“In a matter of seconds, all hell broke out.” The words of Ken Collins are the description of the situation when his one-seat A-12 Oxcart, designed to fly in controlled flight at high velocity and altitude, was turned into an instrument-liar in solid cloud.
Collins was one of a few, highly vetted cadres recruited out of the Air Force into a program in the CIA whose presence remained secret over decades. Even the plane was the Skunk Works solution to a new issue: the previous U-2 could only travel approximately to 80,000 feet, but it could still be followed. The A-12 was designed to escape danger by flying at the border of the atmosphere, and eventually proved capable of speeds of over 2,000 mph and altitudes of over 70,000 feet during tests. It also required a type of discipline in its cockpit: pilots able to walk without outside points of reference, and able to make decisions that could not be undone within seconds when systems went off.
This choice was reached on May 24, 1963, a subsonic engine test flight in the tail number 926, of an A-12. When Collins tested an inertial navigation system by flying over heavy cumulus clouds at 30,000 feet and above, his cockpit started giving him the illusion that things were “normal” and it was not what the plane was actually doing. He remembered that with no perceivable alteration of plane or speed of the aircraft, the altimeter was unwinding a good deal, which meant that it was losing altitude at a great rate. The airspeed pointer was also winding off indicating a rapid decrease in airspeed. No horizon, and instruments incompatible, in cloud, the Oxcart pitched up and stalled, and dropped into a flat inverted spin, one of the most intolerable situations an aircraft can find itself in since control surfaces may lose power and recovery margins disappear rapidly. The combination that Collins identified to be the most significant in flight test risk is unrecoverable attitude and unpredictable altitude.
He ejected inverted. I turned on my helmet visor, and picked the ejection D-ring, between my legs… and pulled the D-ring, Collins said. The ejection seat rocket produced a downward (recall I was inverted) and out of the plane shot. When the A-12 turned away he could see a column of black smoke above a hill and below him was a hilly rough desert country sprinkled with sage and rock. He landed, and pulled his parachute, and started picking up the scrap pieces of the checklist that had been ejected along with it pieces of paper, bits of a program designed to leave the bare minimum of a footprint.
The parachute landing did not signify the end of secrecy. A pickup arrived, with civilians who already had his canopy recovered, Collins made them avoid the wreckage by telling them it was an F-105 carrying a nuclear weapon in its cargo. The unofficial cover-up matched the official one and the accident was publicly credited to a Republic F-105, and even after the Oxcar program had grown behind closed fences, some records still continued to show that shorthand.
The mishap engineering lesson was not romantic. It was precise and able to be fixed. The cause of the loss was eventually identified as a failure of Pitot-static system related to icing that contaminated the air data supplied to the cockpit and led to the inescapable departure. Collins went so far as to be questioned by sodium pentothal to have details reconstructed with as little loss as possible a strikingly unusual testimony to the way in which a black program safeguarded not only their technical investment but also their secrecy.
The later record of the A-12 was evidence of how keen the edge had been. Five out of 13 A-12s constructed were lost, a figure very indicative of the performance tradeoff involved in making the Oxcart speedy, altitude-wise and with low observability. However, the aircraft also demonstrated the worth of that commerce in actual reconnaissance efforts, flying at approximately 90,000 feet and at a speed approaching Mach 3 were used in CIA missions that supplied decision-making with images that several other systems could not offer at that point. The lineage to the SR-71 was also direct, although the most infamous shape of the Oxcart was a cockpit issue: in high altitude, the information is lost, and the only way a pilot could use the malfunction successfully is to be quicker than the plane itself to realize it.
