Skunk Works

Kelly told us later that LeMay was enthusiastic about using the Blackbird as an interceptor but resisted the idea of using it as a bomber. The B-70 was still very much on his mind. “Johnson, I want a promise out of you that you won’t lobby any more against the B-70.” Kelly agreed—a promise he would deeply regret in the years ahead. “We’ll buy your interceptors. I don’t have a number yet but I’ll get back to you soon.”

Kelly asked, “What about the reconnaissance aircraft we built for the agency? Can’t the Air Force use any?” LeMay looked dismayed. “You mean, we haven’t ordered any?” He wrote a note to himself and promised Kelly he would forward an Air Force contract for the two-seater version of the spy plane within a few weeks.

The very next day, Kelly was tipped off by a colonel on LeMay’s staff that on the trip back to Washington aboard his jet, LeMay revised his thinking rather sharply and ordered his staff to develop a proposal for building ten Blackbird interceptors and ten tactical bombers a month!

For once, Kelly was speechless. “If this really comes to pass,” he told me, “our whole concept of operation will have to change. This would be such a staggering operation, when you consider it means building one airplane every other working day, that I doubt we could do it successfully using our Lockheed facilities here in Southern California. I could be wrong, but let’s do a study and see precisely what it would take.”

The size of LeMay’s shopping list reinforced our feeling that the administration was quietly and quickly gearing up for a major military showdown with the Russians. That conviction grew a few weeks later when Secretary McNamara himself arrived at our doorstep under a tight lid of secrecy, to be briefed by Kelly, review our management methods on the project, and see the Blackbird for himself. He brought with him all his top people: Secretary of the Air Force Joseph Charyk, Assistant Defense Secretary Roswell Gilpatric, and the Air Force’s future secretary, Harold Brown. Kelly briefed, while McNamara took copious notes and asked several questions about the airplane’s unique navigational system. It was the first astro-navigational system that actually used a small computer-driven telescope to find approximately sixty stars in its database. The telescope looked through a small window toward the rear of the airplane and was extremely accurate and reliable locking onto stars. It was so sensitive that it once locked onto a rivet hole in the hangar roof when the system was accidentally turned on during airplane servicing.

McNamara wanted to know all about it. “This is the most accurate navigational system we can devise,” Kelly said. “Remember, we are traveling at twice the speed of a sixteen-inch shell, and we don’t turn on a dime. A tight turn takes between sixty and a hundred nautical miles, and if a pilot gets a little sloppy he could start a turn over Atlanta and end up over Chattanooga.”

Several of us escorted the official party during the inspection tour of the Blackbird inside the giant assembly building. One of the generals on the secretary’s staff took me aside. “Mr. Rich,” he said, “I don’t understand why you’re building those large spikes to block air coming into the inlet. What is the principle here? It seems to me you’d want the air unimpeded.” I couldn’t believe that an Air Force general would ask such a naive question. I said, “General, the object is to build up pressure at high altitudes. Did you ever try to squirt water from a hose by placing your thumb over the opening?” His nod showed a glimmer of understanding.

By the time McNamara and his party boarded their jet for a red-eye flight back to Washington, Kelly was practically dancing a polka. The briefing could not have gone better. We expected purchase orders to follow. And we weren’t disappointed. As an immediate follow-up, Lew Meyer, the Air Force assistant secretary for finance, flew out the following week and informed us that we would probably get orders for ten Blackbird reconnaissance aircraft for the Air Force, in addition to the ten we were building for the CIA. They wanted a larger two-seater version, with a pilot up front and a navigator-electronics specialist called the Reconnaissance Systems Officer in a separate rear cockpit, working the routing, as well as operating all the special avionics for capturing enemy radar frequencies and electronic intercepts. We would also be receiving a contract for ten fighter-interceptor versions of the Blackbird and twenty-five tactical bombers. These orders would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars and seemed to defy the longtime Pentagon quasi-socialistic policy of never putting all their purchases in one manufacturer’s shopping cart.