stage, Skunk Works aerodynamicists and the radar team added downward slopes, called chines, on either side of the body of the aircraft, making the airplane look like a cobra with wings. With the plane’s underbelly now flat, its radar cross section was reduced by an astonishing 90 percent. Still, Richard Bissell wanted a spy plane closer to invisible. Lovick needed a full-scale laboratory. Johnson got an idea: return to Area 51.
Johnson had met privately with an unnamed official to try to convince the CIA to allow a small cadre of Lockheed scientists and engineers to return to Area 51 for proof-of-concept tests. There and only there, Johnson argued, could his group do what needed to be done to meet the CIA’s grueling radar-evasion demands. During this intense design phase, and despite the secrecy of the project, Lockheed was not the only contractor bidding on the job. Who exactly would land the CIA’s contract to build the U-2’s replacement airplane was still up in the air. The federal government liked to foster competition between defense contractors, which meant aerospace contractor Convair was also in play, hoping to secure the CIA’s hundred-million-dollar contract for itself. Johnson knew reducing the aircraft’s observables was his best shot at getting the contract. Permission was granted, and in the late summer of 1959, fifty Skunk Works employees returned to Area 51.
The days of measuring child-size airplane models in a tiny chamber in Burbank were over. The time had come to put a full-scale model of the world’s first stealth airplane to the test. “On 31 March we started to build a full scale mockup and elevation device to raise the mockup 50 feet in the air for radar tests,” Johnson wrote in documents declassified in July 2007. What Johnson was imagining in this “elevation device” would eventually become the legendary Area 51 pylon, or radar test pole.
Lockheed engineers brought with them a mock-up of the aircraft so detailed that it could easily be mistaken for the real thing. For accurate radar results, the model had to represent everything the real aircraft would be, from the size of the rivets to the slope on the chines. It had taken more than four months to build. When it was done, the wooden airplane, with its 102-foot-long fuselage and 55-foot-long wooden wings, was packed up in a wooden crate in preparation for its journey out to Area 51. Getting it there was a daunting task, and the road from Burbank to Area 51 needed to be prepared in advance. The transport crate had been disguised to look like a generic wide load, but the size made it considerably wider than wide. Crews were dispatched before the trip to remove obstructing road signs and to trim overhanging trees. In a few places along the highway, the road had to be made level.
What kind of cleanup went on at Area 51 before the arrival of Lockheed’s radar cross-section crew remains unknown. Twelve months had passed since the last atomic bomb had been exploded next door; it was code-named Titania, like the mischievous queen of the fairies from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. If there was a formal decontamination of Area 51 or a summation of what the radiation levels were and whether it was safe to return, those details remain classified. As it was, the radar test system Lockheed set up was only temporary. The CIA did not yet have presidential approval to proceed with the A-12. “I had no more than 50 people on the project,” Johnson wrote in a document called History of the Oxcart by the Builder, declassified in 2007. The small group of Skunk Workers bunked down in the Quonset huts where the U-2 pilots and engineers had once lived.
Beginning in the fall of 1959, a Lockheed C-47 shuttled engineers and mechanics from Burbank to Area 51 on Monday mornings and returned them home to their families late Friday afternoons. It was Ed Lovick’s first experience working at what he’d been told was Paradise Ranch. Because of Lovick’s key role in this phase of the project, he was transported in a Lockheed twin-engine Cessna, usually alone with the pilot. He disliked the commute because the fumes from the Cessna made him queasy. But once he arrived and deplaned he would lose himself in the intensity of the radar work going on. In Burbank, in the silence of the anechoic chamber, Lovick had been testing airplane models the size of his shoe. This full-size mock-up would reveal the results of two years’ worth of chamber work. “The only way to get accurate information of how a full-size aircraft would perform in radar testing was to subject the full size mock-up of the A12 to radar beams,” Lovick explains.
At the edge of the dry lake bed, scientists mounted the airplane on the fifty-five-foot-high pole, centered in a concrete pad that would rise up and down from an underground chamber in the desert floor. “A control room was located underground to one side of the pad. An anemometer and a wind-direction weather vane were located near the edge of the pad, away from the line of sight,” Lovick recalls. The radar antennas, manned and monitored by EG&G, were located a mile away from the pole. “The nose of the mock-up would be tipped down so the radar would see the airplane’s belly, the same way that Soviet radar would see it. It was an elaborate and time- consuming process,” Lovick recalls. “The mock-up that was tested on the pole had to be housed in a hangar on the base at least a mile away. It was carried out and back on special carts.”
In late 1959, the CIA did not know how far the Soviets had advanced their satellite technology — whether they were capable of taking photographs from space yet. The CIA’s espionage concerns further complicated the radar work at Area 51. Each member of Lovick’s crew carried in his pocket a small chart indicating Soviet satellite schedules. This often meant working odd hours, including at night. “It also made for a lot of technicians running around,” Lovick explains. “Satellites passed overhead often. Getting an aircraft up on the radar test pole took eighteen minutes. It took another eighteen minutes to get it back down. That left only a set amount of time to shoot radar at it and take data recordings.” As soon as technicians were done, they took the aircraft down and whisked it away into its hangar.
What Lovick remembered most about life on the Ranch during this period, besides the work going on around the pole, was how intense the weather was. At night, workers needed to bundle up in heavy coats and wool hats. But during the day, temperatures could reach 120 degrees. “Once, I saw a coyote chasing a rabbit and they were both walking,” Lovick recalls.
In December of 1959, the president was briefed on the status of the A-12. Eager to move ahead, Eisenhower was also aware of the hundred-million-dollar check he would be writing to Lockheed from his discretionary funds for a fleet of twelve spy planes. Eisenhower told Bissell he had decided to request that Lockheed deliver results on a last proof-of-concept test, one that focused specifically on radarevasion technology. Bissell had been informed that Lockheed’s A-12 would appear on enemy radar as bigger than a bird but smaller than a man. But he had not yet been told about a problem in the aircraft’s low observables that Lovick and the team had been unable to remedy while testing the mock-up out at Area 51. Lovick explains: “The exhaust ducts from the two huge jet engines that powered the aircraft were proving impossible to make stealthy. Obviously, we couldn’t cover the openings with camouflage coating. During testing, the radar waves would go into the spaces where the engines would be, echo around, and come out like water being sprayed into a can. We’d tried screens and metallic grating. Nothing worked.” Kelly Johnson believed the CIA would accept this design weakness. “Ike wants an airplane from Mandrake the magician,” Johnson told the team and added that the president would settle for something less. Johnson was wrong.
With the president’s final request on the table, settling for something less was no longer an option. On a final trip to Washington, DC, Kelly Johnson was going to have to explain to Bissell the exact nature of the design problem. “The meeting took place at an old ramshackle building in Washington, DC, inside a conference room with a mirrored wall,” Lovick remembers. “Killian and [Edwin] Din Land were there, so was ‘Mr. B.’” Kelly Johnson told the CIA about the problem with camouflaging the A-12’s engine exhaust, how it was a weakness in the airplane’s overall concept of stealth. “Bissell became furious. Throughout the process, I felt so comfortable working for Kelly, I don’t think I realized how serious the situation was until that meeting. Bissell threatened to cancel the entire contract if someone didn’t come up with a solution.” It was a tense moment. “I knew that more than a hundred men had been lost trying to look over the fence. Shot down over Russia, killed, or listed as missing in training missions. I became aware there was a serious problem of information gathering. Before that, most of my concerns were as a scientist in a lab. [In that moment] I realized how poorly things were going in the world outside the lab. How important this airplane was, and that problem with the engine exhaust needed to be solved.”
There in the conference room, Edward Lovick decided to speak up about an idea he had been considering for decades, “and that was how to ionize gas,” he says, referring to the scientific process by which the electrical charge of an atom is fundamentally changed. “I suggested that by adding the chemical compound cesium to the fuel, the exhaust would be ionized, likely masking it from radar. I had suggested cesium would be the best source of free electrons because, in the gaseous state, it would be the easiest to ionize.” If this complicated ionization worked — and Lovick believed it would — the results would be like putting a sponge in a can and running a hose into it. Instead of being bounced back, the radar return from the engines would be absorbed. “Bissell loved the idea,” says Lovick, adding that the suggestion was endorsed heartily by several of the customer’s consultants. An enthusiastic discussion ensued among the president’s science advisers, whom Lovick sensed had very little understanding of what it was he was proposing. In the end, the results would be up to Lovick to determine; later, his theory indeed proved correct. Those results remain a key component of stealth and are still classified as of
