Blackbird: The Untouchable Spy Plane by James Hamilton-Paterson

Author:James Hamilton-Paterson [Hamilton-Paterson, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786691200
Goodreads: 33192083
Publisher: Head of Zeus
Published: 2017-05-31T22:00:00+00:00

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Back at Burbank in 1960, even before the first A-12 began its tests, ‘Kelly’ Johnson had worried about the project’s runaway costs but could see lucrative possibilities for his unique aircraft in roles other than those of pure reconnaissance. Consequently, he proposed an armed version of it as an interceptor. The Air Force was interested enough to sign a $1 million development contract code-named KEDLOCK. This involved some modification to the A-12. The wings, engine nacelles and the engines themselves remained identical. The aircraft’s nose was made slightly deeper to accommodate a second seat for a radar officer. The chines in the extreme nose were cut back to take interception radar sensors. A folding stabiliser beneath the aft fuselage and a little fin under each engine were added to compensate for the slight loss of lateral stability. The result was the AF-12, and the first example of the only three ever built flew from the Ranch in July 1963.

In any case the search for alternative roles for the A-12 was prudent because the downing of Gary Powers’ U-2 in 1960 had radically changed the high-altitude spying game. In order to secure Powers’ release, Eisenhower had made several concessions to Khrushchev, the principal one being a promise of no more manned overflights of the USSR (a presidential undertaking continued by John F. Kennedy). At a stroke the original main purpose of the A-12 had been annulled, although the inclusion of the word ‘manned’ had craftily left open the possibility of satellite spying at some time in the future when the technology was sufficiently developed. In the autumn of 1962 the CIA latched on to this get-out clause by proposing that Lockheed design an unmanned ramjet-powered drone that could be carried piggyback to altitude on an A-12 and then launched to overfly the USSR and China. This new project, in which ‘Kelly’ Johnson was given a free hand, was code-named TAGBOARD. The drone itself became known as the D-21 and a mother ship version of the A-12 as the M-21.

In the early sixties there were thus three different versions of the Blackbird: the original A-12 as contracted by the CIA, the AF-12 (later called the YF-12A) for the Air Force and the piggyback drone for the CIA. This last project, TAGBOARD, remained completely secret to the outside world until 1977 when the editor of an aviation magazine spotted seventeen of the completed D-21 drones at Davis-Monthan AFB’s storage centre in the Arizona desert near Tucson, thanks to a gust of wind having blown off their tarpaulin covers. Gradually the story became known. It was yet another narrative of Skunk Works ingenuity. The drone weighed nearly five tons and had a steep, chined, wavy-edged delta wing and a tail fin. It was designed to be mounted on a pylon on the mother ship’s back, most of it lying with very little clearance between the M-21’s inward-canted fins. It carried a camera and a highly sophisticated star-tracking guidance system that could take it on a predetermined course over a target and then return.

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