Lockheed A-12

The, okay, strange that this guy's got this part-time job as a guard, but his regular job is at, working for Lockheed.

But then you know that, um, the CIA actually had a highly t- a highly secret A-12 Oxcart project, um, that they were developing as the U-2 spy plane's successor, and this was, the plane was being developed at Lockheed in the Burbank site while this gentleman worked there.

Okay.

Okay, so let's go back to, real quick, the U-2.

[laughs]

... uh, the CIA, um, was behind a, a report that came in, in Studies in Intelligence, that's their journal, written by a man named Gerald K. Haines, which was a study supposedly, allegedly s- a study, uh, I think it's very, very weak, of all the sightings of U-2 aircraft and the A-12 Oxcart, which is the SR-71 Blackbird, uh, in the '50s and '60s.

And what, what Haines argued is that most, he actually said m- the majority of these UFO sightings of that period were of those aircraft.

Such a specious, faulty argument.

The U2 program had used the code name Angel.

The successor got called Archangel.

Not a better angel.

Not Angel with improvements.

Convair wrote the better technical answer to the radar question.

Lockheed convinced the customer they would actually show up.

So at the end of August 1959, the Archangel line finally had a winner, and it had a shape, and it had an engine waiting in Connecticut for something to be bolted to.

What it did not have was proof.

But the response from the Skunk Works was to go even faster and higher.

The A-12 and its successor, the SR-71 Blackbird, first flown in 1964, remains to this day the fastest air-breathing aircraft ever built, Mach 3.2. At altitude, it was essentially untouchable.

By the time a surface-to-air missile could be fired and reach the SR-71's altitude, the aircraft was already miles downrange.

Meanwhile, on the commercial and transport side, Lockheed was also making significant moves in those decades.

While difficulties with the ejection seats led to all four chimpanzees used in the project dying, the partial results obtained indicated that supersonic ejection was indeed survivable.

As a result of these and other findings, crews of the Lockheed A-12, YF-12, and SR-71 Blackbird, designed to fly at speeds exceeding Mach 3, were fitted with conventional RQ-201 ejection seats, the crews themselves being protected from wind blast and frictional heating by the pressure suits.

The surprising effectiveness of this system was demonstrated on January the 25th, 1966, when SR-71 test pilot Bill Weaver and Jim Zwayer suffered an engine flame-out, causing the aircraft to spin out of control and break apart.

As Weaver later recalled, "I didn't think the chances of surviving an ejection at Mach 3.18 and 78,800 feet were very good.

The SR-71 then literally disintegrated around us.

From that point, I was just along for the ride." Miraculously, Weaver survived with only minor injuries, though Zwayer was killed instantly as the aircraft broke up.

That same year, on July the 30th, pilot Bill Parks and launch control engineer, or LCO, Ray Torick, were flying an M-21, a modified two-seat A-12 designed to launch the unmanned supersonic D-21 reconnaissance drone at a speed of Mach 3.25 and an altitude of 24,000 meters, or 80,000 feet.

The crew ignited the D-21's ramjet engine and released the drone.