Contrails Over the Mojave by Marrett George J.;

Author:Marrett , George J.; [Marrett, J. George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Naval Institute Press

Chapter 9

Fighter Branch

Winter mornings dawned beautifully on the Mojave Desert. The temperature was usually in the low 30s, with visibility unlimited and calm winds. It was a great time and place to test airplanes.

Early on a January morning I checked in to our Test Operations facility, donned a flying suit, and reported to our flight dispatcher. He outlined my mission, a contractor chase for a Lockheed twin-engine SR-71 Blackbird. I would fly an F-104 Starfighter, the little brother of the Blackbird. Lockheed’s brilliant aircraft designer Kelly Johnson designed both the SR-71 and the F-104. The F-104A was a top air-to-air fighter in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the SR-71 was the newest Mach 3.2+ spy plane in the Air Force inventory.

The SR-71 was the latest and best of the Mach 3 family. It had the same wingspan and tail height as the YF-12A, but its length was about six feet longer. With additional fuel on board, the SR-71 had an unrefueled range of about three thousand miles, significantly greater than the YF-12A. Only three YF-12As were built, but they never went into production. On the other hand, thirty-two SR-71s were built, becoming operational in a strategic reconnaissance wing at Beale Air Force Base, California, in January 1966. The aircraft remained in service for twenty-four years and finally retired because of a decreasing defense budget and lack of spare parts.

My mission that day would take only thirty or forty minutes starting shortly after sunrise. Robert J. “Bob” Gilliland was the Lockheed pilot who would perform the tests on the SR-71 using the call sign of Dutch 51. Gilliland, thirty-eight, from Memphis, Tennessee, had joined Lockheed five years earlier as a production test pilot on the foreign versions of the F-104. He helped train the first German pilots to fly the Starfighter as well as pilots from Italy, Holland, Belgium, Canada, and Japan. In 1962 he returned to the United States and joined Kelly Johnson’s Skunk Works as one of the first pilots to fly the YF-12. Gilliland then flew the first flight of the SR-71 in December 1964.

I first met Gilliland at one of Lockheed’s annual Christmas parties in Burbank, California. Company test pilots Tony LeVier, Herman “Fish” Salmon, and Darryl Greenamyer hosted other contractor pilots in the Los Angeles area and a few of the military pilots stationed at Edwards to a suit-and-tie dinner in the company’s dining room. This dinner traditionally started out on a very formal basis with pilots quietly eating while discussing some of the test programs they were flying. Then one pilot would throw his dinner roll at another pilot. Other pilots quickly responded, also throwing their rolls. Soon some dipped their rolls in water and pitched them. The dinner typically ended as a major food fight.

The previous Christmas I had attended the party for the first time. During the festivities, someone used scissors to cut off my best tie. Other pilots lost coat sleeves. Because alcohol flowed freely at this dinner, the Air

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