Skunk Works

We were shaken, but no one more so than Kelly Johnson, who was so upset at Torick’s death that he impulsively and emotionally decided to cancel the entire program and give back the development funding to the Air Force and the agency. Several of us urged him to reconsider. The drone project was actually doing well. But Kelly seemed adamant: “I will not risk any more test pilots or Blackbirds. I don’t have either to spare.” Kelly could now turn to the SAC B-52 bomber as the vehicle to carry the drone. The B-52 was subsonic, which would decrease the dangers of an air launch. And it could launch our drone from about forty-five thousand feet, which would not cut very deeply into our bird’s extended range.

Kelly flew to Washington and, shortly after Christmas 1966, met for over an hour with LBJ’s deputy defense secretary, Cyrus Vance, who was enthusiastic about Tagboard and authorized the use of B-52s as the mothership. Vance told Kelly, “We need this project to work because our government will never again allow a Francis Gary Powers situation to develop. All our overflights over denied territory will either be with satellites or drones.”

The Air Force supplied two specially equipped H Model B-52s, an eight-engine mothership that would carry a drone under each wing on a sixteen-and-a-half-hour, seven-thousand-nautical-mile flight, from Beale Air Force Base in central California to a launch point west of the Philippines, over the South China Sea. The drone’s mission was to overfly China. It would launch from forty thousand feet and fire its solid-propellant booster rocket for eighty-seven seconds, soaring it to eighty thousand feet at Mach 3.3 plus, before falling away. The drone’s guidance system would direct its three-thousand-mile journey. On the return leg of the mission, the drone was programmed to descend to sixty thousand feet and slow to Mach 1.6 before automatically ejecting a hatch containing its film, camera, and expensive telemetry and flight control components, which could be used again after successful parachute recovery.

By the winter of 1968 the Skunk Works and the Air Force teamed up to launch long-range test flights using the mighty B-52, which carried two drones, one under each wing, for a total carrying payload of twenty-four tons. The tests were conducted in Hawaii, with the drones launched thousands of miles across the open Pacific, overflying such places as Christmas Island or Midway, taking pictures of preprogrammed targets on these islands, then looping back toward Hawaii and culminating three thousand miles of precise flying with a rendezvous point above a recovery team of picket ships and cargo planes. Our track record on these so-called Captain Hook test flights was five successes and two failures over fourteen months. And by the fall of 1969 a special committee of CIA and Air Force analysts began recommending hot missions to the EXCOM (Executive Committee of the National Security Council). EXCOM approved and forwarded its recommendation to President Nixon. We received a go for a first mission over Lop Nor nuclear test range on November 9, 1969. A lone B-52 took off from Beale Air Force Base in the predawn hours carrying two Tagboard drones, one under each wing—in case one failed to ignite. After a single air-to-air refueling some twelve hours later, it reached its launch point at the fourteen-hour mark, and Tagboard successfully fired beyond range of Chinese early-warning radar nets.

The next day Kelly told us, “Well, the damned thing came out of China, but was lost. It wasn’t spotted or shot down, but it must’ve malfunctioned and crashed on us.”

Those monitoring the flight said Chinese radar never detected it, so we concluded the guidance had screwed up and the drone just kept on chugging until it ran out of gas, probably after crossing the Sino-Soviet border into Siberia.

About eleven months later, the Nixon White House again approved a flight against Lop Nor. This time the drone performed the mission perfectly, arriving back right on rendezvous point, but after dropping its camera and photo package, the chute failed to open and the package plummeted into the sea and was lost.

In March 1971, Nixon approved a third flight over the same area. This one also functioned perfectly; the drone separated its camera package on schedule and it parachuted into the sea where a Navy frigate was on station awaiting a pickup. Unfortunately, the seas were heavy and the Navy botched the recovery, allowing the package to be pulled beneath the ship with the parachute on one side and the hatch on the other. The package sank before they could get cables around it.