicked and cranked out all the emergency vehicles. The guy aborted, staggered back to Beale. All that really happened was that the airplane’s nose wrinkled from the heat. The skin always did that. The crew smoothed it out using a blowtorch. It was just like ironing a shirt.

My favorite route was to refuel over the Pacific right after takeoff, then come in over Northern California going supersonic, flying just north of Grand Forks, North Dakota, then turn to avoid Chicago, swing over Georgia, then coast out over the Atlantic, then refuel over Florida, west of Miami, then head straight back to Beale. Total elapsed time: three hours twenty-two minutes. Take off at nine or ten in the morning and land before two in the afternoon, in time to play tennis before cocktail hour.

As time went on we were being routed over least-populated areas because of growing complaints about sonic booms. One of them came straight from Nixon. One of our airplanes boomed him while he was reading on the patio of his estate at San Clemente. He got on the horn to the chief of staff and said, “Goddam it, you’re disturbing people.” One little community named Susanville, in California, sat right in a valley and was in the path of our return route to Beale. The sonic boom would echo off the hills and crack windows and plaster. We had the townspeople in, showed them the airplane, appealed to their patriotism, and told them the boom was “the sound of freedom.” They lapped it up.

The Blackbird reconnaissance missions over North Vietnam, which began in late 1966, were invaluable to the president. We learned precisely the locations of missile and antiaircraft batteries, what ships were in the harbor unloading, and obtained up-to-date targeting intelligence for our bombing missions. Without these Blackbird overflights of Haiphong and Hanoi, President Johnson would never have allowed any tactical air operations in the North because he was extremely sensitive — I think in some ways, overly sensitive — to the possibilities of a bomb accidentally hitting a Chinese or Russian ship while it was unloading in the harbor, and he also was determined to keep civilian damage and casualties to a minimum. So he demanded frequent Blackbird missions — two or three every week — to supply him with the latest intelligence, since he usually chose the targets personally and insisted on approving each and every raid in the North. The military offered their priorities for targets, and the questions he raised about proposed targets were always the same: What were the military consequences of taking out that particular target? What were the expected losses in men and airplanes on this particular raid? And how much secondary civilian damage was anticipated? Before signing off on a mission he calculated in his own mind whether the anticipated losses were worth the anticipated gains. And the Blackbird photos were the decisive factors in helping him to make up his mind.

On January 23, 1968, the North Koreans caught us by surprise by boarding a naval surveillance ship called the Pueblo while it was in international waters. We were really caught short not knowing the fate of the crew or the ship. We figured they planned that incident to divert us at the time of the Tet Offensive in South Vietnam, but we would be damned if we’d let them get away with it. The whole country was up in arms over this incident. The president was considering using air-power to hit them hard and try to shake our crewmen loose. But when we cooled down, we had to suck in our gut and hold back until we were certain about the situation. Dick Helms, the director of the CIA, urged the president to authorize Blackbird flights to try to locate the missing ship. LBJ was reluctant to overfly North Korea and offer the tempting target of the Blackbird, possibly provoking an even greater international incident. But he was assured that Blackbird could photograph the whole of North Korea, from the DMZ to the Yalu River, in less than ten minutes, and probably do so unobserved by air defense radar. Which is precisely what happened. The Blackbird quickly located the captured Pueblo at anchor in Wonson harbor only twenty-four hours after it was boarded by the North Koreans. So we had to abandon any plans to hit them with airpower. All that would accomplish would be to kill a lot of people, including our own. But the Blackbird’s photo take provided proof that our ship and our men were being held. The Koreans couldn’t lie about that, and we immediately began negotiations to get them back.

We trained a year, acquired a hundred hours of flying time, before we flew out to giant Kadena Air Base at Okinawa in early 1968. The trip took about six hours by SR-71, fourteen hours if you flew over in a tanker. This was for real. The slower and lower U-2s couldn’t make it flying over North Vietnam with all those SAM sites. That mission became ours. We flew five times a week on average. Also, missions over North Korea and to Soviet naval facilities, north of Japan. We operated three airplanes and lived isolated from the main base population in a remote corner of Kadena that had been set up for the original CIA pilots and crew. But very quickly the islanders learned we were there and would go up on the hill overlooking the base to catch a glimpse of our bird, which shook the whole island taking off. The islanders nicknamed our airplane Habu, after a black, extremely deadly pit viper. Habu, like the Blackbird, was indigenous to Okinawa and the name stuck. We carried that name on our shoulder patches. To this day, that hill is still called Habu Hill by the islanders.

The minute we showed up at Kadena, so did two Soviet trawlers, which fed our takeoff times and position to their friends in North Vietnam and put them on the alert. But we were cocky. We timed our flights not for surprise, but to achieve the most favorable sun angle for our pictures, usually taking off between ten in the morning and noon. We made a big turn and banked to head for Hanoi, exposing ourselves on the side to those giant Tall King long-range radars that the Chinese installed on Hainan Island. They knew we had two primary targets — Haiphong and Hanoi — so it was just a matter of timing us and waiting for us to fly over their missile sites. We collected so much photo and electronic intelligence data from each mission that our intelligence people were swamped by it and simply couldn’t keep up. We photographed 100,000 square miles of terrain per hour, from which selected target images could be blown up more than twenty times. Some of the cameras were operated by me as the RSO in the backseat and others were automatic. The cameras were very fast and preprogrammed. We could provide both horizon-to-horizon coverage and close-up telescopic work that would let you see down a flea’s throat.

Okinawa is one hell of a long way from Vietnam. Our missions averaged more than six thousand miles and took more than four hours. The logistics involved were staggering because we had refueling tankers strung out from Kadena to Thailand. So we usually flew two airplanes, using one as a spare in case the mission plane had to crap out. Having all those tankers in the sky was expensive. Typically, we’d hit a tanker fifteen minutes after takeoff, head on down between Taiwan and the Philippines, to Cam Ranh Bay, then turn north over North Vietnam. We’d overfly the north in eight to twelve minutes, take in both Haiphong and Hanoi, staying out of range of the SA-2 missile batteries down below. Then we’d do a double-looper, going over the north again, before refueling over Thailand. We overflew both north and south in Vietnam, did Laos and Cambodia, flew over both north and south in Korea.

Sometimes after a mission, I’d get a look at our photo take to see how well we did. It was unbelievable! You could actually see down the open hatches of a freighter unloading in Haiphong’s harbor. In fact, the photo interpreters claimed that they could tell what was down in those hatches, it was that sharp and clear from 85,000 feet. They’d blow up our photos to the size of a table.

Frankly, I had the feeling that there were things the hostiles made no effort to hide. For example, North Korea. Took us about ten minutes to overfly then hit a tanker and do it again at a different latitude. These missions had to be cleared at the highest level. We concentrated on missile sites, port facilities, any unusual movement. Those folks never moved their missile sites. They wanted us to see them, record them. Not cause tensions or apprehensions by hiding them or moving them around. Same with the Chinese. We overflew them two or three years, but only with direct orders from the commander in chief. Those guys wanted us to know they had the bomb. That was clear.

We knew we’d probably get shot at, but it wasn’t a big worry because at our height an SA-2 missile simply didn’t have the aerodynamic capability to maneuver once we started twisting and turning to get away from it. Still, when a little warning light came on in my cockpit to report that the boys downstairs had launched one up at me, I tightened up for sure. I personally never saw a missile coming up, but others did. One of our pilots, Bill Campbell, saw three missiles explode at his altitude, but a couple of miles behind. He actually watched them being launched and caught it on film. He said those damn missiles looked as big as telephone poles as they lifted off.

Later on, in the late 1970s, when the Russians developed their powerful SA-5 ground-to-air missile that could have knocked us down, they never tried to use it against the Blackbird. That missile was so enormous it looked like a medium-range intercontinental ballistic missile sitting on its pad. Made me queasy just looking down at it through my telescopic sight. But my theory was that the hostiles realized that reconnaissance flights were actually stabilizing. We knew what they were looking at and they knew what we were looking at. If they denied us, we’d deny them. And then everyone would get the jitters. In this game, you didn’t deny access unless you were ready to get serious about preventing it.

We were flying over North Vietnam at 82,000 feet when suddenly I had to do a quick maneuver to keep us from colliding with a weather balloon that whisked past us just off my wingtip. At that very moment, we experienced an unstart in the left engine, which knocked me and my RSO all over our respective cockpits. My RSO looks out and sees the left engine trailing fuel, and he thinks we’ve been hit by a SAM. “Buz, we’ve been hit,” he shouts into his open mike. I always suspected that we were more closely monitored on these flights than we probably realized by special RC-135 snooper airplanes packed with powerful electronics. And now, I’m certain, because by the time we made our second pass over the North, the White House Situation Room had already been wrongly notified that my SR-71 had been hit over Hanoi.

Just before I deployed to Kadena in the fall of ’69, we were tasked to fly up to the Arctic Circle and check on some suspicious activity on a tiny Russian island. I was then stationed at Beale, living at home with my wife. We took off after breakfast, refueled over Alaska, headed north for fifteen hundred miles. It was scary being over the most forbidding area of the world. If you had to eject, you were finished. Anyway, we reached this island, turned on the recorders and the cameras, then turned around, hit another tanker, and flew back into Beale. I was home in time for dinner and my wife never knew where I’d been that day. She assumed it was just another day at the office. At dinner, I almost burst out laughing thinking of her reaction if she had known I’d spent the day flying up and back to the Arctic Circle!

I had another very odd mission, like that one, in the early 1970s, while stationed at Kadena. We were tasked to fly against the very formidable and new Soviet SA-5 missile site that had been constructed at Vladivostok, their big naval base in the Sea of Japan, at a time when the Russians were conducting a huge naval exercise right off the coast. We were to fly to this dangerous site late Sunday night, hoping that we would find their most junior officers on duty, who would snap at the bait and turn on their radar and we could measure the frequency, the pulse repetition intervals, and a lot of other vital technical details that could be used to develop counter-electronics against this monster. A more experienced officer might figure out what we were really up to and stay dark.

The National Security Agency put aboard a special recording package for this particular mission, and we flew right down the throat of that site, so that it seemed certain that we were going to overfly Soviet territory. As we came in, radars from dozens of Soviet naval ships on that training exercise switched on. And at the last second, we pulled a sharp turn and avoided any overflight of Soviet airspace. But the take was awesome. In all, we got nearly three hundred different radar transmissions recorded, including the first SA-5 signals obtained by our side. Meanwhile, I had plenty of problems to cope with before we landed safely.

After turning, we headed toward Japan. During that big turn, the oil pressure on the left engine began falling and rapidly dropped to zero. We stayed on a southern heading but shut down that engine and flew on one engine against awful head-winds at fifteen thousand feet as we approached the North Korean coastline. We were just struggling to maintain altitude and didn’t realize it until later that the North Koreans had scrambled fighters against us, and that the South Koreans had scrambled their fighters to get between us and the North Koreans and defend us. We had no choice but to put in to a South Korean air base at Taegu. I called the field, but they refused permission to land. Field closed, they said. I said, “I’ve got to land. Turn on your lights.” We came in and just sat there, surrounded by dozens of people in black pajamas with machine guns. My pilot said to me, “Butch, you sure we landed in South Korea?”

On November 22, 1969, I flew my first North Korea mission. I was uptight because North Korea was very heavily defended, and on this particular mission we went to every known SAM site in North Korea, all twenty-one of them, and we crisscrossed them, made a big 180-degree turn that took us right across the Chinese border, then came back right down the center of North Korea, then made another 180-degree turn across the demilitarized zone. We crossed North Korea eight to ten times on that mission, covered the entire country. As we finished up and were turning to go home, a right-generator fail light came on. I tried to reset it, but it was no go, so we ended up making an emergency landing in the south and caused a big stir and fuss.

In ’71, we were tasked to fly three Blackbirds over North Vietnam, which was highly unusual. All other missions used only one airplane at a time. We took off first, refueled over Thailand, and headed north, with the other two planes following. The plan was for us to crisscross over Hanoi in thirty-second intervals at 78, 76, and 74 thousand feet respectively, at a certain point, which we later learned was over the Hanoi Hilton, the infamous POW prison, and deliver sonic booms, one after another. Later on, the vice commander of our squadron hinted that the purpose of the mission was to send a signal to the POWs, a fact I’ve never been able to confirm. Many years later, I talked to POWs who were in that prison at the time and they heard the sonic booms thirty seconds apart but insisted that they didn’t know what in hell it meant.

I ran the SR-71 operation for Lockheed at Mildenhall, an RAF base in Suffolk, from 1982 to 1989. We had two SR-71s, and when I went in with eighteen Skunk Works mechanics, I replaced eighty Air Force mechanics who had suffered eight aborted missions in a row. We took over and immediately logged eight successful flights in a row and had those blue-suiters scratching their heads.

The Mildenhall operation was revealed by the prime minister, Mrs. Thatcher, about two years after we got there. Our main deployment was to fly twice a week up to the northern extremes of the Soviet Union to the big naval base of Murmansk, on the Kola peninsula, to keep a sharp eye on their nuclear sub pens. That place was so remote it took us three air-to-air refuelings to get there. Which is why they put their subs there to begin with. The place was very heavily defended by fighters and missiles, but only the Blackbird could fly it safely. They always detected us, but they couldn’t stop us. We flew right up against them but didn’t actually penetrate Soviet airspace. That was a big no-no, by presidential orders. In cases of emergency, engine problems and such, we had to put in to Norway — that happened three times. We took pictures of the subs in their pens, saw which ones were occupied, which empty. Those nuclear subs were a potential threat to our mainland because they carried Polaris-type nuclear missiles that could be fired offshore and hit Washington and New York. So we kept a close count and tracked the subs from the moment they left their pens. The pictures were so clear we could even tell the size of the sub’s screws under the water, count the missile silos on the decks. We took both radar pictures and regular pictures, tested radar frequencies by penetrating their air defense systems, and then did the same thing on long flights down the Baltic coast of East Germany and Poland.

The Soviets would scramble their MiG-25s against us, but they got up to only sixty thousand feet, then fell off. One of them got up to Mach 3 on a zoom, then fell off. Those MiGs could reach max speeds of Mach 2.5 to 2.7, which wasn’t nearly good enough to catch the SR-71. They also fired missiles at us from time to time, but we used our jammers very effectively. The purpose of the Baltic coastal flights was to gather radar and electronic intelligence as well as obtain good photos of military facilities along the border of the Eastern bloc. On a typical mission, we could get invaluable intelligence on as many as fifty different radar and missile tracking systems deployed against us in the Baltic and Barents Sea regions.

Our guys out of England regularly overflew the Mediterranean, from Greece to Tunisia. We were far superior to any damned spy satellite. You wanted a picture at 10:01 a.m. Sunday, anywhere in the world, we’d go out and get it for you. We covered the world with a handful of airplanes.

My first mission to the Soviet sub pens in the Baltic was in December 1985. At eighty-five thousand feet, the winter view of the northern Russian port areas was magnificent. The land was absolutely white in every direction, and the sea was frozen solid, too, except for the dark black lines where icebreakers had been used and I could see subs moving along the surface, heading for deeper waters. In the polar cold, we pulled engine contrails, which made us a clear target in the cloudless sky. Way down below I could see the spiral contrails of Soviet fighters, scrambled because of us. At that time of year the sun was very low on the horizon even at noon. I had lowered the curtain to cover the left window so I could watch the radar and defensive systems panels in the backseat without having the sun directly in my eyes. As we approached the sub pens we received a “condition one” alert over the high-frequency radio that got our immediate attention. An instant later, the defensive systems panel began lighting up, indicating we were being tracked and engaged by SAM missiles and there might be a missile on the way. I advised my pilot to accelerate out to maximum Mach. I thought, If they really fired a missile, it should be here by now. At that instant, the Velcro that held the sun screen curtain in place let go, and my cockpit was lit with brilliant light. For a split second, I thought, They got us! I let go with a shriek of terror. So much for the image of the fearless flyer. Scared crapless by a blinding flash of winter sunlight.

In the fall of ’82, I flew from Mildenhall on a mission over Lebanon in response to the Marine barracks bombing. President Reagan ordered photo coverage of all the terrorist bases in the region. The French refused to allow us to overfly, so our mission profile was to refuel off the south coast of England, a Mach 3 cruise leg down the coast of Portugal and Spain, left turn through the Straits of Gibraltar, refuel in the western Mediterranean, pull a supersonic leg along the coast of Greece and Turkey, right turn into Lebanon and fly right down main street Beirut, exit along the southern Mediterranean with another refueling over Malta, supersonic back out the straits, and return to England.

Because Syria had a Soviet SA-5 missile system just west of Damascus that we would be penetrating (we were unsure of Syria’s intentions in this conflict), we programmed to fly above eighty thousand feet and at Mach 3 plus to be on the safe side, knowing that this advanced missile had the range and speed to nail us. And as we entered Lebanon’s airspace my Recon Systems Officer in the rear cockpit informed me that our defensive systems display showed we were being tracked by that SA-5. About fifteen seconds later we got a warning of active guidance signals from the SA-5 site. We couldn’t tell whether there was an actual launch or the missile was still on the rails, but they were actively tracking us. We didn’t waste any time wondering, but climbed and pushed that throttle, and said a couple of “Hail Kellys.”

We completed our pass over Beirut and turned toward Malta, when I got a warning low-oil-pressure light on my right engine. Even though the engine was running fine I slowed down and lowered our altitude and made a direct line for England. We decided to cross France without clearance instead of going the roundabout way. We made it almost across, when I looked out the left window and saw a French Mirage III sitting ten feet off my left wing. He came up on our frequency and asked us for our Diplomatic Clearance Number. I had no idea what he was talking about, so I told him to stand by. I asked my backseater, who said, “Don’t worry about it. I just gave it to him.” What he had given him was “the bird” with his middle finger. I lit the afterburners and left that Mirage standing still. Two minutes later, we were crossing the Channel.

On October 28, 1987, I flew from Okinawa to Iran and back — an eleven-hour mission into the Persian Gulf. The purpose was deadly serious. The Reagan White House wanted to know whether or not the Iranians were in possession of Chinese Silkworm missiles that could be fired against shipping in the Straits of Hormuz. These missiles posed a threat against oil tankers, and the Blackbird overflights clearly showed that the Iranians indeed had Silkworms in place along the coast. Knowing their exact location, we were able to forewarn the Navy and also deliver some very direct private warnings to the Iranians about what they could expect if they fired one of those Silkworms at shipping. Our government was escorting tankers in and out through the narrow straits to ensure their safety.

Our flight was code-named Giant Express. And that it certainly was. We flew halfway around the world. After leaving Okinawa, we headed out toward Southeast Asia, and then, south of India, for our second refueling. Five hours after taking off, we approached the Gulf region and could actually see the Navy escorting a line of tankers down below. While in acceleration after the third air refueling, I received the following radio call: “Unidentified aircraft at forty thousand feet, identify yourself or prepare to be engaged.” I immediately transmitted on another UHF frequency specifically designated for this sortie that I was “an Air Force special.” I received no further response. A few months later, an Iranian civilian airliner was shot down by the U.S. Navy in the Gulf. While reading the press accounts of the incident, I recognized the identical transmission to the Airbus that I had received, probably from that very same missile frigate down below. I sometimes wonder what would have happened had I chosen not to respond to their identification demand and maintained my radio silence.

When Congress approved the decision to retire the SR-71, the Smithsonian Institution requested that a Blackbird be delivered for eventual display in the Air and Space Museum in Washington and that we set a new transcontinental speed record delivering it from California to Dulles. I had the honor of piloting that final flight on March 6, 1990, for its final 2,300-mile flight between L.A. and D.C. I took off with my backseat navigator, Lt. Col. Joe Vida, at 4:30 in the morning from Palmdale, just outside L.A., and despite the early hour, a huge crowd cheered us off. We hit a tanker over the Pacific then turned and dashed east, accelerating to 2.6 Mach and about sixty thousand feet. Below stretched hundreds of miles of California coastline in the early morning light. In the east and above, the hint of a red sunrise and the bright twinkling lights from Venus, Mars, and Saturn. A moment later we were directly over central California, with the Blackbird’s continual sonic boom serving as an early wake-up call to the millions sleeping below on this special day. I pushed out to Mach 3.3.

From Kansas City eastward we were high above a cirrus cloud undercast but savored this view from above 97 percent of the earth’s atmosphere — enjoyed witnessing for one final time the curvature of the earth, the bright blue glow just above the horizon, and the pitch-dark daytime sky directly overhead. High above the jet stream, the winds blew at only five mph, and we cruised smooth as silk.

We averaged 2,190 mph from St. Louis to Cincinnati, covering the distance in eight minutes, thirty-two seconds, a new city-to-city aviation record.

When we were abeam Washington at eighty-four thousand feet, I terminated the supersonic afterburner and began our descent. We had set two records: L.A. to D.C. in only sixty-four minutes and Kansas City to D.C. in twenty-six minutes. And we had set a new transcontinental speed record, covering 2,404 statute miles in only sixty-seven minutes, fifty-four seconds. It was also the first time that a sonic boom had traversed the entire length of our great country. Through the haze I saw the Dulles tower and flew above the waiting crowd at eight hundred feet, resisting the temptation to really go down on the deck for fear of blowing out the Dulles terminal windows with our powerful engine vibrations. I felt both tremendous elation and tremendous sadness. When we landed and climbed out, Ben Rich, head of the Skunk Works, was waiting below to shake my hand. I had met him once before, when I worked with him to plan a fly-by of this airplane directly over the Skunk Works on December 20, 1989, celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Blackbird.

I made three low passes over the complex of hangars and buildings that comprise the famous Skunk Works operation at Burbank, and Ben had trotted out every single worker to cheer and experience the thrill of seeing this incredible machine they had built sweeping in low over their heads. There were several thousand workers down below waving at us. On the last pass I performed a short, steep afterburner climb and rocked my wings in a salute. I heard later that men had cried.