How to Fly An Oxcart

 

On this day in 1962, at a non-existent location in the Mojave Desert of Nevada, Lockheed Chief Test Pilot Louis Schalk, Jr., was scheduled to take the first Oxcart for a high-speed taxi test on the specially constructed 8,000' runway. However, he had received secret instructions from designer Kelly Johnson to take the craft airborne. Schalk roared down the runway, lifted off and flew at about twenty feet for two miles. The super-secret aircraft---code name Article 121---was oscillating badly so he set it down straight ahead on the dry lake bed and disappeared into a cloud of dust. Johnson feared the worst but Schalk taxied back to the runway. The malfunction was fixed with no further complications on subsequent flights.

This was the actual first flight of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Top Secret A-12 reconnaissance aircraft. The official first flight would come several days later. Built by Lockheed’s “Skunk Works,” the new airplane wasn’t state of the art, it was well beyond state of the art. Thirteen A-12s were built for the CIA which evolved into the more widely known two-place SR-71A “Blackbird” reconnaissance aircraft.