OK, you have to check this out. National Geographic just published this awesome slideshow documenting the crash site of one of the CIA’s A-12 spy planes operating out of Area 51 in 1963. The image above is from the collection featuring recently declassified photos of the A-12 program. It’s pretty amazing to see the mockup of the Mach-3 jet sitting there above the ancient looking jeep. The airframe is on the big stick so that Lockheed and CIA engineers can test its radar signature.
Below is a teaser of the pics you’ll find on the show. It’s the empennage of the A-12 that crashed in the desert near Wendover Utah after getting into an unrecoverable spin. National Geo does a great job at describing the efforts to cover up the fact that the super secret plane went down, noting how the pilot kept civilians from approaching the wreck by telling them the plane was carrying a nuclear weapon.
{ 29 comments… read them below or add one }
The A-12 was a prototype interceptor, not a spy plane.
You're thinking of the AF/YF-12, which was a developmental offshoot of the A-12 program.
The A-12 was developed by the CIA to do one thing and one thing only to replace the U2 spy plane to fly over the USSR and spy on their military capabilities.
We would have been far better off to have pursued stealth technology along the direction the SR-71 took, combining stealth shaping with a high cruise speed, and eliminating the expensive and unreliable signature reducing coatings, and the even more expensive, hard to maintain composite structures. Had we gone this route, our stealth aircraft would be much more robust, provide better armor and protection to the crews, and be cheaper than these billion dollar stealth hangar queens we have today. Yet another opportunity lost. Today, with our much more elightened "design by committee" approach to aircraft design, we can't even figure out how to make a Mach 3+ capable aircraft that will cover as much distance between refuelings as the SR-71 could. That's some progress we've made in the last 50 years! It would take longer than the 18 months it took to design the SR-71 just to decide what color to paint it today.
How do you propose to hide the massive heat signature generated from friction by flying at mach 3+?
It always amazes me to see the great lengths that people will go in an attempt to twist anything to fit their personal agenda. The SR-71 was a beast to maintain & ungodly expensive for it's day (yay black budgets!). It's extreme speed also contributed to making it MORE observable (despite it's use of expensive, hard to maintain signature reducing coatings & composite structures).
In short it was the exact opposite of the model you're arguing for.
The SR-71 filled in a small era where computers were too slow to track something Mach 3 and most SAM's wouldn't be able to catch up to it.
Those advantages were gone by the Eighties (MIG 31 specifically)
What's with armoring a spyplane? Its not an A-10- a SAM would bring it down unless it was built like an Abrams tank.
SR-71 was a reconnaissance plane but satellites fly a lot faster and have much bigger optics.
I had heard in a documentary once that the SR-71 had outlived it's purpose because it was built to be a reconnaissance plane, if it had been built to drop bombs it might still be flying today, we might be flying it's successor. I don't think strategy back then could have accurately predicted the importance of precision bombs.
I think these days you could use composite materials to improve the SR-71's initial titanium design, probably could build one that doesn't leak fuel out of the seams and make it lighter and faster. SR-71 counts as a Ramjet and the military is working out Scramjet engines at the moment, which would more than double the speed of the jet.
The problem with satellites is that they're fairly predictable, all of the major players when and where a satellite will be at any given time, plus you can't put a satellite anywhere you want at any time. That's the benefit of a plane like the SR-71, if you need some near real time intel at a moment's notice then you send in a plane that can be anywhere within hours.
And now you'd use a UAV instead. They're staged close to areas of interest so response time is still reasonably fast, and they have higher persistence.
Yeah, they'd persist right up until someone shot their slow ass out of the sky.
The heat generated by an aircraft like that would have increased it's radar signature because the change in air density would reflect radar waves.
Do any of you have anything to say that's even a little bit true?
Well at least you did manage to get the 18th development cycle right…
Wow, so close to being clever…
YF-12, precursor to this aircraft was the interceptor, not the A-12 Mark!
Ancient jeep haha. The ol' Wiley's were the best jeeps until Hummer came along. But so expensive when Wiley's were cheap, easy to maintain/repair and reliable. Those were the days. As for the jet, nice read, I love historical relics like this. As far as I'm concerned they aren't out of style and can still do their role if the big heads would send them in.
"The airframe is on the big stick so that Lockheed and CIA engineers can test its radar signature."
The real reason is because of Soviet satellites taking photos of the test base. The planes' shadow was painted on cardboard and plcaed on the tarmack as the satellite passed over. Pilots and engineers complained about "wheeling in and out" the plane every time a soviet satellite passed.
Funny thing is that they mount aircraft upside down like that today to check radar signatures of aircraft. The jeep was most likely 'to wheel it in and out'. You guys were both right.
Although Kelly Johnson Knew alot about alot, the SR71 was called "the Flying Fuel Leak"by those who worked on her. They routinely were issued new uniforms,&,new boots every month,becauseof the corrosive nature of the fuel. The plane grew significantly in flight. This caused the fuel tanks to crack & leak. Placing bladders in the tanks only delayed the leaks for a short while.
I've always read that the leaks were a design feature and were present to allow for the fuel tanks to expand when heated up during flight. Once the SR-71 was at cruising speed the tanks no longer leaked because they've expanded and thus sealed the leaks.
Leakage was a feature of the design, but not something intentionally designed. Rather, it was more important to accomodate thermal expansion than to seal the fuel tanks on the ground. The leakage was never desirable, and meant that the aircraft had to refuel shortly after take-off to achieve decent range.
Your right, the the thermo sealing at speed was intentional because no existing bladder or sealant could tolerate the high temperatures or corrosive fuel mixture of the blackbirds, they even had their own tanker fleet for the special jp mixture.
Disclaimer: I have no vested interest and nothing to do with the book below.
About 2/3 thru new book "Area 51" and it is a great collection of exhaustive research about Area 51 & its history, products. Didn't expect much d/t what I thought was going to be a rehash of all the sensationalistc stuff (UFO aliens helping us build alien technology, etc) but the book is exhaustively researched and takes you through the inception, development, and lots of other truly interesting history. For anyone liking aviation, secret spy stuff, and how it got to be what it is today, this is a must read. Answers questions and speculation such as the question above.
New York Times review if you check out their Book Review section.
An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base
By Annie Jacobsen
523 pages. Illustrated. Little, Brown and Company. $27.99.
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A-12 and SR-71 did a heckuva job for being built in the 1960s and was able to perform for a long time, thanks to those who maintained and flew it. Big technology jump for the times.
There are a few websites dedicated to digging out the wreckage in the desert. Here's one of them:
http://www.thexhunters.com/xpeditions/blackbirds….
The Soviets achieved a successful interception of the SR-71 using MiG-31s in the 1980s, and their SA-5 was cited by Ben Rich as a major threat to SR-71 operations in the '70s. Being fast doesn't mean you're invulnerable, and it's a lot easier to be stealthy when you're not emitting a huge amount of IR from afterburners and aerodynamic heating.
Like hell they did. Where do you get this bs? The SA-5 could have been a threat to the SR-71 if they had carpeted the Soviet Union with them and fired half of them every time it flew over. It is not just the speed, it is the speed combined with the unpredictability of the entry trajectory combined with the fact the velocity, direction, and speed can change dynamically. Satellites are easy to hit. If it was there yesterday, it will be there today, tomorrow, the next day. Hell even those Chicom MF'ers could hit a satellite. No one has ever taken down an SR-71. That's what killed the program. Lockheed makes lots of money upgrading the U-2. They didn't make squat upgrading the SR-71, therefore they made sure the cash cow continued in service.
The SR was also expensive as hell to maintain. A capability that in peacetime seems not worth funding.