Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base by Annie Jacobsen

Author:Annie Jacobsen
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Military, Nonfiction, History
ISBN: 9781409141396
Publisher: Hachette Digital, Inc.
Published: 2010-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Three months later, on a balmy spring day in May of 1967, Colonel Slater decided he was going to take the Oxcart for a last ride. Some of the pilots had four hundred hours in the air in the Oxcart. Walt Ray had had 358 when he died. Colonel Slater had only ten. Why not take the world’s most scientifically advanced aircraft out for a ride while he still had the chance? Soon, the Oxcart would disappear into the experimental-test-plane graveyard. There, it would collect dust in some secret military hangar way out in Palmdale, California, where no one would ever fly it again. Slater went to visit Werner Weiss to see if Weiss could arrange for Slater to take one last Mach 3 ride.

“Consider it done,” Werner Weiss said to Colonel Slater’s request.

Up in the air, Slater quickly took the Oxcart to seventy thousand feet. Slater had forgotten how light the Oxcart was. It had an airframe like a butterfly, which allowed pilots to get it up so high. Flying at Mach 2.5 made things hot inside the cockpit. It was like an oven set on warm. If Slater were to take off his glove and touch the window, he’d get a second-degree burn. He moved up to Mach 3 cruising speed at ninety thousand feet, traveling the seven hundred miles to Billings, Montana, in about twenty-three minutes.

The fallacy was that at this height and speed, a pilot could look out the window and take in the view. You couldn’t. Even when you reached cruising height, you had to keep your eyes on every gauge, oscillator, and scope in front of you. There were too many things to pay attention to. Too many things that could go wrong.

Colonel Slater headed toward the Canadian border, where he took a left turn and flew along the U.S. perimeter until he reached Washington State. There, he took another left turn and flew down over Oregon and into California. Finally, he took the aircraft down to twenty-five thousand feet and prepared for a scheduled refuel. Minutes later, Slater met up with the KC-135 that had been dispatched from the Air Force’s 903rd Air Refueling Squadron out of Beale Air Force Base in Yuba County, California.

The process of taking on fuel was one of the more dangerous things an Oxcart pilot could do. In order to connect its fuel line to the tanker, the aircraft had to slow down to between 350 and 450 mph, so slow it could barely keep its grip on the sky. The issue of speed was equally taxing on the flying fuel tank. The KC-135 tanker had to travel at its top speed just to keep up with the slowed-down triple-sonic airplane. This was always a slightly nerve-racking process, complicated for Colonel Slater by the fact that a call came in over the emergency radio at exactly that time. Whatever was going on back at Area 51 that merited this emergency call was most likely not a welcome event.

Slater answered.

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