Skunk Works

President Johnson awarded Kelly the Medal of Freedom, our nation’s highest civilian award, in 1967, not long after authorizing the first Blackbird overflights of North Vietnam in May of that year. The president wanted hard evidence to back up rumors that the North was receiving surface-to-surface long-range ballistic missiles from the Russians that could reach Saigon. Two CIA-piloted Blackbirds, flown by the agency out of Kadena Air Base in Okinawa that summer, were dispatched by presidential command to find out what was really happening. They covered the whole of North Vietnam photographically and found no evidence whatever of the presence of ground-to-ground missiles. Kelly joked that LBJ bestowed the Medal of Freedom on him more in expression of his relief than in gratitude.

For budgetary purposes LBJ ordered the CIA out of the spy plane business in May 1968, and from then on all the missions involving Blackbirds were conducted entirely by the Air Force in its two-seater Blackbird, the SR-71. The second man, assisting the pilot in the first cockpit, was the Reconnaissance Systems Officer, seated in the separate rear cockpit, who operated all the avionics, as well as the nonautomatic cameras and radar frequency recording systems.

I won the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Award in 1972 for designing the Blackbird’s propulsion system. But because the airplane operated in such secrecy for the Air Force, and its training flights were conducted over least-populated areas at tremendously high altitudes, few Americans ever saw it fly and the public was only vaguely aware of its existence. After LBJ officially announced the Blackbird’s creation in 1964, the Air Force was allowed to fly the airplane for official speed and altitude records over closed courses in 1965. The Blackbird established a new speed record of 2,070 mph and an altitude record of 80,257 feet, even though, over the twenty-five years it was operational, it routinely broke these records many times over while outclimbing and outspeeding missile attacks. On one operational flight in 1976, a Blackbird actually reached 85,068 feet while flying at 2,092 mph.

Even now, many years after the fact, the public remains oblivious to the harrowing and dangerous missions the airplane flew on an almost daily basis for more than a quarter century. Many rumors still surround the “routine” penetration overflights by the Blackbirds over such heavily defended denied territories as North Korea, North Vietnam, Cuba, Libya, and the whole of the Soviet and Eastern bloc border, including intensive surveillance of the Russian nuclear submarine pens in the far frozen north. The Blackbird also performed a daily surveillance flight across the length of the demilitarized zone in Korea. General Larry Welch, as the blue-suiters’ chief of staff, recalled having lunch with his South Korean counterpart near the DMZ when suddenly all the dishes rattled and the room rocked with a loud kaboom from the Blackbird’s sonic boom. The Korean general smiled at Welch and sighed with satisfaction, “Ah, so.”

We in the Skunk Works believed that the airplane’s height and speed, as well as its pioneering stealthy composite materials applied to key areas of its wings and tail, would keep it and its crew safe, but we fortified that belief by adding a special fuel additive, which we nicknamed “panther piss,” that ionized the furnace-like gas plumes streaming from the engine exhausts. The additive caused enemy infrared detectors to break up incoherently. We also implanted a black box electronic counter-measure in the airplane’s tail called Oscar Sierra (the pilots called it “Oh, Shit,” which is what most of them exclaimed when an ECM system activated at the start of an enemy missile attack). This ECM confused and distracted missile radar and kept it from locking on.

Time and again, the airplane and its counter-measure equipment proved their worth over North Vietnam, Cuba, and northern Russia. But mostly we could just outspeed any homing missile that would have to be led at least thirty miles ahead of its target to reach the Blackbird’s altitude of sixteen miles high and at 2,000 mph–plus speeds. Most missiles exploded harmlessly two to five miles behind the streaking SR-71. Often the crew was not even aware they had been fired upon.