Blackbird Secrets Finally Revealed

LANCASTER - This story is TOP SECRET. If I tell you this story, I'm going to have to kill you.

In recording the laurels of the fame and lore of the legendary Blackbird spy plane fraternity, Blackbird pilot yarns fall in the category of "Now it can be told." Now is about 10 years after the end of the Cold War.

But in a galaxy far away and not so long ago, all of these stories - and the thrills, fright and chuckles that went with them certainly were beyond TOP SECRET.

To discuss the Blackbird program freely was a crime. To venture near the aircraft without authorization could invite deadly force by small-arms fire from sentries.

There were code words. Oxcart and Archangel - program and code names for an aircraft so secret it was tested at a place that didn't exist - Area 51. Groom Lake, Nev. The Ranch.

For the 21 high-stakes aviation players inducted into the elite honors society dubbed the Blackbird Laurels fraternity on Saturday night, there were anecdotes about medals from the CIA, midnight meetings, false names and the rules that nobody could talk about to anybody who wasn't in the program.

The weekend festivities commemorated the first flight of the A-12, first in the family of Blackbird aircraft, originally delivered to the CIA. Later Blackbirds flew for the Air Force and still fly research for NASA.

Intelligence retrieved by Blackbird's high-resolution cameras and sensors crossed the White House desks of a half-dozen presidents, starting with Lyndon B. Johnson and continuing through George H.W. Bush.

Johnson announced the existence of the program during the 1964 campaign, but in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Blackbird was a project code-named Oxcart. Irony was built into a code name that signified what would become - and still is - the world's fastest jet aircraft.

Then, there were the locations where the super-secret Blackbird planes operated. Places like North Korea and North Vietnam, and a lot of places north of a lot of map lines where the mission's existence would be denied.

Originally, Blackbird overflights were planned for the Soviet Union and China. But other hostile nations offered plenty of intelligence targets.

"We got replaced by satellites," retired Maj. Gen. Mele Vojvodich said. "We didn't do what we were designed to do, but we did what we were ordered to do."

And they did it far from home. Blackbirds nested at RAF Air Base Mildenhall in England and Kadena Air Base on Okinawa. The Mildenhall crews flew the outer tracery of the Soviet Union and the Middle East. On Okinawa, the Blackbird crews that overflew Asia gave their aircraft the nickname "Habu" for a deadly local viper with a lightning quick strike.

Closer to home, in Palmdale, the spy planes of the Blackbird fleet would be moved at night, clustered in warehouse hangars to thwart Soviet spy satellites.

And until now, 40 years after the first flight of the sleek, black A-12 spy plane, nobody did talk.

On Saturday night, the fliers, crew and support staff inducted into the Blackbird Laurels Society did open up a bit. First of all, they talked about how they couldn't talk.

Now retired from the Air Force, pilot James Eastham remembers getting auditioned for the Blackbird program by fellow flier Louis Schalk at his home in Lancaster.

Eastham demurred, saying he was hustling a red-hot program, the B-58 Hustler supersonic bomber, and it just didn't get any hotter.

Schalk promised what he was doing was hotter yet. "Doing what?" Eastham pressed.

Another inductee, Norm Nelson, recalls how he was scouted for a Blackbird assignment at a midnight meeting at Los Angeles International Airport. He'd be someone from the government tasked to let "the customer" back in Washington know how things were going with Blackbird.

To get on board, he had to be OK'd by none other than Kelly Johnson, the legendary founder of Lockheed's engineering hot house, the Skunk Works.

Johnson thought well of Nelson, so he could come on board. "Only no office, no desk, no filing cabinet, no secretary and no telephone," Nelson recalled.

"They talk about all these program offices these days. We handled the whole thing through the Postal Service and Ma Bell."

Secrecy could be maintained with testing done at a dry lake in Nevada where there were no spouses, no girlfriends and, in those days of Cold War gender segregation, no women, period.

Engineer Erik Feraldo recalls paying a quarter for first-run movies, and that the one time he saw a woman at his classified location, it was a historic event. As mysterious as the secrecy that surrounded the program itself were the missions.

During the Korean War, Vojvodich flew the kind of hair-raising flight that got him invited into the secret Blackbird program a decade later.

He flew a souped-up RF-86 Sabrejet north of the Yalu River into Communist China. His escort fighters stayed south of that demarcation point, and by the time he strained his fuel supply he was a nearly unbelievable 350 nautical miles north of the Yalu, deep into Manchuria.

The young Capt. Vojvodich found what he was looking for, and got it on film - Ilyushin-28, Russian-built bombers with nuclear weapons capability, parked in China.

Pretty soon he had four MiG-15s on his tail. Not long after that, he had two dozen "bandits" chasing him.

"There's only one good thing about being chased by 24 MiGs, and that's that only one of them at a time can shoot at you."

Flying on fumes, he got south of the Yalu only to find out there were six fuel-short fighter jets ahead of him in the landing pattern.

Instead of a welcome back, he got a chewing for being gone nearly 3 1/2 hours. His colonel was convinced that his deep thrust into China would end both their careers and probably earn Vojvodich a court-martial.

So, matters didn't improve when Vojvodich spilled his pipe tobacco embers in the staff car, set the seat on fire and extinguished the smoldering blaze with a "honey bucket" retrieved from a befuddled peasant woman. But the brass were pleased.

"They saw my film of the Ilyushins. The colonel got promoted to brigadier general, and I got a medal ... and I developed a longtime interest in strategic reconnaissance."

About 15 years later, Vojvodich reminisced, he overflew Hanoi with SAM missiles chasing his tail that petered out and exploded five miles behind his twin exhausts. No Blackbird was ever lost to hostile fire.

So, the Blackbird fraternity gathered to honor each other on Saturday night. With wives, girlfriends, fans and admirers, the Blackbird Laurels fraternity filling the banquet room at the Park Plaza hotel, at each place setting a wine goblet with a Blackbird engraved in it.

The younger fliers are spry 60s; the older ones recall combat missions that go back to World War II. These were guys who had climbed into space suits, but had to struggle getting a few inches of ribbon pulled over their ears as they were honored by state Sen. William J. "Pete" Knight.

Knight, an X-15 test pilot with more than 200 combat missions, still holds the title "fastest man alive" for his Mach-6.4 rocket plane exploits.

The pilots were so good that one of them, retired Col. Joe Rogers, shot down a MiG-15 over Korea. So, a lot of pilots did that. But Rogers shot down the Russian jet while he was flying an F-51 Mustang-style propeller-driven fighter.

If there was one thing anybody felt free and easy talking about, it was the reverence for the late Kelly Johnson, the Blackbird's designer. Johnson's Lockheed star began to rise with planes like the P-38 Lightning "forked tailed devil" in World War II; kept going with the P-80 Shooting Star, the first U.S. operational jet fighter; shot past Mach 2 with the F-104 Starfighter; and went into the stratosphere with the U-2 and the Blackbird.

The Blackbird family included the A-12 model for the CIA, the YF-12 interceptor and finally the SR-71. The SR-71 Blackbird still holds the record for the world's fastest jet plane, a triple-Mach speed faster than a 30:06 rifle shot, with a classified operational ceiling closer to outer space than to Earth.

And all the design and engineering work was achieved in the pre-digital era with a 12-inch computer called a slide rule.

"For those who knew him, Kelly Johnson was an amazing man, and Blackbird was an amazing program," retired Col. Ken Collins said.

At any given time, the pilots numbered in the dozens, the program engineers and support staff in the hundreds.

Inducted into the Blackbird Laurels fraternity were Collins, Henry Combs, David Clark Co. (maker of the pressure suits), Eastham, Bill Fox, retired Lt. Col. Fitz Fulton, Robert Gilliland, retired Chief Master Sgt. Bill Gornik, Robert Illian, retired Maj. Gen. Eldon Joersz, retired Col. Ronald "Jack" Layton, Frank Murray, Bob Murphy, Nelson, retired Col. Tom Pugh, Rogers, Schalk, retired Col. Hugh Slater, retired Brig. Gen. Dennis Sullivan, Vojvodich and Johnson.

The weekend celebration, which began at Blackbird Air Park in Palmdale, was organized by the Flight Test Historical Foundation. Sponsors included Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Co., Northrop Grumman Corp., Clear Channel Worldwide/KTPI and JT3 LLC.

As amazing as the planes were the phenomenal Pratt & Whitney J-58 engines that fired 35,000 pounds of blowtorch thrust. Add to that the space suits worn by the crews and you had a flying fraternity who were half-pilot, half-astronaut, flying planes that looked like space ships, a documentarian noted in a short film titled "Letter to Kelly."

Sullivan summed it up. "It was the world's greatest flying club. There's not a better bunch to be with."

Got walk beside one inside it's hangar in 1968 to make a package delivery to the crew chief. My escort was an AP with an M16 and I made sure to not stare at the plane while that close to it. Blackbirds had a No-Lone zone area surrounding them was the reason for my armed escort. I was in hog heaven to be that close to such a plane. : )

They have (or at least had) a decommissioned one sitting on the deck of the U.S.S. Intrepid museum in NYC. I have a picture of yours truly standing by it around here somewhere ... I'll dig it up.

The Hutchinson Cosmosphere in Kansas has one on display.

It is mounted in such a way that you can walk right under and on top of it. Pretty neat.

The Black Bird and the X-15 are the best aircraft ever developed.

A few years ago, NASA was bouncing around the idea of mounting a rocket booster on top of the Black Bird aircraft and converting it into a space craft. They calculated that it could fly safely to the Moon and return, although obviously it could not land.

What ever happened to that idea?

At that time it was a NoNo to take pictures of a Blackbird and I did see an Army guy learn that the hard way. He was intransit on the base when he saw the plane sitting outside it's hangar. He sat down with his camera and started snapping away. Two APs drove up and had a short conversation with him. His camera was opened up and the film stripped out.

Giggle, that reminds me of the time I took some pictures of a captured Soviet tank that we "did not have."

Yup, they opened up my camera and destroyed the film!

Hey, Army people are curious by nature. Nobody believed me when I reported that a MiG-23 flew over our base in West Germany on a photo recon, until I showed them the picture I took of it.

When in Germany, you take lots of pictures.

"When in Germany, you take lots of pictures."

Wish I had spent six months of temporary duty in Germany rather than on the Island of Guam.

I will admit that it was interesting to watch fully loaded B52s take off on Guam. The runway ended at a clift over the ocean and sometimes the planes would drop out of sight as they cleared the runway and became airborne. It was a heart stopper to watch. After a few minutes you would see the planes slowly climbing though.

That's amazing!! Then again, those boys with the 16th TAA were some daring dudes.
For those who are interested, we have a Blackbird at the Pima Air & Space Museum in Tucson, AZ.

Great Pics! That plane is still impressive. 2Ts, you may be able to pick up one of these at a surplus sale sometime. : )

To keep from being photographed, I remember seeing one take off and about halfway down the runway it seemed to point straight up and flew out of sight. What an airplane!!!

"We got replaced by satellites," retired Maj. Gen. Mele Vojvodich said. "We didn't do what we were designed to do, but we did what we were ordered to do."

Satellites by their very nature are faster, fly (a lot) higher, and are less manueverable than spyplanes.

The more previously classified information we hear about the Blackbird, the more one suspects that Aurora is a reality.

-Eric

Interesting factoid.....the plane was originally designated as the RS-71, (R standing for Research, which is how the USAF normally designates special aircraft, see todady's Prowler, for example) but President Johnson, who was mildly dyslexic, though he never admitted to it....when he was delivering remarks at some ceremony on a military base, screwed up the letters while reading his notes, referred to the plane as the SR-71, so presto, the designation immediately changed to SR-71.

To keep from being photographed, I remember seeing one take off and about halfway down the runway it seemed to point straight up and flew out of sight.

Two weekends ago, an ex-military guy I was on a group motorcycle tour with told a very similar story: that he saw an SR-71 virtually vanish straight up from takeoff into a clear blue sky.

I was gonna mention it here, but wasn't sure whether he was talkin' smack. Sounds like he wasn't! <|:)~

"2Ts, you may be able to pick up one of these at a surplus sale sometime. "

Thanks CAV, but I don't see room on it for my canoe! &;-)

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