But our proposal reached Trevor Gardner, then Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Research and Development, and a brilliant engineer in his own right. Late in 1953, he invited me to come to Washington to discuss it. He had assembled a committee of scientists and engineers, and for three days they put me through a grilling as I had not had since college exams. They covered every phase of the aircraft design and performance—stability, control, power plants, fuels—everything.
Later I met and lunched with Air Force Secretary Harold Talbott, CIA Director Allen Dulles, and his right-hand man, Larry Houston, among a distinguished group. When I was asked why I thought Lockheed could do what I proposed—build 20 airplanes with spares for roughly $22 million and have the first one flying within eight months, Gen. Donald Putt graciously volunteered, “He has proven it three times already—on the F-80, F-80A, and F-104.”
The secrecy of this project was impressed on me by Gardner. I understood that I was essentially being drafted for the job—becoming a “spook”—the intelligence community’s label for their agents. I returned to Burbank with instructions to talk only with Robert Gross and Hall Hibbard. Despite the fact that they had sent me to Washington with instructions not to commit to any new projects because the plant already had several military programs in engineering, they agreed that we must cooperate with this important work. Trevor Gardner himself later met with Gross and Hibbard to confirm formally the contract.
I organized the project with 25 engineers including myself in the experimental department and with Art Viereck again in charge of the shop, with a staff that gradually grew to 81 people.
It had been decided in Washington that the project could best be handled under the CIA’s direction and funding, with the Air Force providing the engine. We had been working with Pratt & Whitney on developing the J-57 for this purpose. There was no time to develop a new engine; we had to use existing equipment.
Richard Bissell, “special assistant” to Dulles, was selected to direct the program. Bissell, an economist, quickly became very knowledgeable on engineering matters. He has described his introduction to the program:
“I was summoned one afternoon into Allen’s office; and I was told with absolutely no prior warning or knowledge that one day previously President Eisenhower approved a project involving the development of an extremely high-altitude aircraft to be used for surveillance and intelligence collection over ‘denied areas’ in Europe, Russia, and elsewhere. I was to go over to the Pentagon, present myself in Trevor Gardner’s office and there with Gardner, Gen. Donald Putt of the Air Force, Gen. Clarence Irvine and others, we were to decide how the project was to be organized and run.
“The first time I heard Kelly’s name mentioned was in a call put through by Trevor Gardner to Kelly in which he gave him a go-ahead to develop and produce 20 U-2 aircraft. We had an almost impossible schedule to meet.”
First program manager for the USAF was Col. O. J. “Ozzie” Ritland, special assistant to Deputy Chief of Staff, Development, USAF Headquarters. He was followed by Col. Leo P. Geary, USAF.
One of our first tasks was to find a base from which to operate. The Air Force and CIA did not want the airplane flown from Edwards AFB or our Palmdale plant in the Mojave Desert. So we surveyed a lot of territory. There are many dry lakes in and around Nevada, and the lakebeds are generally quite hard, even under water in the rainy season. A site near the nuclear proving grounds seemed ideal, and Bissell was able to secure a presidential action adding the area to the Atomic Energy Commission’s territory to insure complete security.
Dorsey Kammerer and I flew to what would be the test base. I had an Air Force compass, and he had some surveying equipment for use on the ground. Kicking away some of the empty. 50-caliber shell cases and other remnants of target practice, we laid out the direction of our first runway.
A road had to be laid out, hangars constructed, office and living accommodations built, and other facilities provided. Since Lockheed did not have a license to build on the nuclear proving ground, we gave our drawings to a contractor who did. When he put the work out for bid, he was told by one company, “You want to look out for this ‘CLJ’ outfit. We’ve looked them up in Dun & Bradstreet and they don’t even have a credit rating.” We were using my initials for identification.
By July, “agency” personnel, Air Force, and Lockheed people began to move in.
In recruiting mechanics and technical people to work on the project, we named it The Angel from Paradise Ranch—Angel because it was such a high-flying airplane, of course, and Paradise Ranch because we thought that would attract people. It was kind of a dirty trick since Paradise Ranch was a dry lake where quarter-inch rocks blew around every afternoon.
Actually, in the Skunk Works, we’ve never had trouble getting workmen to go wherever we’ve needed them because they know wherever it is the work will be exciting and challenging. And where it’s really rough, they are paid a bonus of perhaps 15 percent on top of a good basic salary, plus living expenses. They cannot, of course, take their families with them for security reasons, but they can return home at least once a year when on long assignments.
Security was so strict that after we had submitted our first vouchers for progress payment on the contract, two checks for a total of $1,256,000 arrived in the mailbox at my Encino home. It seemed prudent to establish a special bank account after that.
One of the Skunk Works rules that we actually make contractual is that funding should be timely. We plot our way along the program, report progress monthly and the amount of costs. We require incremental payment so we don’t have to go running to the bank to carry the government. But on a couple of occasions we have.
On the U-2 program, Colonel Geary once came to tell me the money had not yet been appropriated for the next 30 days. Well, I had read in the newspaper about delayed budget approvals, and had already made arrangements for us to borrow the money—as I recall it was two or three million dollars. But interest rates then were only about five percent.
The government got a bargain on that contract when completed—about $2 million in refunds on contract costs, and six extra airplanes from spare parts we didn’t need because the U-2 functioned so well.
Our security on the U-2 was threatened at one point in a horrendous example of bureaucratic mixup—understandable because of that very secrecy. The Air Force in 1955 issued a proposal to industry for a weapon system designated the X-17. It appeared that they copied our proposal; it was a dead ringer for our original presentation. I phoned Bissell on a Sunday night after I’d discovered this to point out the breach of security involved. When I showed the specifications to him and Ritland the next week in Washington, they reacted with stark horror. We went to Gardner’s office; he went to Talbott. The proposal was withdrawn within a few minutes. It would have had the Air Force spending from three to six million dollars when actually a better airplane—the U-2—would have been flying before they had design proposals returned from the aircraft companies.
By July of that year, “the ranch” was ready. The first U-2 was disassembled and at 4:30 a.m. on July 24, we arrived at the plant to begin loading the plane into a C-124 for the flight to Nevada. We would follow in a C-47.
The base commander, however, denied permission for the C-124 to land because the normal tire pressures would be too high for the thin surface of the runway. But we determined it would be safe if we let most of the air out of the tires, providing about four times the tire footprint area on landing. It was a novel solution, not covered in operating procedure for the base, and the commander couldn’t and wouldn’t approve it. So we phoned Washington for permission to overrule the local authority, reduced the air pressure, took off for Nevada, and made a beautiful landing on the soft runway. I measured the impact area myself, and the deepest impression was one-eighth of an inch. Had we not devised this unusual procedure, we would have had to land elsewhere, haul the plane over roads not in very good shape, and miss the target flight date by as mu
ch as a week.
Our first flight was unprogrammed. It was supposed to be a taxi test with Tony LeVier at the controls. The airplane was so light that on his second taxi run it just lifted to a height of about 35 feet before Tony realized he was off the ground. And when he tried to land, the darned airplane didn’t want to. It could fly at idle power on the engine. He managed to bounce it down, and in the process bent the tail gear a bit. But we soon had it fixed. The unofficial first flight was on August 4, 1955.
Tony made his first flight to 8,000 feet in a rainstorm. The lakebed was dry when he took off, but he flew through rain just north of the field. I was observing from the C-47 “chase” plane. The airplane flew beautifully, but again Tony had trouble on landing. He came in tail high and the plane porpoised badly. He made five other attempts before I could talk him down. We discovered the airplane makes a fine landing when the tail wheel hits at the same time or slightly ahead of the main gear. The landing characteristics are quite unusual but not unexpected.
Ten minutes after the U-2 landing, the lake was flooded with two inches of water. This was incredible, because average annual rainfall for the previous five years had been 4.3 inches. We had had almost that much already within the preceding two weeks.
That night all of us celebrated with the usual beer and arm-wrestling contests. Thanks to my early lathing work, I was pretty good at both. It has been our policy in the Skunk Works that everyone—all the workers as well as engineers and executives—sees the first flight and is included in the traditional party afterward.
To witness the “official” first flight on August 8, we invited our customers from Washington. It was a very successful flight to 35,000 feet.
From then on it was drive, drive, drive. Build the airplanes, get them in operation, train ground and flight crews, maintenance men, military pilots.
With the developing U-2, an aircraft considered a technological triumph by any standard. Below, the high-flyer in Air Force markings.
It wasn’t long—eight or nine months after first flight—that the U-2s became operational. Two of them were deployed to Lakenheath in beautiful country northeast of London. They were spotted by the British Air Defense Force while on practice flights at 70,000 feet, and the RAF scrambled to try to reach them to investigate.
The British and Russians at that time were at odds over an incident in which the Russians had killed a British frogman inspecting a Russian cruiser in harbor in England. The presence of the U-2s could only worsen an already sensitive situation. They were removed to West Germany in June of 1956, for their first flights directly over Moscow and Leningrad. “A brilliantly successful first field operation,” as described later by Bissell.
There were diplomatic protests after a few overflights, and missions were curtailed a while and then resumed. The points of origin varied, and the U-2 flights over Russia, or near enough to its borders for reconnaissance, continued for about four years until Powers was shot down.
He had taken off from Pakistan, and was to fly over Russia to Norway. He was flying a U-2C, with a new improved Pratt & Whitney engine that gave it 3,000 to 5,000 feet more altitude than the original U-2A. Photos from earlier overflights had shown as many as 35 Russian fighters trying to climb up to intercept the U-2. They formed an aluminum cloud over the terrain to be photographed.
During the period of U-2 overflights, the Russians had been working diligently to improve their SA-2 missile and radar systems. When Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev triumphantly announced that Powers had been shot down west of Sverdlovsk, we tried to reconstruct what had happened. We simulated Powers’ flight mission and studied what aircraft components might fail and cause him to lose cruising altitude. We found nothing in the aircraft or its systems likely to lead us to doubt that the aircraft had been hit at altitude as the Russians stated.
But they had published a photo of the downed airplane. I knew it was not a U-2 and believed it was one of their own fighters they had shot down while trying to get the U-2. What they exhibited obviously had been scraped up with a caterpillar blade and had school kids running all over it. It didn’t take any stroke of genius to know that they wouldn’t have handled a captured U-2 like that, allowing kids to play on it. The CIA wanted me to provoke, insult actually, the Russians into revealing more about the incident. So, I challenged them publicly.
“Hell, no,” I was quoted in the press, “That’s no U-2.” At about that time it was suggested to me by security people that I not go to work and come home always by the same route or establish regular patterns of movement. And for a few years during this and other secret aircraft developments, I slept with an automatic pistol close by.
The provocative strategy worked. The Russians put the real U-2 on display in Moscow. From the many excellent news correspondents’ photos, particularly the complete and high quality coverage by Life magazine’s Carl Mydans, we could determine many things. Among them:
Both wings failed because of down-bending, not penetration of critical structure by shrapnel from a missile.
None of the pictures showed a horizontal tail. And the right section of the stabilizer was missing. While this damage is conceivable from a crash landing, it was improbable because of the relatively undamaged condition of the vertical tail itself.
The design of the U-2 wing is so very highly cambered that without a tail surface to balance the very high pitching moment, the aircraft immediately goes over on its back; and in severe cases the wings have broken off in down-bending. This occurred once in early testing when the pilot inadvertently extended wing flaps at high cruise speed, resulting in horizontal tail failure. This takes place in a few seconds, at great acceleration and with the fuselage generally spinning inverted.
When Powers was exchanged in February 1962 for a Russian spy, I met and talked with him as soon as possible. His statements matched our conclusions.
Between what we had deduced and what Gary told us, it appeared that an SA-2 missile had knocked off the right-hand stabilizer while he was at cruising altitude. The airplane then, predictably, immediately went over on its back at high speed and the wings broke off in downbending. Gray was left sitting in the fuselage with a part of the tail and nothing else. He did not use the ejection seat, but opened the canopy to get out.
With the airplane spinning badly and hanging onto the windshield for support, he tried to reach the destruct button to destroy the airplane. It was timed to go off about ten seconds after pilot ejection. But he could not reach the switch. We simulated the situation and it just was not possible with the forces on his body. He had to let go. His biggest worry then was that the fuselage and flailing tail would descend through his chute. But he landed uninjured in a farming area and was captured almost immediately.
The following is the conclusion of my report to our government on February 21, 1962.
“I was so impressed by the very clear description of the incident by Frank, and having direct knowledge of what he was ordered to do in case of capture, that I will gladly contribute to a fund for decorating this officer for the fine job he did under the most difficult circumstances. He satisfied me, by detailed questions, that the Russians could not have brainwashed him on detail matters of his escape from the aircraft.”
Powers came to work for us at the Skunk Works.
After the U-2 was taken off Soviet overflights, it was assigned many other jobs. But it had developed very important information and it would be many years before we had anything to surpass the U-2’s photographic capability—and then it was our own Lockheed Agena satellite and the SR-71 aircraft.
The airplane is a good workhorse, really earning its “U” designation for utility. It even has done the high-altitude weather research first announced for it—in fact, a great deal of atmospheric and earth resources surveying for NASA. For that assignment, the ER-2, for “earth resources,” is their latest model, flying higher and farther than its predecessor U-2.
The U-2C has operated on the carrier Kittyhawk and others
in demonstrations for the Navy. A later model, the U-2R—for “revised”—would be even better for carrier operation, although its 100-foot wingspan versus the earlier 80 feet does take up a lot of space.
SR-71 production at Lockheed’s “Skunk Works” in Burbank, Calif.
By about 1965, the U-2s had served nearly ten years and were showing their age. We proposed to build the U-2R. The Pratt & Whitney J-57 engine had achieved a 20 percent increase in power, so we could fly with a heavier load. We had to reduce the wing loading while keeping the span as great as we could; we extended the wing to that 100-foot dimension, providing 1,000 square feet of wing area instead of 600 sq. ft. The cockpit was enlarged 45 percent, which made it more comfortable on long missions. There were other improvements to equipment and field serviceability.
The airplane operated in Southeast Asia over a period of four years with a maintenance readiness record of dispatch within 15 minutes of assigned time on 98 percent of the calls.
The availability was as good as for the big widebody airliners. And this was in snake-infested jungle areas with the absolute minimum number of maintenance personnel and equipment.
When the Mayaguez was captured and our communications satellite went out of commission, one U-2R stayed at altitude for a total of more than 27 hours in a three-day period acting as a communications link for our military forces.
Our B-52 pilots in the war theater preferred not to go out until the U-2 had told them who was coming at them.
The “R” can fly almost nine miles a minute above 70,000 feet and search 300 miles to the horizon. It can pick up enemy radar and communications. The plane can stay out for as long as ten hours, making it a very good early warning aircraft. Used with the Navy, it could land on a carrier to refuel when ranging far from land bases and be off again. One day, I think the Navy may want to use the U-2 for that purpose.
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