I'd like to introduce the people I brought my own cheering section here because I didn't know how this could go over but I brought my son Joe I thought my daughter was here for a while and I don't know where she went she found something better to do I don't blame her but I brought TD bonds that are my table here TD is the president of the Roadrunners organization I also brought Roger Anderson another old ball headed go here sir I've flown with for many years and these guys are the current and past presidents of the Roadrunners organization which is the organization of the u2 and 812 pilots of the CIA so the rows one is because Jimmy that's a fairly unique Club and there weren't many people that got to do those things also in my standing route here I got norm and Donna Myers old friends of mine who is along here is because I needed bigger cheering section mmm and of course Chris Johnson the airport's operations management and Mike Rayford my buddy who introduced me here so without further ado the story that I'm going to relate to you tonight has to do with the development by the United States of the world's fastest air breathing airplane and this lucky son of a gun got to fly that and it's a thrill to go faster than hell faster than a speeding bullet and all that and over up to 90,000 feet and altitude but we didn't do it with glider wings we had very thin wings it went like hell and the airplane got hotter than hell so there he is there's my man okay next that's what I look like when I was a youth and something magic happened when I grew up that picture was taken in 1967 at area 51 I'm standing by the nose of the wonderful a12 Cygnus which is what it was called next slide I want to introduce you to the family of airplanes that make up the Blackbird family and there's only one really hot rod in the bunch there and that's what I think but there you see the yf-12 interceptor version this guy it carried three m47 missiles that was the proof of concept airplane they only built three it worked pretty good as expensive as hell and they had enough of the cost of that so it never went anywhere they built more of this model here which I call the family model I'm sorry if any of you guys are s our drivers is I don't have a hill a lot of good say but I never flew I never flew that they neither thank God but I did fly the eight twelve on the end over there is that wonderful thing and the one at the bottom down here with the drone on its back the monkey on its back is the end 21 which is really a marriage of an eight 12 with the d21 drone a program that ended in great fault laws of the airplane loss of one of the guys in the twelve and it was canceled for the eight twelve to carry that thing it works for a little bit but it scared the [ __ ] out of everybody and you can see look at the wingspan of the drone and the clearance between it and the rotors to launch the drone the thing has to go straight up between the rudders not move off when inch one way or the other where it's going to hit the rudders so that was hairier than the butt end of aperture because they said that was no fun and one man from rocky did all of the piloting on that was bill park since deceased died an old man in his rocking chair own but anyway their credit to him but one thing I want to note want you to note is look how skinny the chine on the a12 is compared to these other things the a12 did not carry anything in the chines much what on the left side of the chine by the cockpit was one box it was a piece of the jamming suite some of the stuff the electronic warfare system we carried in the airplane other than that the Chinese were empty they were full of nothing but wind and the SR carried most of its packages in the chine so they widened the chines to increase the room to carry equipment in both sides so it carried its cameras in there the a12 had one big camera we carried it right behind the cockpit and it was a monster of a camera I'll show you the pictures of does to go along next slide the reason for the a12 goes back all the way to the time of Eisenhower's presidency the airplane was brought about because they knew very well that the u2 that we were operating still hear me in the back ok ok fine the YouTube was known to be vulnerable because it was so sonic it flew up to about seventy thousand feet which is above the where the Russian fighters could get at the time it was deployed at first but they knew damn well that missile systems are coming along to sort it out and next in 58 get this in the days before digital computers the a12 design got underway at Lockheed under the leadership of the smartest man in aviation Kelly Johnson there's nobody ever got the smarts that guy forgot next in 59 gussto the operation before was a sort of a fly off on paper idea between convair and lockheed the two makers of airplanes in the United States have had some naktu experience at least so they had a fly off in their on paper Lockheed beat the tar out of convair for that and oxcart was started in 59 get this the design for the oxcart a12 was set in the contract led in 1959 for 13 airplanes as you see it today this all done long before digital computers and the powers incident proved in 1960 that we were right the u2 was vulnerable Frank Powers got his butt shot down over spurred loss in 1960 on a date so it came to pass what we knew was going to happen of course the a12 was headed in to be the replacement but sad to say President Eisenhower met with Khrushchev at the time of the shift down and told them that we would not fly manned airplanes over Russia anymore so now what the hell do you do within a 12 so they continued okay next one there we go the object is given in the contract to develop the airplane we're both robust and some of them achievable and some not we just never quite got there we never made the range of four thousand miles we could squeak out 3,000 miles tanker to tanker which is well more than across the United States or well more from New York to Paris or something like that we could do that and we did that all the time we refueled all the time which is not a hard thing to do a lot of people think it is but it's it's relatively easy it's mostly formation flying which anybody can do that the the speed objective of mach 3.2 was set and established by the technology limits of the metals we had to make the airplane up and so we achieve that easily the speed limit of the airplane is not a Mach number limit the speed limit of the airplane is established by the compressor Inlet air temperature in other words what the temperature of the air going down the engine there's a limit to what the engine can take after that it shreds and that's terrible to try and fly a twin-engine spreaders reality to objective of 85,000 we made that handily and we used to get 85 on every test top it was easy to do the maximum altitude ever demonstrated by the SR under the most optimum factory condition was eighty five thousand two hundred and sixty three feet or something [ __ ] we got that in a turn all the time so there's a big difference in the performance of the Cygnus c12 and the family model next and the weight of a hundred and ten thousand pounds was an arbitrary thing I don't know where that came from I didn't have any to do with it but we couldn't do we couldn't get that skinny and go that far L we carried 68 thousand pounds of fuel all you got is left is cute sweet um there'd we make the airplane up next and camera systems I want to go through these rather quickly the reason for the airplane in the first place is to carry a camera it wasn't made to bomb it wasn't made the you know sending radio signals his purpose was to take high-resolution photography of our postulated enemy Russia and we didn't like them and they didn't like us and we made airplanes to spy on them because we wanted to know what the hell they were up to well in the first picture here and this is the u2 up right you can see a bunch of guys loading a camera from the bottom they're putting it in from the bottom they got a little kind of a gantry up top if they crank it up and if you look closely you can see that there's actually three cameras in that sled is a vertical look left and it look right so that's how they got their swath width free cameras and that's an early PerkinElmer design PerkinElmer is a very small optics company based in st. Louis and they're still around they make things like the Hubble telescope and opposers know sort of a fair optics company for safety and redundancy reasons Kodak was asked to make a camera system and it ended up being very similar to the PerkinElmer design it didn't work reliably so it was never used operationally the next haikon was a small country that made very good tactical cameras used in fighter aircraft throughout the United States and haikon never did get used in the a12 operationally this picture at the bottom here is a picture looking down on the top of the cube a which is the camera Bay in the a12 and all you see is electronics boxes and crap like that I don't have a good picture showing what the camera looks like at the bottom but of course the camera looks out to a glass covered hatch at the bottom looking at the ground target next the camera system in a nutshell this is the PerkinElmer camera worked very well we flew 29 missions I think it was over denied territories using the PerkinElmer camera and we had one instance one time on the camera worked on the first pass and jammed on the second and that's it so 29 and a half successful it was pretty damn good I thought it was a panoramic camera which meant when it took pictures it was horizons with horizon sort of well it's not that quite that but it was 67 miles off nadir nadir straight down so 67 left in 67 right and resolution at the edge of 67 was somewhere around two feet so if it could discern things that were two feet or bigger the system the PerkinElmer system uses two cameras in the a12 and they're taking pictures on the same piece of film okay it's not two cameras looking at the same spot on the film it's two places on the film and the film is sprocket las' they had a friction drive for it which was faster safer didn't punch new holes and you know all the other crap the camera system was the stabilized gyro stabilized platform so that you can maneuver the airplane a bit and the camera would stay on the target and it would continue taking pictures even if you reach the gimbal limit but they weren't as good because now you're allowing the airplane vibration to be picked up in the camera see what I mean so one roll of film 5,000 feet of thin base film that's a mile of film in that big brownie and that was it the linear coverage if we started and wanted to run a continuous path picture panoramic get it now remember what I told you you could go 2500 miles for you ran out of film so we carried some film with an 18-inch lens shooting it 3.8 so f-stop of three point eight pretty good look at the resolution one foot look at the contrast 200 lines per millimeter this is like taking pictures of hairs in the parking lot this is damn good especially for a camera that was whistling along 3,300 feet per second which is the speed of the airplane at cruise easy reliable performance I've said that easy product controls on/off on/off weather not it was it on our standby whether it was cloudier than they said stick it in whether if otherwise put it non and go I never had a camera closure in my the missions I flew the airplane I never had a failure so on the tourist system for sure next we had to have a place to fly this airplane that wasn't Burbank where they built the things obviously so we built the airplanes in Burbank completely and totally built them every last rivet screw and weld was put on there then they put them in boxes and haul them up to 51 I wrote a book on how that was done my books are on Amazon but if this deals it deals with how much work that was to haul 18 airplanes total the a-12 yf-12 and a couple of slugs you know a couple of book those are things used for photo into not not photo for radar cross-section analysis so there was 13 812 built one of them was a two-seater where we took the camera Bay of one airplane and took it out and put another chair in there and scare chair she called it one day Roger Anderson my ball hit a friend here Harry we I took him up in the trainer one time for a mission including refueling and playing and doing whatever that a Tyrell could do so Rogers been along he knows about the trainer we only had that one airplane it lasted the entire program it's now on display in LA next to the shuttle that's over there by the by the Coliseum there was team drone launchers made we lost one of those in test and and the airplanes were all hold over land to 51 a distance of 370 month roughly miles one way and those boxes of Lockheed built hold all that stuff up there and back and forth 18 tricks and it worked like stink one time a Greyhound bus ran into the big box and all it did is scratch his paint and we paid him off and he went his way nothing further said next to test the airplane of course Lockheed builders had a cast of people to say oh the good one guy couldn't do all that line so they hired everybody they could find on the street like joking they had five or six guys to do their test flying we only had six people to fly their operational mission so anyway they had a bunch of guys the first guy that did all the first flights and demonstration of the airplane to speed now the tubes again in loose shock and Lewis therapy ceased but he was a hell of a good friend and built park another guy who I said did all the all the drone launch testing and most of the envelope expansion work was done by Bill and other guys did some first flights out of the box and stuff like that but they weren't really developmental test pilots like barking shock next mission pilots I didn't mention my therapy end that's me and a handful of other guys there's a picture of the box at the bottom seated with a cover on it down there and there's two a twelve in manufacturers the box was built on the same production line of the airplane they just went down the line together when they got to the end they stuck the airplane the Box contributor 51 over simplification of fact the project pilot switcher the the name for the mission part if you guys like me that did the flying all came from the Air Force I'm a product of the Air Force aviation cadet training program I'm just a high school kid I went through the pilot training program stayed in the Air Force because I found no weather home and I wasn't much good of a farmer next eleven guides started in the selection process and through attrition for whatever reason we ended up with six that flew all the operational missions you couldn't be very big because by the time you put the guy in a pressure suit and stuff him in that little bitty cockpit he would stick out and that's that would be good you blow your hat off or something all the guys were Air Force officers we all had to resign our Commission in the Air Force get out become a civilian employee of the CIA do our job when it was done go back in the Air Force and we all did exactly that there I've said that before next the training and stuff for this for this thing is the true pain in the butt because a lot of it was uncomfortable away from family intense and like you know waterboarding and [ __ ] but you know that's really no big deal they make a big deal of that in Congress because they got nothing better to do after lunch they drive that through all times all the Special Forces guys go through that craft you know all of them the seals they all go through worse than that and nobody says a damn word do they the best part of the training was a flying training I ate that up that was great if you like to go fast go high and then do it all that often you'd like flying the a12 we were based all over helens on the pilots were I was the one Palmdale weenie there and I went out there because I had three kids and I was looking for the best school system within range of Burbank we had to be able to commute to Burbank because that's how we got from the with the area we flew in on those Connie's that came out of Burbank we spent five days a week up there doing this I did that for five years and that's tough on family I'll tell you you haven't done that you don't know what it's like overseas we will be over there six to eight weeks at a wax anyway there's only three of the pilots left today and I'm the pup of the bunch and I'm in my 87th year so I must have been made out of some pretty tough stuff the picture of the five guys on the right and then one on the left is Jack week so we lost right at the end of the program but of the ones you see on the right there three remain Ken Collins Denny Sullivan and myself Jack Layton and meldova ditch and Jack weeks were lost so they couple of them just died of old age next I want to get into the airplane a little bit and as I do this I've got some pieces of this thing I'm on a pass around so you get a better feel of what I'm talking about four structures and stuff like that I want these back if this [ __ ] gets on eBay I'll kill you the main the main structures of the airplane the frame if you will was almost entirely made of titanium and they were both for sheet and extrusion pieces and then they had to put a covering on things so the structure under structure primarily titanium next surfaces to covering of the airplane it was about a third plastic can you believe that it is and I've got some chunks of that that's around here so that you'll get a grip on that that's a piece of a trailing edge of an elephant don't sniff the asbestos in it it is it that the lot of the sheeting of the airplane was titanium especially in the area of the fuel cells because the skin was the outer wall of the fuel tank so the the tanks were integral to the airplane the airplane was a tank the tank was airplane the lexan composites like that piece coming around here that one was damaged by the way when a wall of water pushed the a12 up against the berth the girders and a hangar during Katrina and the guys down there the people down there at mobile where that airplane was gave me that they signed it and gave it to me just a piece of my collection but anyway that's clearly hedge Elavon notice the honeycomb stiffeners in it some of that and the coating and paint put on the stiffeners is part of the stealth design I'll go into that more detail I have another chunk here that somebody swiped it gone to ebay this is a leading edge piece of the same material this is from the wing between the nacelle and the fuselage and the entire periphery of the airplane if you will all the edges all the way around including the spikes rudders the nose and it is made of plastic reason being they were out to reduce the radar cross-section of the airplane we had to make this thing more invisible so we could sneak up on people to take their picture without them shooting at us and none of us liked being shot at some of the other special materials of the airplane like the windows and things like that had to withstand about 600 degree heat when hot and then be down to minus 70 when you're down on the tanker minus 70 degrees - you know something around 600 is a hell of a temperature range in to extend that plastic takes that can you believe that and I don't know who dreamed that plastic of an every effort it's like sand and asbestos the funny mix like fiberglass is glass fibers you know and polyester resin and you put a match that you'll burn up while you're looking at it but this stuff here will take all kinds of heat it is really tough the windows that the camera had to look through on the belly of the cube a the lower hubei hatch where the cameras look down to those windows could not be glass because the glass got imperfections in it just due to heating and got waves and things like that would squeeze up photography so they knew that quartz was impervious to that but you can't get quartz in natural quartz and is big enough to do any good nor of the optical purity you want so the scientists study what the hell force is made of and they went out and cast a bunch of it and you can make it as big as a tabletop rock so they would manufactured quartz and cut that to the size they wanted they had trouble attaching that's the metal frames he had a [ __ ] of a time with that because quartz didn't want to glue like some other things did with modern sealants so they had to do a fusing of the quartz to the metal frame by ultrasonic means and you believe that they shot it with a thing that they check and see if your baby's a boy or a girl the sealants used between things in the airplane anywhere you wanted to keep the rain out if you will had to be sealed up or the airplane would leak like a sieve and none of the sealants we had were all that shiny they were mostly things just like the one you're using your best of at home you know stuff like that and it gets hot melts and runs and they shave it off with razor blades not just like I did here shaving this morning something is sticking up so I just cut it off not to slip I'm better known as an aviator than I am a razor blade mechanics sorry about that next the fuel tanks I alluded to are the structure of the airplane you can't remove the fuel tanks from an a12 they are the airplane the bottom skin of the airplane where you see the belly is the bottom of a fuel tank the fuel tanks there's six of them in a row from starting at the cockpit back and they hold 68,000 pounds of fuel anybody here you figure out that that's 10,000 US gallons that's a lot of petrol and this thing feels just like you're flying a milk truck got more wiggles and because it's full and it's not full of anything that's rigid it's full of liquid so it kind of does this you know in turbulence is funny feeling but no worries the airplane leaked fuel all the time so we did not refuel the airplane on the ground until you meant to fly and then we'd only fill it up about halfway and we'd go out take off and go to a tanker right away and fill the plane up in the air so we got plenty of practice refueling like I said that's a piece of cake it really is a lot of people think it's difficult it is difficult in the clouds at night enlightening literally scared the [ __ ] out here's my French reporter okay the airplane was ready to flight test before the engines were rated five the j58 so in the beginning they put the third engine the 105 and 106 repairing j75 after burning entrance and pretty good engine not big enough not suited for the inlets but we could get it up and fly it around take off land if you couldn't get out the speed or anything but it was a good substitute for a while developing about twenty-five thousand pound static trust in a be the project engine was a j58 both of these by the way by the best engine maker in the world pratt and whitney and from many thousands of hours behind pratt and whitney and i may be one engine failure in the whole pile i think that's pretty good and the 58 is thirty to five in the weakest model of it they made one that was 34,000 pounds basically the same engine with a variable in the guide vane so the 58 is one horse of an engine it was designed for the Blackbird it was designed to match the inlet duct and the duct was made to match the engine and until those two could marry no you weren't going to be happy for our next picture of the j58 I want to point out one thing a lot of people in engines and engine right not quite you see these tubes that on the side see em right there there's seven of those tubes that go down ducting air from the fourth stage of compression in the in the engine compressor going around the hot section and dumping into the afterburner honey burnt that air has not gone through the main combustor of the engine it went around it one of the secrets of the j58 why it made sea-level thrust at eighty-five thousand feet in the air that's why the thing goes like hell by the way a wonderful engine Lockheed called their airplane the Archangel they also called you - the angel air force guys yeah you guys that flew and never called him anything like that we sleep on another name we were we were good at that anyway the fuel at the time I was flying it was called pf1 petroleum fuel number one didn't go unit it didn't said anything should have been made out of kerosene or dog dude it didn't make a lot of difference but anyway you know what I'm sittin here I'm a on schedule more or less I've got one for you I got a trivia here okay everybody in this room has seen Top Gun have you not or hold your hand up if you haven't because you can go home now that I got your attention okay in the movie Top Gun in the first third of the movie maverick Tom Cruise was sent down to his commander because he just buzzed the tower and caused the tower officer to spill coffee down his shirt so he's down there getting his butt chewed and about that time the guy who was supposed to go to Top Gun school from their squadron quit the Navy if you remember the story and number two in the squadron was maverick and goose that pair of the f-14 guys and the commanding officer told them there's a question coming up Navarrete was warned if he screwed up this assignment you're going to be flying a transport out of Hong Kong Holly what commodity what was it rubber [ __ ] is right I thought the best line in the whole damn movie I had to get that out the devil hey the devil made me do that put up a big people I'm not right through the fuel system of the j58 was powerful enough with enough volume and pressure to be used as the engine hydraulic system to operate bypass doors the a/b flats you know the a/b nozzle flap and things like that so they did it first time ever where engine fuel under pressure was used as a hydraulic system on the airplane so it was a unique application that's Lockheed for you those guys are just way ahead of the next guy next ok the oil I do have to say something about that if room temperature like pressure today you could carry a quart of the oil of that the testing used around without the cam because it was the consistency of cold lard unheated so it's the only airplane I've ever flown where they had to preheat the engine in the summer because you had to get the oil thinned out so it would flow to start once she got gone and got warm it was ok but it was a very high temperature high melting point oil so that it didn't know just go away in the wind and where the hell the oil go yeah so they made it a special thing hydraulic food was much the same this airplane is probably the hardest airplane in the world to find a hydraulic leak because when it leaks it evaporates and there's no sign of where the hell the leak when so we we had some problems with that we had a big lock system on the airplane liquid oxygen carried four gallons you know about 16 liters of liquid oxygen just for the pilot and it did retain one you like to breathe all of us did and it also was the primary cooling for the pilots head so inside the helmet it was sprayed out through spray bars on the side of them of the mask that your face is in and it floated in cooling your face because it was hotter than hell just yet inside of that glass and so the other gases on the airplane we create a lot of liquid nitrogen there were two doers or flasks whatever you want to call it one of them was 80 liters the other was 120 and they were located in the nose wheel well and that was gas use for inerting of the fuel cells and pressurizing of the fuel tank if you didn't pressurize an empty fuel tank and descended we have this very pressure rise from the descent would crush the airplane remember what I said the tank is the airplane your plane tank so you can't get away with that we also had a strange thing the normal fuel for the j58 engine will not ignite on spark plug ignition it won't do it because the flash point of the fuel is too high so that being problem we made a hypergolic because say they're called tab try out the boring and this was a liquid that was sprayed in the engine it's a start and also sprayed into the a B to light the a B and it did it every time and it burnt with a green flame it was a weird stuff and there's some stories I could tell about there we don't have time what the nav system on the airplane was primarily the AI NS which I knew nothing about when I got in the 8th world I couldn't even spell it but I found out all about it because it's a purely passive nad system it doesn't look at anybody or anything it just measures acceleration so it's got a stable table and the system that was used in the airplane was matured in that it had come from the Atlas missile which had been on alert for a number of years and was using that minneapolis honeywell of cable so we use that for the a12 because it was the most reliable system that was available and worked and we had a backup system of the Sun compass you know that's like looking outside and Savior it's windy you know that wasn't much very much use the combat system on the airplane was all Collins and Collins is good stuff and because we've got in this country they made the whole thing see they're in the second bullet on secure radio arc 50 the arc fifty radio was in the a12 and in the tanker and there was a mode you could go into and say anything you want to do to the tanker within range of the radio and nobody else could figure out what the hell you're talking about because it was a spread-spectrum scrambled voice system I don't know it work just work we had another one in there which was a telemetry system that was built for the a12 following the YouTube incident where we didn't know what the hell happened to Frank Powers he got shot down we didn't know where he died of old age or what the hell happened to him until you got out a year or two later so the agency decided we can't have this we've got to know what the heck's going on with this airplane and this driver so they put in a thing called a birdwatcher which is the name for a 40-channel to on the tree system and if you had anything go on and turn on at Elinor anything like that or ejected or whatever it would send signals to a ground station that things are not hunky-dory the life support system the suit pressure suit was made by David Clarke David Clarke is probably the biggest manufacturer in the country of ladies girdles and bras that's a fact and they do that and they sell everybody and I guess those are alright but I never wore one of them but I wore their pressure suits a lot I lived in their pressure suits which were very good and works fine and everything we've ever put onto the moon that's up during the space station today all made by David Clarke so the trusted company fire well made the ejection package including the parachute tip and those kind of things Lackey made the seat is their own design next important in this airplane is environmental systems like this airplane gets hotter than hell the base of the windshield runs at about 650 the temperature on top of the nacelle vector where the rudder is is about 1050 1,050 back there because it's being heated from the inside by an after burning engine is glowing orange and friction heating on the outside so as a double whammy back in that part and fuel was used as a heat sink for the air conditioning and cooling the engine oil hydraulic fluid anything that needed cooling was cooled by the fuel and they had a very smart system in their recirculation things and and an idea called the OAH tank that's unlike some part of it you know materia medica or something I'm gonna tell that was anyway it was a special tank that they took the hot fuel to and when two gathered or nothing but there that sent it the engine brought out the pipe so the total loss cooling system using the fuel as the heat exchanger and then burning it up for propulsion great idea oil cooling was done by the fuel hydraulics same thing next and the autopilot was made by Honeywell I've never run an auto pilot as much as I've done in this thing you probably Bob Bob is a retired United Airlines captain and he doesn't have my flying time but George has a hell of a lot George being the auto pilot but anyway I can get him he's a good friend he puts up with me but the auto pilot was a Honeywell system and I've never flown a better one and it was specially made for that airplane didn't come out of a be anybody or see anybody it came right off the drawing board to suit the need and it did it well a big piece of the autopilot subsystem would be the stab AAG the dampers if you will and that's the thing that keeps the pointy end going forward when all else goes to words like in a nun start gun start or something you can really get busy I said the ejection system was basically the one used in the 104 updated with a few new ideas on the Spurs and things like that that had happen because of this airplane and the true air speeds if you might eject that like Mach 3 next the defensive systems of the airplane and up here you know the already words up there alone unarmed and unafraid they didn't take that guy's underwear because because you know sometimes you can get you know what scared out yes because you're in there with no guns no bombs no nothing just a camera and I did that for a while and I kind of liked it once I figured out that it was going like a whistling outhouse you know I musically couldn't get at it too good as I said there and I'm free the main defense of this airplane is its speed and altitude that's what it relied on if it wouldn't go in like books said it should which is on speed altitude we didn't go in there that was a simple rule don't penetrate unless you've got your underwear on so stay home say day the typical mission penetration altitudes always spelled out in the briefing and it was usually around 75,000 feet hell we got that at level off so you know way back there a thousand miles back after you climbed off the top tanker you were already at 75 so by the time you got to anywhere you're going you're 80 or 82 for whatever you can manage then anyway and speed and altitude was our Savior but we had some other systems just in case JD I see say down the bottom there North Vietnam the only required 75 held we got that at level aa I played a mission over North Korea right after the Pueblo incident remember where they grabbed our boat I was in there taking pictures just you know me and my brownie and they said eighty thousand men and for that I'm going to 86 something like that you know just a little insurance for Grandma on the kids next okay the names given to the defensive systems was a protective thing they didn't want the pilot to know it was Al Q 1 2 3 - 9 they didn't want us to know the real designator for the protective systems because these might be systems used on b-52s or B 1 2 3 somebody so they didn't want us to know so we only got the cryptic name and I kind of liked them in big blue dog mad moth I always thought that was kinda 8 that it was a good one and these were various jammers and for various reasons I'll go into it in system 6 down there was a major system on the airplane it was the broadband receiver it was the recorder of everything the enemy was trying to do to you what he was saying what he was trying to do it also recorded our resultant jamming that they'd come up and try to do something and we'd get after that every time we would these other guys here next 10 peg I even went in my investigation from my background this stuff just to give you a feel for we weren't using Chinese you know Sears & Roebuck manufactured junk we use the best companies the United States had to build these systems like Westinghouse and Sylvania so we didn't go with the lowest bid and the agency was not required to either they went with the best performance he gave especially if you're riding around in that thing and somebody's wanting to burn your butt off a blue dog by Sylvania answered to the pin peg the pin peg would say somebody over there on the right side at a certain but distance is locking on you he seeks him to put something out there with you he wants to fight formation with your life and then pegwood cells we dog regard this thing has gone to high p RF pulse repetition frequency meaning december [ __ ] launch the missile attune so or more so pin peg turns on blue dog sort of as time went on years went on the russians and the other people that were using fan song missile systems against us started trying to update their operation to get around our jammer so we being smarter foot came up with a new one madmaz was like a blue dog but it dealt with some of the latest problems that we saw recorded by system six our broadband recorder next now all you guys that like airplane instrument battles this is the a twelve panel and it is busier than a one-armed paper hanger with you know what i can outline some of it this line our switches and lights those are the operational control of the fuel system pumps so any tank with fuel in it you push the number one it will go from nothing to green if there's fuel in it and the pump is running and the pump is running trying to move fuel from the number one tank to the end so it has six tanks and six lights like that the gauge is down here that's the total fuel contour selected fuel quantity you could select tank for whatever want to want to look at and you can see how much it stopped the rest of the switches over there we're the liquid-nitrogen control switches for the inerting and pressurization gas system the dump switch the refueling door operational sequence which if you open you know to get on the tanker that kind of guy so all of those things were grouped up in what this side of the panel this set here are the engine gauges egt rpm oil pressure enp exhaust nozzle position stuff like that right at the top up here fire warning lights great big red lights luckily for me I never saw one come on never did my name is Pierre lucky Pierre is the flight group is right here you know the normal stuff you see in tri-pacer that's the same kind of craft except it's got a little longer range good may be the scope up here there's the pilots view scope use that to look at the ground look at the film strip look at instructions coming in whatever they can put anything on there you can put on a notepad with your with your Apple iPad or anybody else very nice that's the driving smooth handle right there that's my friend I love that had a 40-foot b-58 drag chute on it and that would stop even though the brakes wouldn't stop the airplane we're good the drag bag did this is their controls for the few finder right here the weight I'm sorry that's caustic temperature CIP DTG distance to go these are yet these are the controls for the viewfinder you could put up a map advance it [ __ ] go back look at a letdown play stuff like that it was all available in that viewfinder good thing because you didn't have any way of doing it otherwise major controls here down on the bottom group are the spike controls and the forward bypassed door controls and if those things weren't operating right you want to see some busy hands and that's the guy trying to keep the pointy end he and the SAS trying to keep partying going forward well you get the goddamn engines running again and that's a nice if you want to continue and there were some nice features in this airplane like you control the exhaust gas temperature trim from the cockpit not out of the fuel control with some mechanic if some guy out there diddling with it they gave you that control right in the cockpit that was very nice to have that's pretty much it for the office of the a12 it had consoles on either side down at the bottom here he does only barely see a little bit there was 36 tella light warning lights down man 36 lights saying left hydro low or you know right engine oil high or whatever and all of those that turn on the master caution light which is up here somewhere and then you look down here to see what the hell's going on and all the same time the bird watchers squawking in your ear remember the telemetry thing you can hear at bitchin I not doesn't say anything is just not that kind of noise next I don't have any way of showing the light system see I say here the DF lights in the ill eyes and whatnot those lights were across the top of the brow above the viewfinder in the top part would be bed of lights up there and things like I say here the df' lighted direction-finding lights tell you where the ground system is it's tracking you maybe locked onto you wanting a piece of your buttons the Li lights are the launch indicator and that says blue dog where madmaz has detected missile launch and they're coming for you the beautiful way that we jammed those both the blue dogs and madmaz would record the command signal structure coming from the ground radar to the missile they would record those exact signals going to the missile and we'd store them and put them under here for a while and when the thing got in the terminal phase we'd start repeating those commands and that's not what it took to hit you it was a command guided missile as you know it has no terminal seeker so we just stick it up their own thing and I wonder we're sending off in the green field somewhere and we're good damn red if the light is the light at the top of the brow and the center is the big one up there went Jam red once you unloaded your pants here or something because that says the system has failed you're already about as fast as you can go and about as high as you can go so there's nothing much you can do about that so you're just kind of look out the window maybe practice a prayer if you know what you know not that we were big time players but you know we might have been some of the slower I suppose the bit is built in tests we had a function switch down here on the right console where the where the master arm for the jammers system was and before you penetrated a target of any words you know in denied territory whoever you pushed the bit switch down and hold it and watch for the sequencing of the lights to go through a built in logic test of the system each one would stage and turn on the other in turn on the other on the other until it proved to itself it was doing what it should do that's it the bit all the while you press the bit the birdwatchers screaming like the wounded eagle because it thinks the system went hot no you can't tell the difference between of better and it can't tell the difference between a bit and the real attack so anyway there we go next a little bit about the airplane it's a long skinny thing built like a butterfly it is not very strong it's only 2 TG airframe to g-get that you know you pull or not stopping at the stop light down here it's feared so that's not much it's kind of a wide thing for a delta is 55 feet wide next only weighs 55 thousand pounds ft though again I said built like a butterfly light and strong enough not built for any heavy lift maximum we all up everything up 125 thousand pounds that's the biggest and fastest airplane I've ever flown in my life I don't fly bombers and transports and things on the fighter pilot Google capacity there you go sixty-eight thousand pounds of gas the only time you get that on board it's off the tanker you can't take off with that tires at all bust before you get it airborne the payload is not much it wasn't made for be a transport you had a camera some jammers and it's skinny little bird like me flying the airplane next drag shoot I went over next and sometimes to one of these things I call these things my dog and pony sessions sometimes I drag out a main tire that I have in the garage at home and it's a well use them he looks like junk but it was the center main wheel for the a12 that is down in Mobile Alabama and when they put new tires on and he got the airplane for display they gave him some new skins for it and they were taking me to the dump and I took went home okay there's two those wheels those things probably last forever put them on your wheel barrow when you're done the tires are serviced with a lot of nitrogen gas 375 pounds in the main tires I don't know what the nose wheels were there were 250 of them they were good for about 10 normal operational takeoff and landings at that time they kept track and regardless of what they look like they change them they just changed them out and that's it and you only got on the mains you only got one go with new tires even if you had to abort the takeoff because the aborted takeoff created enough brake heat to go through the rims and ruin the tire and it blow out on your next normal takeoff so they found out one aborted takeoff shift and the tires they were only 2700 dollars a piece anyway what the hell it was like a bicycle wheel right some of you guys that are into flying airplanes your sales planes have a wing loading that's a minus number or something this a-hole is going a little bit 78 pounds per square foot is pretty good wing loading and that's because it's all gasps it's got a heavier wing loading the most bombers by far so it's a it's your tote and stuff around the landing wing loading result won't cut that in half because and the same flew in the pattern I can say this without question that was the most beautiful flying pattern airplane you ever flew typical Dells are soft under controls you know very typical like all Delta's handled great plenty of power in the pattern for landing and stuff like that I love this great fun day night whether it can make a difference we climbed at a fairly high speed and for your sailplane guide we climbed it 450 knots equivalent and that's the wind that's going over the wing when you're supersonic your pitot static gauges are out to lunch they don't mean a thing because you got soft way standing on it the static ports and the pitot tube and everything else so those gauges are or OTL create speed a free one we always went to free one I like free two better but it did what the hell the design speed of the airplane is three point two and a three point two the spikes are all the way back the doors are all shut and you're where the airplane was built to be and that's where it whistles it really does nice service ceiling of 85 at least the max demonstrated by the factory I think was three point two nine which is thirty three hundred and forty miles per hour we blow your head off if the canopy came up with it and ninety thousand feet some of the performance measures BMC maneuverable cruise speed at 270 knots you can still do a 30-degree Bank turn at best anyway Beamen was set at 250 anything slower than that you had distortion across the engine face and you probably get a compressor stall or a nun start normal decent was done at 300 push your reduce power should be good you're not going down and the pattern speed 250 300 around the pattern anywhere final pretty nice 175 and that was for two engine approach if you had a single engine approach you'd up that about 15 so that you have maneuver time to get the good engine going into reheat and to go around really baby normal touchdown about 1:45 the airplane flies slower than that but you'd be landing on the dump chute instead of the wheels because we would stack up moving over about 13 degree alpha the first thing to touch is the s end of the airplane not the wheels and it's lying great there you know feels like it's at home roll auditions of a couple thousand feet with a good shoot I used to love to do that at Kadena Okinawa because you come in over Buckner Bay water remember the road there number one come right across that about five seconds before you're getting well you're beginning into the overrun sort of I pulled the drag chute handle because it had to go wind up the send the message to Igor back there I'm back it throw it out however the hell that work it took a while for the time you pull the handle until you got the food feel the bag but I timed that pretty good now you turn off but the first taxiway which is 2,000 feet down the runway goes straight to the hangar just like I knew what the hell I was doing how we done on time getting there okay on a typical mission a combat mission if you will or an overflight mission the reason we were there that kind of a mission not a training mission not a faery mission but but a regular mission the Asians they would send down the word to us about 24 hours out giving us time to sober up a pilot not that we drank is any more than anybody else but we normally brought up two guys two airplanes and two guys back in the mission up should anything happen we didn't want to fail the mission if we had people standing around you know what the hell get them ready so we always did it that way then you go into the flight planning section GUP the pilot would go down to the funny wing shop in that shop and those guys that go down and they go over the nav route and stuff like that places to avoid so on talk about what camera were carrying how it's going to be set where the threats are you know if you're going to be flying over a nest we know damn well and we wanted to know that and they all paid always tickle me escape invasion plan where the hell you think you're going in a pressure suit you know in Siberia or someplace I always got a kick out of that I that was normally a good time beyond and after that you go down to the suit shop and they put your lay your bag it's already out there they've already done some testing on it they put the helmet and gloves on and blew it up to see if it's going to blow the ass-end out a button they didn't want that surprise either and then you put the bag on you and try it with you in it and then you go through the pre-breathe you usually had two pre-breathe the half-hour 45 minutes to purge the nitrogen out of your blood so you don't get the bends danger and they did that routinely and they test the suit and all that jazz and the calm you know the communications capability then they breach in the croutha and send you down to the airplane and this young airplane never flew where I never did a pre-flight I never looked at goddamn thing I just climbed the ladder and sat down so what could I do embracing say yeah I couldn't even count the tire so I knew better than the best way that I just left well enough alone and I trusted the guys that were on the ground crew and they took care of me every time and have to take off you climb out to the first top off tanker he's usually within a hundred miles of the base or something so you waddle out there and fill this thing up and get on your way okay part of the stealth design and I want you to remember those pieces you saw floating around here of that composite stuff that I started say the entire periphery of the airplane is made of that stuff the whole thing all the way around reason being radars first pulse of energy strikes an object at the edge and that's where the reflection starts right there so if you make it of something at one absorbs it rather than reflect it that's a help on your junk aging back so you're not there the objective of stealth for us was to deny early detection of the airplane a couple 300 miles out don't let them see you if they don't see you they don't know you're coming and if you get inside their launch range before they can launch you just beat them you whip them right there that's the end of the game because you come over and go click click click take their picture you smile and tie on your weight ok and this is a new page for me and I haven't even had a look at it since TD Barnes put this together for me and he puts together all of this stuff for me the a12 is the first airplane built in the United States with stealth in mind it was a it was a project term in the contract to make it to do what you can no numbers given to reduce the RCS radar cross-section very important and that was the first of their tries to do this remember again this contract was let in 1959 before the days of some of you people they built the full-scale airplane out of aluminum I've seen pictures of it and they took that up to area 51 and some boxes and put it back together and they hoisted it up on a pole on the lake and they looked at that thing which is the worst case model this is a pure aluminum airplane no attempt that stealth with editing and that was baseline this is as bad as it can get and then everything after that was compared to that and they made several sub scale models as they went along for the same ideas easier to use but the first one was full-size and EG&G edgerton germeshausen and grier which I met have never heard of maybe but they were a primary scientific contractor in on the ranges for both AEC the Atomic Energy Commission us did the roads and commodes they did all that stuff sucker the number 2 a 12 article 122 was built put together up there and stuck on the pole and it spent a lot of time up there and when it went to sleep in the barn to be stored at the end of the program it had like 68 hours or something on it that was it nothing and mud even broken in for chrissake but if it was required to do that the cell features yeah we had a number of simulated and sometimes actual radars from from the other countries and we use those to look at the a12 to along with some we built the electrically the same but physically are on creation the objective of course was to deny early detection that was it that's the reason they don't care if we look like a barn door remember you were overhead because it's too damn late that thing is going 3,300 feet per second away from you that's way faster than the 3006 blur comes out of the barrel by the way the exhaust plume was found to be radar reflected but and that that's one of my lower bollocks down there that was accidentally found by the EG&G guys studying the airplane coming across and he come out of a BB overhead and all of a sudden he thought disappear well they figured out that the exhaust plume was radar reflective the shock diamonds a plasma shocks in the plume were radar reflected so they said what can we do about that you know you can't do a lot about that but they put a caesium Advocate in the fuel which made the exhaust plume radar absorptive so you know for every tip there's a pack there you go we never did make this airplane super stealthy like the f-22 and the 117 later on those were much advanced project and we got a lot better as we went along but the first one was the a12 next and no big deal sometimes we fly one pass over some target and go through it maybe go get a tanker on the other side of it and then go get another target somewhere else because there honey you'll be at tankers and we had plenty of film remember 5000 foot roll egad and sometimes we'd be killed several times here's a picture of the 12 approaching the tanker one of my favorite spots I love to refuel this thing like I said it average of about 20 minutes if you came up fairly light like ten thousand eight thousand ten thousand pounds remaining on board and you hooked up to fill up to sixty eight it takes you about twenty minutes so you'd hang on the bone my information-- piece of cake that I always thought I never had a bit of problem with that next this shows some of our target plot runs that we were doing mostly Southeast Asia and Chinese border coasts we did a lot of that diddling around them remember we had a camera system we also had systems SiC system States was the wideband eel int receiver and it recorded everything those guys whispered that thing got pretty good and put a time tag on it and when compared to film if you had camera running at the same time you put a geological position on it too which made it real easy for the fighter bombers to come in later on and take it apart next we're in the wind down at the end of the program the 11:29 squadron by the way which roger belong to I was in that before when I first got to 51 was an Air Force squadron put together of all the specialties they needed to support oxcart so non cons and commissioned officers all put together this magnificent squadron of the best talents we had anywhere in the Air Force to do this that was pure Air Force action 11:29 next the chase airplane was the aardvark as I called it that's the 101 boudu and one of my favorite airplanes I had 3000 hours flying that old thing and I got around all over the world with it and with it was the primary photo chase airplane up there at 51 we had eight of them up there and I've been flying that for years everywhere I went they had I 101 the big airplane by McDonald now here's the cutter we had enemies there was people within the United States government that wanted to kill and effectively did kill oxcart they did in the early days in the days of LBJ who was there when he killed it of course he was greatly influenced by what amounted to about a four person National Security Council we didn't have as we do today the National Security Council then they has a 303 committee secretary of defense secretary of order dingbat that had to do with the budget Bureau of the budget who else so CIA was in that but they were outnumbered and next next these are the guys these were the flows right there and every time they got a chance that lunch with LBJ they'd say you got a new airplane coming along this is good that's our 71 just as good can't afford both get rid of one and they didn't seriously consider getting rid of the sr which was the air force's new baby so they took the easy way out at lunch one day and convinced LBJ and he said take it down and down we went we pulled our pants up and went home that was it the last mission over flight was flown by Jack Layton and it was a it was a run up over North Korea to see what the hell is did with Pueblo in May of 68 the last 812 flown anywhere was flown to storage and guess who got to do that my gosh I always there goes dead I brought it back from Kadena and I struggled through all that crap that everything did not want to go to storage it's found island everywhere who there's one soul and oh we've got to be dandy and overly equal new dandy and I finally got it home next pilots all went back in the Air Force at the end of this thing and went on to serve our time I stayed another nine years for a total of 29 in service to my country which guy thoroughly enjoyed here's a tip this is what I call the sardine can and this is sickening these are the eight 12s in closed storage at Lockheed at the end of the program they rounded him up stuffed them in there you couldn't have lit a hair between them they didn't have a lot of space I guess and what the intelligence star was awarded to the pilots Jack weeks having been lost just a very short less than a month before the end of program on a test stop we lost Jack his wife received his medal that's a gong about that big made of solid bronze I've got my those somewhere and get this you can tell skinny ties were in weren't they look at the size on those guys the Admiral there was device of the CIA CIA always has a military flag officer Admiral general as the number two and this guy Taylor was Rufus I think anyway he was giving the gongs to the guys here they presented him dude really guy should give me that hey so he's back and he's been dead for years [ __ ] she was my recorder friend is that that anyway there Malvo [ __ ] on the left is a piece of him so he didn't get a full menu Sullivan Jack Layton Ken Collins and me and we were all we were all about precise we went into that thing we've kind of skinny guys around 170 I'm only a pound or two off that today so I could get back in my suit we have a little treat at the end of the program here for you how about a touch and go and so I told you that is the nicest airplane the pattern you ever saw black huh which is down about 15 degrees angle of attack that's it folks [Applause] for you [Applause]
