Organization uncharacteristically issued a press release stating that a private pilot had mistakenly landed on the “Watertown landing strip.” Mr. Current never made a public statement about his curious visit and remains the only civilian who ever landed at Area 51 uninvited in a private airplane, got out, and roamed around.
Meanwhile, in Washington, DC, Richard Bissell waited for presidential approval to plan more overflights using U-2s stationed at secret CIA facilities overseas. And on the West Coast, in Burbank, California, Lockheed’s Kelly Johnson was busy drawing up plans for the secret new spy plane. If Johnson was able to secure the new CIA contract he was working on with Bissell, it would likely mean Lockheed would spend the next decade fulfilling contract work out at Area 51. But what Kelly Johnson needed at this point was a radar cross-section wizard.
It was September of 1957, and Edward Lovick was standing on Lockheed’s antenna pattern range tinkering with echo returns when Kelly Johnson approached him for a chat. Lovick, then a thirty-eightyear-old physicist, was known among colleagues as Lockheed’s radar man. Radar was still a relatively new science but Lovick knew more about the subject than anyone else at Lockheed at the time.
“Would you like to come work on an interesting project?” the boss asked Lovick. In his eight-and-a-half-year tenure at the company, Lovick had never seen Kelly Johnson before. But standing beside Johnson were William Martin and L. D. MacDonald, two scientists Lovick considered to be brilliant. Martin was Lovick’s former boss, and the three men used to work together in the antenna lab. Martin and MacDonald had since disappeared to work on projects inside Building 82, a large, nondescript hangar at the north end of the facility where Lockheed’s black operations went on. As for the project that Kelly Johnson was asking Lovick to join, Johnson said it might finish in six weeks. Instead, it lasted thirty-two years. Although Lovick had no idea at the time, he was being invited into Lockheed’s classified group, officially called Advanced Development Projects but nicknamed the Skunk Works. In 1957, its primary customer was the CIA.
Lovick was granted his top secret security clearance and briefed on the U-2 aircraft. He learned about the death of test pilot Robert Sieker at Area 51, just four months before. “My first assignment at Lockheed came as a direct result of this tragedy,” Lovick recalls. Sieker’s death had inadvertently played a role in the invention of the most significant military application of the twentieth century, and it led Ed Lovick to become known as the grandfather of stealth. What the Boston Group at MIT had attempted to do — add stealth features via paint to an existing airplane — had proved futile. But what Lovick and his team would soon discover was that stealth could be achieved if it was designed as a feature in the early drawing boards.
“The purpose of stealth, or antiradar technology,” Lovick explains, “is to keep the enemy from sensing or detecting an aircraft, from tracking it, and therefore from shooting it down. The goal is to trick the enemy’s air defenses though camouflage or concealment.” Camouflage has been one of the most basic foundations of military strength since man first made spears. In ancient warfare, soldiers concealed themselves from the enemy using tree branches as disguise. Millennia later, American independence was gained partly because the British ignored this fundamental; their bright red coats made them easy targets for a band of revolutionaries in drab, ragtag dress. In the animal kingdom, all species depend on antipredator adaptation for survival, from the chameleon, which defines the idea, to the arctic fox, which turns from brown in summer months to white in winter. Lockheed’s U-2s were being tracked over the Soviet Union because they had no camouflage or antiradar technologies, so the Soviets could not only detect the U-2s but also accurately track the spy planes’ precise flight paths.
To stay ahead of the Russians, Richard Bissell envisioned a new spy plane that would outfox Soviet radar. The CIA wanted an airplane with a radar cross section so low it would be close to invisible, the theory being that the Russians couldn’t object to what they didn’t know was there.
The aircraft would be radically different, unlike anything the world had ever seen, or rather, not seen, before. It would beat Soviet advances in radar technology in three fields: height, speed, and stealth. The airplane needed to fly at ninety thousand feet and at a remarkably unprecedented speed of twenty-three hundred miles per hour, or Mach 3. In the late 1950s, for an aircraft to leave the tarmac on its own power and sustain even Mach 2 flight was unheard-of. Speed offered cover. In the event that a Mach 3 aircraft was tracked by radar, that kind of speed would make it extremely difficult to shoot down. By comparison, a U-2, which flew around five hundred miles per hour, would be seen by a Soviet SA-2 missile system approximately ten minutes before it was in shoot-down range, where it would remain for a full five minutes. An aircraft traveling at Mach 3 would be seen by Soviet radar for fewer than a hundred and twenty seconds before it could be fired upon, and it would remain in target range for fewer than twenty seconds. After that twenty-second window closed, the airplane would be too close for a Soviet missile to fire on it. The missile couldn’t chase the airplane because, even though the top speed for a missile at the time was Mach 3.5, once a missile gets that far into the upper atmosphere, it loses precision and speed. Shooting down an airplane flying at three times the speed of sound at ninety thousand feet was equivalent to hitting a bullet whizzing by seventeen miles away with another bullet.
Lockheed was confident the speed element was possible, but it wasn’t in charge of building the jet engines; the Pratt and Whitney corporation was. Height was achievable; Lockheed had mastered flying at seventy thousand feet with the U-2. Stealth was the feature that would be the most challenging, and it was also the single most important feature of the spy plane to the CIA. To create stealth, Lovick and his team had to master minutiae involving radar returns. Eventually, they’d need a wide-open space and a full-size airplane, which is how Ed Lovick and the Lockheed radar cross-section team became the first group of men after the atomic blast to set up shop at Area 51. But first, they did this inside a room within a hangar at Lockheed.
“Radar works analogous to a bat,” Lovick explains. “The bat squeaks and the sound hits a bug. The squeak gets sent back to the bat and the bat measures time and distance to the bug through the echo it receives.” So how does one get the bug to absorb the squeak? “The way in which to solve the radar problem for us at Lockheed was to create a surface that would redirect radar returns. We needed to send them off in a direction other than back at the Soviet radars. We could also do this by absorbing radar returns, like a diaper absorbs liquid. In theory it was simple. But it turned out to be quite a complicated problem to solve.”
Lovick had been solving problems ever since he was a child growing up in Falls City, Nebraska, during the Depression — for instance, the time he wanted to learn to play the piano but did not want to disturb his family while he practiced. “I took the piano apart and reconfigured its parts to suppress the sound. Then I sent the vibrations from the strings electronically through a small amplifier to a headset I wore.” This was hardly something most fourteen-year-old children were doing in 1933. Four years later, at the age of eighteen, Lovick published his first article on radar, for Radio-Craft magazine. Inspired to think he might have a career in radar technology, he wrote to Lockheed Corporation in faraway California asking for a job.
Lockheed turned him down. So he took a minimum-wage job as a radio repairman at a local Montgomery Ward, something that, at the age of ninety-one, he still considers a serendipitous career move. “What I learned at Montgomery Ward, in an employment capacity that today some might perceive as a dead-end job, would later play an important role in my future spy plane career.” Namely, that there is as much to learn from what doesn’t work as from what does.
To learn how to outfox radar, Lovick returned to the trial-and-error principles he’d first cultivated as a child. He set about designing and overseeing the building of Lockheed’s first anechoic chamber to test scale models of Skunk Works’ proposed new spy plane. “An anechoic chamber is an enclosed space covered in energy-absorbing materials, the by-product of which is noiselessness,” Lovick explains. It is so quiet inside the chamber that if a person stands alone inside its four walls, he can hear the blood flowing inside his body. “Particularly loud is the blood in one’s head,” Lovick notes. Only in such a strictly controlled environment could the physicist and his team accurately test how a one-twentieth-scale model would react to radar beams aimed at it. Lockheed’s wood shop built tiny airplane models for the physicists, not unlike the models kids play with. Lovick and the team painstakingly applied radar-absorbing material to the models then strung them up in the anechoic chamber to test. Based on the radar echo results, the shape and design of the spy plane would change. So would its name. Over the next several months, the design numbers for the Archangel-1 went up incrementally, through eleven major changes. This is why the final and official Agency designation for the airplane was Archangel12, or A-12 for short.
While imaging and then designing Lockheed’s new spy plane, Edward Lovick accompanied Kelly Johnson on trips to Washington, DC. There, the men met with Richard Bissell and President Eisenhower’s science advisers to deliver progress reports and attend briefings on the aircraft. President Eisenhower called it “the Big One.” On these trips to DC, Bissell, whom Lovick knew only as Mr. B., would pepper Kelly Johnson with technical questions about stealth, or “low observables,” which Lovick was responsible for answering. “We shared test data from the chamber work, which was going along fine,” Lovick recalls. “But the Customer always wanted better. No matter how low we felt our observables were, the Customer always wanted them to be lower.” This meant more work. In a final design
