the world, and overflight schedules were easily determined by analysts at NORAD. The ironically named Oxcart was an attack espionage vehicle: quick and versatile, nimble and shrewd, with overpasses that would be totally unpredictable to any enemy. But most of all, in terms of clear photographic intelligence, nothing could compete with what Oxcart was about to be able to deliver to the president: two-and-a-half-foot blocks of detail made clear by film frames shot from seventeen miles up.
While McNamara and McCone fought, a presidential election loomed for Johnson. Nikita Khrushchev, ever the antagonist, decided to make things difficult for the saber-rattling Texan. During the campaign summer of 1964, the increasingly bellicose Khrushchev declared that any U-2s flying over Cuba would be shot down. The CIA saw the threat by the Soviet dictator as an opportunity to let Oxcart show its stuff, and McCone pushed President Johnson for an official mission. Finally, the president approved the Oxcart for Operation Skylark, a plan to fly missions over Cuba if Khrushchev showed signs of putting missiles in Cuba again. Skylark provided a terrific opportunity for the CIA to flex its overhead muscle and gain an edge on the Air Force. The only problem was that out at Area 51, the Oxcart wasn’t quite ready.
Collins sat in the cockpit of the world’s fastest aircraft as it climbed through sixty thousand feet. On this particular flight, navigators had him flying north to the border of Canada, where he was to turn around and head back. Flight-testing the Oxcart was the best job in the world, according to Ken Collins. Most jobs came with a daily routine, and for Collins each day of work at Area 51 meant another performance field to tackle — anything but routine.
For months, the pilots had been testing the hydraulics, navigation system, and flight controls on the aircraft. After each flight, the data from flight recorders was analyzed by a team of Lockheed engineers. Changes were made daily at Groom Lake. The wiring continued to be problematic until replacement materials that could withstand 800 degrees were finally located. Another problem that took forever to solve involved the buildup of the liquid chemical triethylborane (TEB) that had been preventing the engine afterburners from starting. Finally, that too was solved. But one dangerous problem remained, and that was the dreaded un-starts.
Moving through seventy-five thousand feet now, Collins watched the gauges in front of him. It was ?70 degrees Fahrenheit outside with exhaust gas coming out of both engines at 3,400 degrees Fahrenheit. Each one of a pair of specially designed J-58 turbojet engines behind him generated as much power as all four of the turbines on the 81,000ton ocean liner the Queen Mary. It was those insanely powerful engines that enabled the aircraft to fly so high and so fast. But the Queen Mary carried more than three thousand people; the Oxcart just one. Collins counted on those engines. If anything went wrong with either of them it could mean catastrophe. Carefully, he moved the aircraft through the dangerous window between Mach 2.5 and Mach 2.8, which translates to something around 2,000 mph — as fast as a rifle bullet goes. Getting up to and through that speed asked more of the aircraft than anything else. It was also the place where an un-start was most likely to occur, and why Collins was counting on the aircraft engines to perform.
To the pilots, there was nothing scarier than an engine un-start. To the engineers, there was nothing to explain the cause of it. Flying at a certain pitch, one of the two J-58 engines could inexplicably experience an airflow cutoff and go dead. At that speed, the inlets were swallowing ten thousand cubic feet of air each second. One engineer likened this to the equivalent of two million people inhaling at once; an un-start was like all those people suddenly cut short of air. During the ten seconds it took to correct the airflow problem — one engine dead, the other generating enough power to propel an ocean liner — a violent yawing would occur as the aircraft twisted on a vertical axis. This caused a pilot to get slammed across the cockpit while desperately trying to restart the dead engine. The fear was that the pilot could get knocked unconscious, which would mean the end of the pilot, and the end of the airplane.
As Collins moved through Mach 2.7, the Earth below him hurtled by at an astonishing rate of more than half a mile each second. The aircraft’s preset flight path kept it away from urban centers, bridges, and dams for safety reasons, and from Indian burial grounds for political reasons. Once, a pilot flying over semirural West Virginia had to restart an engine at thirty thousand feet. The resulting sonic boom shattered a chimney inside a factory on the ground, and two men working there were crushed to death. And if a pilot had to bail out, as Collins had in 1963, the aircraft needed significant amounts of remote land on which to crash. At 123,000 pounds, this airplane had about as much glide in it as a tire iron falling from the sky.
Collins pushed the aircraft through Mach 2.8. In another forty-five seconds he would be out of the danger zone. Nearing eighty-five thousand feet, the inevitable tiny black dots began to appear on the aircraft windshield, sporadic at first, like the first drops of summer rain. Only a few months earlier, scientists at Area 51 had been baffled by those black dots. They worried it was some kind of high-atmosphere corrosion until the mystery was solved in the lab. It turned out the black spots were dead bugs that were cycling around in the upper atmosphere, blasted into the jet stream by the world’s two superpowers’ rally of thermonuclear bombs. The bugs were killed in the bombs’ blasts and sent aloft to ninety thousand feet in the ensuing mushroom clouds where they gained orbit.
Collins was just seconds away from Mach 3, which meant cruising altitude at last. If there was a brief moment where he might allow himself to relax, maybe even glance outside at the round Earth below and enjoy the cruise, that moment would come soon. But then the unstart happened. In a critical instant, the airplane banged and yawed so dramatically it was as if the airplane’s tail were trying to catch its nose. Collins’s body was flung forward in his harness. His plastic flight helmet crashed against the cockpit glass, denting the helmet and nearly knocking him unconscious. As the airplane slid across the atmosphere, Collins steeled himself and restarted the engine. The aircraft’s second engine kicked back into motion almost as quickly as it had stopped.
Things in the cockpit returned to normal. Inside his pressure suit, Collins felt his heart beating like a jackhammer in his chest. Fate really is a hunter, he thought. It lurks behind you in constant pursuit. When it will catch up to you and take you is anybody’s guess.
Death didn’t get him this time, and for that he was grateful. But somebody needed to fix this un-start problem, fast. With his feet firmly planted on the earth again, Collins discussed the issue of the un-starts with Bill Park during his debrief. Park was Lockheed’s chief flight-test pilot and he always sat patiently with the project pilots after their flights, listening intently about what went on during the flight and what needed work. No detail was too small. Park agreed with Collins; the un-start problem was major and had to be fixed before somebody died. Park was the liaison between the project pilots and Kelly Johnson, and Park was directed to Lockheed’s thermodynamicist Ben Rich to get the unstart problem solved. Park had experienced his own share of un-starts, and giving Ben Rich an ultimatum was not something he had any problem with.
Rich’s office was sparely decorated with a few trophies and some plaques on the walls. There were papers everywhere, and pencils with the erasers gone. A hand-cranked calculator and a metal slide rule sat on Rich’s desk. Park set his flight helmet down — it had its own crack, similar to Collins’s — and pointed to it. “Fix it,” Park said. “And I mean the un-start problem, not my helmet. Time to suit up, Ben. Time for you to see how it feels.” The pilots figured that the only way to get Ben Rich to understand just how unacceptable this un-start business was would be to have Rich experience the nightmare scenario himself, and there just happened to be a two-seater version of the Oxcart on base. The Air Force was currently testing its drone-carrying version of the Oxcart, the M- 21/D-21, in the skies over Groom Lake, and the pilots had seen the two-seater going in and out of the hangar all week. Park told Ben Rich the time had come for him to take a Mach 3 ride.
In a burst of what he would later describe as “a crazy moment of weakness,” Ben Rich agreed. Rich was a self-described Jewish nerd. Totally unathletic, he was a kid who never made the high school baseball team. Before joining Skunk Works, Ben Rich had only one claim to fame: being awarded a patent for designing a nickelchromium heating system that prevented a pilot’s penis from freezing to his urine elimination pipe. He was a design wizard, not an airplane cowboy. He’d never come close to flying supersonic before, and he had absolutely no desire to go that fast. But he was chief engineer for Skunk Works, so fixing the un-start problem was his job. “I’ll do it,” Ben Rich said.
Before Ben Rich could get into the world’s fastest aircraft, he had to go through a battery of physical tests. You can’t just climb into an aircraft that gets up to ninety thousand feet without being checked out in a pressure suit in an altitude chamber first. The flight surgeons on base prepped Rich for tests, the way they usually did pilots. Rich passed the physical and a few early stress tests but when he got to the pressure-chamber test — the one that simulated ejection at fifty thousand feet — things did not go as the engineer had planned. The moment the chamber door closed behind Ben Rich, he panicked. “I was sucking oxygen like a marathon runner and screaming, ‘Get me out of here!’” Rich later recalled. Without ever getting close to simulating what it was like to fly at Mach 3, let alone
