55 Years Ago Today at Area 51: An Oxcart Flew

Say OXCART and most people think, “cart pulled by an ox.” A handful go with “the CIA’s A-12, a high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft capable of flying 2,210 miles per hour.” Both are correct. By the way, flying 2,210 mph: that’s ten football fields every second! We’ll get back to that in a minute (during which time the A-12 Oxcart could go 37 miles).

The need for such a swift strategic reconnaissance aircraft became apparent in 1960, when the state-of-the-art spy plane predecessor, the U-2, which flew 500 mph at 70,000 feet, was rendered a sitting duck by Russian radar and missiles. Project Oxcart proceeded at a rate as head-spinningly fast as the aircraft itself in the hands of the Skunk Works, Lockheed’s secretive advanced development division. On April 30, 1962, less than four years after the Soviet Union downed the U-2 piloted by Francis Gary Powers, the Oxcart was off the ground: A-12 serial number 60-6924 took off from the 8,000-foot runway at the CIA’s top secret facility at Groom Lake, Nevada (a.k.a. Area 51) with test pilot Louis Wellington (“Lou”) Schalk, Jr., in the cockpit.

Even more astonishing that the speed of development was the tech, often summed up at the time as “black magic.” Topping a long list of revolutionary components were monstrous Pratt & Whitney J58 jet engines and a design that drastically reduced radar signature, pioneering “stealth” technology. If Soviet missiles ever did manage to lock on to an A-12, it could simply outrun them. Said a sign over the entrance to the A-12 base in Kadena, Japan, “Though I Fly Through the Valley of Death I Shall Fear No Evil—For I am at 80,000 Feet and Climbing.”

The A-12 had a ceiling of 95,000 feet and, as noted, could reach 2,210 mph. At the time, as far as anyone without top secret clearance knew, the world’s fastest plane was the F-4 which hit 1,606 mph in November, 1961. The A-12’s Air Force successor, the SR-71 Blackbird, reached 2,193.2 miles per hour. In 1990, a Blackbird flew from L.A. to D.C. in 64 minutes.

Thirteen A-12 Oxcarts and thirty-two Blackbirds served in secrecy until 1998, never succumbing to enemy action in thousands of mission sorties whose contribution to national security can’t be overstated.

What replaced the Oxcarts and Blackbirds? Satellites, unmanned aerial vehicles (a.k.a. drones), and, perhaps, a new secret aircraft. 50 years before the Oxcart, the Model B—made by the Wright Brothers for the US Army—hit 45 mph. If aviation technology has continued at its Wrights-to-Oxcart pace, there’s something up there now doing 100,000 mph.

To learn more about the history of the Oxcart, check out Area 51 Special Projects site or the photo-intensive, habu.org. Or, better still, marvel at one in person.

Image: CIA/Roadrunners Internationale