CIA history of the A-12

[West Coast]

Interesting with some good photos.

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/a-12/Archangel-2ndEdition-2Feb12.pdf

it helps when I add the attachment.

[charliegolf]

Interesting with some good photos.

Secret Photos?

CG

[MPN11]

Stealth ... The Early Years.

[11Fan]

Clearly, a Need to Know project

[Airbubba]

Is this what you are talking about?

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/a-12/Archangel-2ndEdition-2Feb12.pdf

[Dan Winterland]

I love the fact that the titanium ore used to make the A12 and SR71 was clandestinely purchased from the Soviet Union.

[West Coast]

I love the fact that the titanium ore used to make the A12 and SR71 was clandestinely purchased from the Soviet Union.

Yes, some of the lesser known facts such as that are quite interesting. Also found it interesting that the water chlorination in Burbank came into play when dealing with titanium manufacturing.

[West Coast]

Is this what you are talking about?

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/a-12/Archangel-2ndEdition-2Feb12.pdf

Yes sir, that’s the one.

[LTCTerry]

Back in the late 70s my dad was responsible for U-2 and SR-71 flights looking at the Warsaw Pact nations. Shortly after Y2K I bought a book for him for Christmas about U-2 and SR-71 operations in Europe. His eyes got huge when he saw it. "These pictures are classified." A different era for sure.

[treadigraph]

Thanks West Coast, have saved that for a leisurely perusal; the Kelly Johnson and Ben Rich biographies are also well worth a read.

I'd never heard of Tagboard and the D-21 until I saw the example on display with an A-12 and SR-71 at the Palmdale Blackbird Air Park 20 years ago...

[megan]

From https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20090007797.pdfTitanium alloys presented numerous challenges because of adverse chemical reactions between the metal and various materials and compounds commonly used in aircraft construction and maintenance. To prevent corrosion and stress-corrosion cracking at high temperatures, it was imperative that titanium parts be prevented from contacting such materials as cadmium, mercury, fluorine, chlorine, bromine, astatine, and iodine. Certain common hand tools were cadmium-plated and some marking materials (pens and pencils) contained chemicals that caused corrosion. Contaminating elements also could be found in the composition of solvents, adhesive tapes, paints, packing materials, plastics, fire extinguishing agents, cleaning agents, and other materials commonly used in aircraft maintenance. Technicians and maintenance personnel were required to be vigilant, and use only compatible materials from approved lists.

[fallmonk]

Small video came online about it just yesterday,
people might find interesting...

https://youtu.be/ota57uxa-wo

[Stu666]

Never ceases to amaze me how they spent all that money researching and developing these fantastic aircraft, only to mothball them a few years later. And then they languished in a hangar, virtually untouched for the next 20-odd years. Surely the US could've got more use out of them? I understand it was political and due to internal rivalries, but even so, what a monumental waste of technology and taxpayer money. No wonder they kept them secret for so long.

[sandiego89]

Never ceases to amaze me how they spent all that money researching and developing these fantastic aircraft, only to mothball them a few years later. And then they languished in a hangar, virtually untouched for the next 20-odd years. Surely the US could've got more use out of them? I understand it was political and due to internal rivalries, but even so, what a monumental waste of technology and taxpayer money. No wonder they kept them secret for so long.

A shame. Agree that they should have been put into USAF service.

An often overlooked part is the dedicated KC-135 refuelers for the special fuel. A truly massive enterprise to support SR-71 and A-12 operations.

[Duchess_Driver]

Brian Shul: Sled Driver, Flying the worlds fastest jet.

excellent read, available as a pdf on t’internet.

[West Coast]

Never ceases to amaze me how they spent all that money researching and developing these fantastic aircraft, only to mothball them a few years later. And then they languished in a hangar, virtually untouched for the next 20-odd years. Surely the US could've got more use out of them? I understand it was political and due to internal rivalries, but even so, what a monumental waste of technology and taxpayer money. No wonder they kept them secret for so long.

Unfortunately not something unique to just the A-12. The USN had a research sub nearly sink in 2002. They spent 3 years and many millions to fix, upgrade and then conduct sea trials on it only to retire it to a museum in 2006.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Dolphin_(AGSS-555)

[gums]

Salute!

How come I haven't seen a ref to

Home Page - Roadrunners Internationale Declassified U-2 A-12 Projects Aquatone OXCART Area 51 (http://roadrunnersinternationale.com/)

Lottsa first person war stories and good pictures and........

Gums sends...

[fallmonk]

Brian Shul: Sled Driver, Flying the worlds fastest jet.

excellent read, available as a pdf on t’internet.

Also he has a online video of one of his talks on you tube , very interesting lasts about a 1hr
'From butterflies to Blackbirds"
I know from previous posts on here not all the SR71 community are his biggest fans, but he's came thru a lot in his life to be a blackbird pilot. Despite being told many times he would never fly, never mind fly such a technical aircraft as the SR71!

[gums]

Salute!

Good point FALL I know Brian personally 'cause I was one of his instructors at a USAF charm school and also a fellow Green Demon member - first operational A-10 and also A-7D unit.

He grew a bit more "flavorful" since I worked with him in the late 70's, but his crash survival "lessons" are valid and should be promulgated. He has gone thru more surgery than any human being you know, and he gave me his first book "26 Operations".

I was very surprised he got the SR-71 assignment, but his story or two from then are good ones.

The You Tube video is a good one, but I have lost the link I had during last "clean up". Should not be hard to find once on a You Tube video.
=========================
As with many here, I was surprised the government stored the A-12's and not have USAF "borrow" them.

Nevertheless, the SR did great work for a coupla decades while the satellite folks were still refining their equipment. Remember! We ( USAF and the Company) did not have the cosmic digital cameras and then the increasing resolution and digital downloads and then......... Original satellite stuff was actual film and ejected canisters that came down near Hawaii and captured mid-air by C-119 planes.

Gums sends...

[Asturias56]

I seem to remember when they were building the 747 Boeing wanted to use titanium in the undercarriage but there were serious issues about how to machine it. They set up, and got permission for, a very long dinner in Paris with people from Tupelov, who had been machining the stuff for years. In return for "guidance" on titanium Boeing gave "guidance" on the tricks of hanging engines off the front of the wing. Apparently both sides were satisfied bu tthe Russians walked off with the table cloth which was covered with sketches .......

[GlobalNav]

“For such a state-of-the-art aircraft, the instrumentation was surprisingly old-fashioned, in keeping with Johnson’s preference for tried-and- true systems..”

Amazing statement about Kelly Johnson’s engineering perspective. Practically everything about the airplane was decidedly not old-fashioned. Every innovation had a form-fit-function purpose and where old-fashioned was sufficient, that was used.

Certainly the “drivers” demonstrated courage and competence when operating this amazing aircraft, especially early on. But consider the engineering courage it took, by many people, and the incomparable leadership and vision displayed by Kelly Johnson to guide it through the immense development challenges.

[Airbubba]

From our earlier discussions here about Brian Shul:

Brian Shul and Rich Graham famously do not get along decades later. Graham tells of an incident where Shul was less than candid about his whereabouts when reports came in of an SR doing a unauthorized buzz job in burner for a photo shoot. Months later Shul supposedly was in a deployment bar bragging about how he got away with one and word got back to Colonel Graham. Mission voice recorder tapes from the archive were pulled and Shul and backseater Walter Watson kept their wings but never flew the SR again.

A former colleague who flew the SR-71 claims that Shul is persona non grata among the Blackbird alumni after someone told the Air Force Office of Special Investigations about security risks due to illicit affairs between crewmembers and locals in Mildenhall and Kadena. With the TS/SCI clearance significant contact with foreign nationals is a mandatory report. My former colleague feels that Shul was the source of the tip that initiated the OSI investigation.

Whatever the case, Brian Shul has kissed the Blarney Stone and is a terrific speaker.


Colonel Graham tells the story of a crew's removal for cause from the 'program' in one of his books (see below) but doesn't give names.

Here's an anecdotal account of the incident from another forum:

I had a most interesting conversation with Col. Rich Graham, former SR-71 pilot, 1st SRS squadron commander and 9th SRW commander while I was at the Oshkosh EAA Airventure today [posted in 2013 - Airbubba]. Recently in an Air Force Association Magazine letters to the editor section there were a few letters including one from General Patrick Halloran about Brian Shul, basically saying he was the only SR-71 pilot removed for cause and that he should not be regarded as any kind of hero Blackbird pilot. Nothing was said about what actually happened.

I asked Col Graham if he could tell me what that was all about, and he was happy to do so. It seems one evening the command post at Beale received several phone calls from people living in nearby Marysville saying a plane had crashed. There were only two jets airborne from Beale at the time, a KC-135 and an SR-71 flown by Shul. Both were contacted and reported no problems. When the SR landed, Col Graham, who was Squadron CC at the time, and another high-up from the wing were there to meet him. Shul and Walter Watson, Shul's RSO, told a believable story explaining what had happened and nothing else was said.

Months later Shul was in England and one evening at the Officer's Club was bragging about lying to the command staff and getting away with it. Word got back to Beale and Col Graham had the mission tapes pulled out of storage. He said that he, the Deputy Wing Commander and Wing Commander listened to the cockpit voice recording and heard Shul and Watson in the cockpit concocting what story they were going to tell. What really happened was that Brian Shul was starting his photography business and wanted photos of an inflight SR-71 lighting off the afterburners at night. He had a friend over at his house, and Brian made several low passes over his house lighting off the burners for the friend to get the photos. The noise is what made the citizens think there was a plane crash. Col Graham said while Watson went along with the story, it was Shul who was behind it. Col. Graham and the wing deputy commander wanted Shul permanently grounded, but the Wing Commander decided to cut him a break, so while removing him from the SR-71 he allowed Shul to continue flying the T-38.

Col Graham also said Shul was breaking regulations by taking a camera into the SR-71 and later T-38 cockpits, but the command staff was unaware he'd been doing that until Shul published his books after leaving the USAF, because everyone who witnessed it figured Shul had permission and so they never reported it. Shul most assuredly did not have permission! Col Graham told me that had he been aware, Shul would have been fired from the program immediately. And they were also unaware of the other things Brian Shul later wrote about, such as flying Mach 3.5 over Libya (Col Graham doubts that number but concedes it might be possible) and nearly stalling the SR-71 while flying an unauthorized fly-by at a small airport in England. Col Graham said had any of those things been brought to his attention Shul would have been immediately fired. Because of all these things Brian Shul is persona non grata to the Blackbird community.

Col Graham stressed that the SR-71 was considered a national treasure and that they all knew any pilot hot-dogging in the airplane could bring major embarrassment to the program, the Air Force and the Nation. Evidently most all of the other Blackbird pilots consider Shul a pariah and want nothing to do with him as well.
Brian Shul and the SR-71 - General Discussion - ARC Discussion Forums (http://www.arcforums.com/forums/air/index.php?/topic/267042-brian-shul-and-the-sr-71/)

Col. Graham's SR-71 Revealed: The Inside Story (1996) has a similar account of the incident on pages 189-190 with word of the exploit filtering back from Kadena instead of Mildenhall. Col. Graham was 9th SRW Vice Wing Commander in the book version.



Brian Shul's story about getting slow on a cadet flyover is highlighted in this Tyler Rogoway article:

https://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/the-sr-71-blackbirds-most-spectacular-flyover-was-also-1719654907

[gums]

Salute,

Maybe the only pPrune dude here that Brian would recognize on a dark stormy night trying to get into the pub.......

I cannot vouch for all the war stories and such associated to Brian, and I do not think all of them originated with him.

The fellow was a no kidding survival case due to his extreme physical condition. That allowed him to get back into flying status when 99% of mortals would have either died or given up.

So say what you will, and believe what you will.

I have flown with more combat heroes that have ever posted here, as they are very few.

I do not view Brian as a great war hero.

I view him as a great survival lesson. Very good physical condition, good choice of underwear in a burning wreckage, etc. He trashed the nomex stuff. Told me that after running down the wing and finding a tree that he thot he was home free. Then the nomex stuff burned the hell,outta him. His hands clearly showed where the old leather portions of the glove were versus the nomex. The nomex does not burn but it gets hot and stays hot. Wool and cotton do not do that.

Please let Brian go in peace and direct poo mouth to somebody else.

Gums sends...

[hec7or]

There was a drawing made of a “UFO” spotted after landing in Rendlesham Forest UK just off the RWY at RAF Woodbridge in December 1980 by a witness who saw an object looking very much like the D12. How it got there, who knows, but they were carried as D21Bs on an underwing pylon on the B52H.

[Airbubba]

A classic online saga from two decades ago about some A-12 archeology by Tom Mahood.

'The Hunt for 928':

https://www.otherhand.org/home-page/area-51-and-other-strange-places/bluefire-main/bluefire/the-hunt-for-928/the-start-of-stupidity/

[Airbubba]

I cannot vouch for all the war stories and such associated to Brian, and I do not think all of them originated with him.

Yep, like I said. :ok:

Whatever the case, Brian Shul has kissed the Blarney Stone and is a terrific speaker.