Three Times the Speed of Sound

For John, BLUF:  There were some real technical wonders back in the 1950s and 60s.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Vietnam, the CIA, and the World's Fastest Aircraft

The sub-headline:

As the SR-71 went public, these pilots flew its lookalike in secret.

David Freed Air & Space Magazine October 2017.

This is the story of the Lockheed Skunk Works A-12 OXCART. Here is the lede plus three:

During the selection process for pilots to fly a top-secret mission, Ken Collins was told to report to an apartment in Philadelphia, then locked in a room for six hours in complete darkness.  A loudspeaker would periodically order him not to doze off. He didn't.  "I can only assume that I must have passed," Collins says.

Collins, 88, a retired Air Force colonel, was among six hand-picked Air Force fighter jocks who overflew North Vietnam at Mach 3 on high-altitude photo-reconnaissance missions for the Central Intelligence Agency.  He flew a spy plane so hush-hush its operations remained classified for decades.  The top-secret project for which Collins had volunteered was code-named Operation Black Shield, and it was based in the Nevada desert.  Deceptively nicknamed "Oxcart," the supersonic Lockheed A-12 aircraft he piloted was the single-seat predecessor of its ultimately more famous, two-man virtual twin, the SR-71 Blackbird.

The A-12 made its first flight in 1962.  Lockheed's Kelly Johnson hadn't designed the A-12 for Vietnam, but Vietnam was the war it was born into.  Johnson had created the airplane in response to the CIA's need for something that could fly faster and higher than its subsonic U-2, another Johnson-designed reconnaissance airplane, which the agency had relied on since the mid-1950s to provide high-altitude photography.  The A-12 was unlike anything anyone had ever seen.

"You didn't wear it like you did a fighter," says another pilot who flew Black Shield missions, retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Francis J. "Frank" Murray, 86, of Gardnerville, Nevada.  "You were stuck way up in the nose, with a monster behind you."

One of the names mentioned in the article was Mele Vojvodich Jr., who was my wing commander in the early part of my second tour in Southeast Asia.  He commanded the 388th at Korat Royal Thai Air Force Base.  But, before that, after flying in the Korean War, he was "sheep dipped" into the CIA to fly the A-12.

Regards  —  Cliff