Thanks to Cathy Nicholls Coyle for spotting
this one - Wes
What Plane?
by Annie Jacobsen (March 8, 2009; Los
Angeles Times)
As suburban secrets go, building an invisible aircraft in
the heart of a city is a doozy
If you were to transform this story into a movie and the line at the end of the
credits read, “This is based on a true story,” no one would believe it.
Back in the 1950s, there was a top-secret program code-named SUNTAN being
conducted at a top-secret facility called Skunk Works. Its
objective? To develop a liquid-hydrogen-powered spy
plane. Because liquid hydrogen is incredibly volatile, early experiments
were conducted inside a bomb shelter with eight-foot-thick walls.
The engineer in charge built what he called his “own hydrogen-liquefaction
plant.” At first, tests began in Dixie cups, but before long the place was
producing more liquid hydrogen than anywhere in America. “We wore grounded
shoes and couldn’t carry keys or any metallic objects that might spark,” he
recalls. “We installed a nonexplosive electrical
system and used only nonsparking tools.”
Still, storing liquid hydrogen presents a very clear danger. And in the spring
of 1959, a stove only 700 feet away from the tank caught fire. Extinguishers
were ineffective. When local firefighters showed up, they didn’t have
top-secret security clearances, so according to the engineer, the facility’s
guards wouldn’t let them on site. Fortunately, the hydrogen tank did not
explode, but with the project capable of blowing up the surrounding area, it
was deemed too dangerous to proceed. The public was never the wiser, Project
SUNTAN met its end, and Skunk Works returned millions in “black operation”
money to the Air Force. The thing is, that covert spy-plane project was but one
in a long line of secret projects being worked on at the same
hide-in-plain-sight location—Burbank.
The facility was Lockheed Aircraft Corporation—now Lockheed Martin—and the
engineer, later the director of Lockheed’s supersecret
division, was Ben Rich. And all of this really did happen in beautiful downtown
Burbank. Colonized by a dentist in 1867, it’s the sleepy L.A. suburb that, a
century later, Johnny Carson would immortalize as the picture of normal and
nondescript.
Who would have thought that in the 1950s, Burbank was a hotbed of international
espionage? “It would have been hard for people to imagine the kinds of things
we were doing there,” says Edward Lovick, the
90-year-old California physicist who worked at Lockheed in the Skunk Works
facility (also called Advanced Development Projects) and would become known
among colleagues as the grandfather of stealth.
After work on the liquid-hydrogen plane was halted, the goal for Skunk Works
became developing an invisible aircraft—invisible to radar,
that is. With stealth technology, the U.S. could spy on its Cold War
adversaries without running the risk of getting caught. These days, the idea of
stealth bombers is business as usual—heck, they even do flyovers at football
games. But back then, inventing the technology was a strictly clandestine
activity.
So it was in Burbank that, beginning in 1958, Lovick
and a team of scientists and engineers indeed created the invisible
airplane—something all kids dream of but hardly imagine could be happening next
door. Even though the 2,000 mph aircraft, code-named OXCART, was developed back
when Eisenhower was president, it was not declassified by the CIA until 2007.
Like its predecessor the U-2 spy plane, OXCART was a collaborative effort
between the CIA, the U.S. Air Force and Lockheed. Eisenhower had expressly put
the CIA in charge because the Air Force was under tight congressional scrutiny,
while the CIA could run OXCART as a black operation—meaning covert and
deniable.
Lovick, sporting a colorful Hawaiian shirt and khaki
pants and observing the world through large, wire-rimmed glasses, now offers us
his perspective on Burbank through the long lens of recollection. He is seated
in his home in the San Fernando Valley, surrounded by books, maps and
small-scale models of the spy planes he worked on during his 40-year career at
Lockheed. Quick-witted and endlessly full of ideas, Lovick
and his wife, Sherre, also a former member of Skunk
Works (and the person who, on another project, made the window on the
catamaran-like ship called Sea Shadow invisible to radar), have recently
returned from a grand European tour.
“In the 1940s, Lockheed produced airplanes like the P-38 Lightning, which
helped us win the war,” Lovick says. “In the 1950s,
Lockheed designed and built the famous U-2.” In May, 1960, Francis Gary Powers was shot down in a U-2 over Russia, and the CIA knew it
needed a better spy plane. “Actually, the Russians had been tracking the U-2
long before Powers was shot down. It was only a matter of time before that
happened, and the CIA knew it, which is why they had us working on a successor
aircraft at the Skunk Works.” The idea for the new spy plane, originally called
the U-3, “was to add stealth as an element from paper to plane.”
As Louis Pasteur once remarked, “Fortune favors the prepared mind,” and this
was certainly true in Lovick’s case. He was
Lockheed’s radar and antennae expert at the time and had been working on
microwave theory, which is an integral part of stealth, since it advanced as a
new science after the war. “Back then, few people cared much about this
relatively new technology. Most engineers were learning about wiring—how power
was generated and distributed. I began lab experiments with microwave theory at
Caltech, and it was there I learned how to guide wave energy through hollow
pipes to a specific location. My becoming an expert was simply a case of being
the first one to know anything about it at Skunk Works.”
As Lockheed’s radar man, Lovick grasped how an
intimate theoretical knowledge of radar could help in designing a plane that
could fool it. So crucial was Lovick’s work that he
accompanied his Lockheed boss, legendary airplane designer Clarence L. “Kelly”
Johnson, on trips to Washington, D.C., for high-level meetings with the CIA.
“Right before Lockheed got the new [spy-plane] contract,
we went to a hotel room for a meeting. It was Kelly Johnson, a few science
advisers to the president, someone from the CIA and myself.
Pillows were put over the heating vents, and the room was checked for bugs
before any of us spoke,” Lovick says. “The CIA, who
we called ‘the customer,’ was like that. It seemed a little silly to me at the
time.”
Before you snicker at the cloak and dagger, it’s important to remember that it
was a tenuous time—the height of the Cold War. Both America and the Soviet
Union were preoccupied with spying on each other. The CIA required Lockheed
employees to report if anyone “foreign born” tried to befriend them. Word was
that pay phones just outside the Burbank headquarters were routinely used by
Russian spies hoping to eavesdrop on workers’ private calls.
At the same time, each superpower was busy testing nuclear bombs. When
considering various forms of espionage available to the CIA—humans, spy planes
and satellites (which were then brand new)—aircraft provided a versatile means
to secure the most accurate information in determining another country’s
weapons capability. Eisenhower’s goal with the Lockheed spy-plane programs was
to get more information on the Soviet Union than it had on us, all to prevent
nuclear war. The OXCART was able to take photographs showing clear lines in
parking lots—from 90,000 feet.
Lovick says he never felt pressure from Johnson, even
though making the aircraft undetectable fell squarely on his desk. “Kelly gave
me access to all areas. I was a little bit like a professor. I would roam the
Skunk Works buildings and talk to various people. Everyone had knowledge. Most
of our advances on the low observables [as in, stealth] came from putting
together these different ideas.”
If it is hard to imagine the birth of aerial espionage taking place in Burbank,
it’s even harder to conceive the materials that helped deliver stealth
technology to the world. “There were no computers at our disposal,” Lovick says. “This meant we made all of our calculations on
slide rules. We mixed chemicals in vats. We stomped on things like grape stompers.” The results of those hand calculations and
old-school chemical trials were astonishing. Not only did Skunk Works create
the magic formula that is now known as stealth, but the OXCART flew three times
faster than the speed of sound (Mach 3.2), at an altitude 16 miles above the
earth. Its state-of-the-art camera could capture 100,000 square miles of
terrain per hour. The design was so sophisticated that one of the companies
involved remains classified to this day.
It was also Lovick who designed the first anechoic
chamber, a shielded, echoless room that allows scientists to test how airplanes
will react to radar in the atmosphere. Now standard at all aircraft
manufacturers, the one built by Lovick in Burbank was
the first of its kind. “It was so quiet in that chamber,” he says, “I could
hear my blood flowing through my body.”
As “Cold War-era” as these spy-plane projects may now seem, it’s another key
element of aerial espionage born in Burbank that has since become the single
most valuable means of surveillance—the pilotless
aircraft, or drone, code-named TAGBOARD. Lockheed’s D-21 drone project,
classified “above top secret,” was officially kept quiet until 2007. Lovick designed the plane’s antenna, which when it received
the necessary signal, would cue the craft to launch off the back of the OXCART.
Because it flew without a pilot, the D-21 was designed to fly over territory
where the U.S. was denied access and to take photographs of weapons facilities
from altitudes as low as 1,500 feet. But the project was canceled on July 30,
1966, after a fatal accident at sea during the drone’s first official launch.
CIA test pilot Bill Park and flight engineer Ray Torick
were flying the OXCART 150 miles off the Malibu coast. A
follow airplane and rescue boat were nearby. The drone was designed to
launch up and off the spy plane at Mach 3, but on this night something went
terribly wrong. During separation, the drone pitched down and split the
aircraft in half. Park and Torick were trapped inside
as it fell more than 20,000 feet. Both managed to eject and fall though the air
tethered to their parachutes—remarkably escaping the falling debris—and both
made successful water landings. The rescue boat located Park, who was fine, but
Torick apparently opened his visor upon landing,
which caused his suit to fill with water, and he drowned.
Scientists and engineers at Skunk Works were devastated. Lockheed canceled the
program, and the CIA/Air Force continued to hone the technology in other
programs. But where would Lockheed flight-test its covert aircraft? Designing
and building spy planes and drones in beautiful downtown Burbank may have been
one of the century’s best-kept secrets, but there was no way to fly an oddly
shaped, Mach-3 aircraft over the San Fernando Valley without causing public
alarm.
For that reason, the CIA had arranged for flight testing to begin at a secret
military facility in the Nevada desert—the place the world has come to know as
Area 51. (link)
ANNIE JACOBSEN writes about aviation
security and the intelligence community. She lives in Los Angeles.
By the way, a great book about the design and construction of the SR-71 is Ben Rich's "Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of my Years at Lockheed" (ISBN: 0316743003 ) - highly recommended - Wes