Blank Spots on the Map Page 7

  Just to the south of Lancaster, the colossal hangars of Plant 42 and the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works tower above the horizon. The North American aircraft company built the rocket-powered X-15 and the supersonic XB-70 “Valkyrie” bomber here at Plant 42. The Skunk Works performed maintenance and upgrades on the glider-like U-2 spyplane and faster-than-a-speeding-bullet SR-71 in its hangars. Plant 42 is home to the advanced development research projects for aircraft like Northrop’s Global Hawk, Lockheed’s F-22, and Boeing’s venerable B-52. Variations and upgrades to those aircraft are tested just to the north at Edwards. Plant 42 is also home to numerous black aviation projects that fly at “remote locations” in Nevada.

  I felt out of place in the Lancaster ballroom, like I’d crashed a party I hadn’t been invited to. Stocky old-timers drinking Scotch on the rocks milled around, laughing and bragging to their erstwhile colleagues. These were the people who’d been at the heart of the flight test industry: the men who’d built the engines, designed the airframes, pumped the jet fuel, flown the planes, and occasionally “augured in” when something went wrong.

  As I sat down at my assigned table and waited for the ceremony to start, one of the old-timers came up and introduced himself. An enormous third-degree burn covered the side of his face. I remembered Chuck Yeager’s quip about the true hero among test pilots being the one who survives. The old-timer said he recognized my face but couldn’t place me. Caught off guard, I replied that my father used to treat SR-71 pilots up at Travis Air Force Base, but he’d have to have a pretty good memory to remember me from way back then. He nodded vaguely and strolled away.

  The evening commenced with an Air Force honor guard of young men and women in starched dress uniforms marching an American flag up to the stage while “The Star-Spangled Banner” blared through the house PA. I joined everyone in the ballroom standing at attention with my hand over my heart, remembering the ritual from my childhood, when military base movie theaters opened each film with a rendition of the national anthem.

  From the podium at the front of the ballroom, Lee Trlica, one of the Historical Foundation’s board members, whom I’d talked to on the phone, explained that three aircraft would be coming “out of the black and into the blue” that evening: a Lockheed stealth prototype from the late 1970s code-named HAVE BLUE, a Northrop stealth demonstrator from the early 1980s code-named TACIT BLUE, and a Boeing demonstrator from the late 1990s nicknamed Bird of Prey.

  HAVE BLUE was built in 1977 after engineers at Lockheed’s Skunk Works plant stumbled upon the idea of using angular, faceted shapes to create an aircraft virtually invisible to radar. With their new approach to “stealth” in hand, the Skunk Works entered a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) competition called “Project Harvey.” Named after the invisible rabbit from a 1950 movie starring James Stewart, the competition’s goal was to develop an aircraft with the lowest possible radar cross-section, a key element in modern-day stealth designs. After beating out Northrop for the prize, the Skunk Works went on to build two stealth demonstrators under the HAVE BLUE program. The two faceted aircraft verified the stealth concept in a series of flights beginning in December 1977. HAVE BLUE 1001, the first prototype, crashed on May 4, 1978, when the landing gear was damaged on a hard impact. Worried that the plane would skid off the Groom Lake runway, test pilot Bill Park took the aircraft back up into the air. When the landing gear failed to extend again, Park ejected and was knocked unconscious. When paramedics found him, his parachute had dragged him across the desert floor and filled his mouth with dirt. The test pilot’s heart was not beating. Paramedics were able to resuscitate him, but Park would never fly again. Lockheed buried the classified aircraft’s wreckage at Groom Lake.

  The HAVE BLUE program ended on July 11, 1979, when the second prototype, HAVE BLUE 1002, crashed near the Tonopah Test Range after a hydraulic line in the aircraft ruptured and set the engine on fire. Pilot Ken Dyson was able to parachute to safety. HAVE BLUE 1002 met the same fate as its older sibling: Its wreckage was buried at Groom Lake. The Flight Test Historical Foundation was now honoring Ken Dyson for his contribution to the program.

  The second plane on the agenda was a Northrop’s TACIT BLUE. Before its 1996 declassification, TACIT BLUE had been somewhat of an enigma among military aviation journalists, the subject of much “RUMINT” (a joke word meaning “rumor intelligence” that defense industry journalists sometimes use, recalling military designations for various types of intelligence: SIGINT, or “signals intelligence”; HUMINT, or “human intelligence”; PHOTINT, or “photo intelligence”; and so on). RUMINT long held that Northrop developed a plane called “Shamu” or “the Whale” during the 1980s, but the consistency of the intelligence ended there. Some stories described a supersized flying wing, while others told of a vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) plane. Still others held simply that the Whale was a “funny-looking” electronic warfare platform. Shamu left traces all over the flight test community: During the early 1980s, the offices of Northrop’s Advanced Projects Division were filled with images of whales. There were paintings of whales on lobby walls, drawings of whales on letterheads, and whale-adorned company logos stamped on Northrop’s office supplies. When the Air Force finally acknowledged the program more than a decade after its first flight, TACIT BLUE was revealed to be long and boxy, with short, stubby wings and a shovel-nosed chine around a uniformly white fuselage. If nothing else, the plane was certainly “funny-looking.” At the Gathering of Eagles, I learned that Dick Thomas first flew the Whale in 1982, and the plane was subsequently flown by pilots Ken Dyson, Dan Vanderhorst, Russ Easter, and Don Cornell on 135 sorties, before retiring in 1985.

  The last of the three black jets on the evening’s agenda was a technology demonstrator originally built by McDonnell Douglas’s Phantom Works, an advanced technology group modeled on Lockheed’s Skunk Works, and first flown in late 1996. Nicknamed Bird of Prey after a twenty-second-century Romulan starship from the TV series Star Trek, the short, tailless plane had a simple, angular shape, drooped wings, and a flat gray paint job. Phantom Works test pilot Rudy Haug first flew the aircraft in the fall of 1996. Over the course of the Bird of Prey’s testing regimen, Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas, absorbing the Phantom Works but continuing funding for the black aircraft. Between Rudy Haug and Joe Felock, both Boeing test pilots, and Air Force pilot Doug Benjamin, the plane flew thirty-eight missions between 1996 and its retirement in 1999. The aircraft was declassified on October 18, 2002.

  The most interesting aspects of the Gathering of Eagles weren’t the introductions or the acceptance speeches. Far more fascinating were subjects that the community carefully spoke around but didn’t directly address. The audience let out a collective harrumph when pilot Doug Benjamin mentioned that the Bird of Prey flew at a “remote location” and pilot Ken Dyson announced his desire to make some “uncleared” remarks about why the audience should support George Bush instead of John Kerry in the upcoming election. That remark, perhaps unintentionally, revealed that everything he said had been vetted by Air Force security officials. “Out of the Black . . .” was no exercise in free speech or government transparency.

  The evening continued with carefully scripted absences and silences. No one said the words “Groom Lake” even though it was where all of these aircraft proved themselves. Other remarks were so filled with roundabout language that the audiences’ knowing nods left me utterly confused. At times, listening to the talks was like hearing someone read from a heavily redacted document, filled with the blacking-out of information too sensitive to include.

  As it turned out, the most illuminating parts of the event were contained in something I could take home with me: the evening’s program notes. On the glossy pages—sandwiched between ads for Lockheed Martin, Northrop, and a handful of other defense contractors seeking to curry favor with flight test bigwigs—were the biographies of the pilots who flew the black jets. The section on Doug Benjamin (who had flown Bird of Prey for the
Air Force) explained that sometime during the mid-1990s, he “moved to the black world where he flew on and commanded a variety of classified programs” (emphasis added). This locution—Benjamin “moved to the black world”—echoed the evening’s tenor. Keith Beswick’s biography added to the intrigue: In 1978, Beswick “was promoted to Director of Flight Test at Lockheed and became responsible for the U-2, SR-71, F-117A, F-22, and several other classified programs” (emphasis added).

  And then there was Dan Vanderhorst, who “has been the lead pilot on seven classified aircraft to date” (emphasis added). In fact, according to his biography, “[Vanderhorst] has made his career in the cockpit of so many classified aircraft, there is not much that we can say about him, on the record,” and “his work has been outstanding and will probably never be recognized by the general public.” Although Vanderhorst was honored that evening, he wasn’t able to make it to his own party: He was “working at Edwards AFB on a classified program.”

  The silences, absences, and unsaid implications in these men’s biographies were like blank spots on maps. They were guides to the places where the public record ran out. The carefully constructed blank spots in Vanderhorst’s biography alone had remarkable implications. To build a single aircraft is a tremendous financial, industrial, and intellectual undertaking. Building an airplane means spending millions or billions of dollars with dedicated factories, test facilities, and countless workers from janitors to managers, pilots to machinists. Vanderhorst, one pilot, had flown seven. In the first instance, his biography spoke to the scale of the classified flight test industry. It pointed to a hidden geography of finance, research, development, engineering, manufacturing, and testing projects as complicated and industrialized as modern airplanes. Second, his biography spoke to the black world’s ability to keep a secret, about not only the physical but the social engineering that goes into building classified aircraft. There’s plenty of RUMINT about secret airplanes. The pages of magazines like Aviation Week & Space Technology and Popular Mechanics are filled with stories of vertical takeoff and landing transports for Special Operations forces, high-speed reconnaissance aircraft, and spaceplanes capable of putting classified satellites into low Earth orbits. But good evidence to corroborate these rumors is thin. Given the number of personnel and the amount of money involved in developing an aircraft, the fact that there aren’t more credible leaks, more inadvertently declassified histories or photos, or more disgruntled ex-officers willing to spill the secrets out into the open means that the secrecy enveloping Vanderhorst’s biography is a remarkable feat of social engineering. Finally, this pilot’s biography says something about the dynamics of secrecy: If Vanderhorst alone piloted seven classified, manned aircraft, and if the three previously classified aircraft at the Gathering of Eagles represent the sum of black aircraft that have made their way “into the blue” since the 1970s, then the declassified record represents an exception to the rule rather than the rule itself. HAVE BLUE, TACIT BLUE, and Bird of Prey are not unusual in that they were secret. They’re unusual because they are not secret anymore. Long after their retirement, most black airplanes stay black.

  After a dinner of hotel-cooked roast beef and mashed potatoes, I drove through Lancaster’s dark desert streets back to my cheap motel room along Highway 14, utterly confused by the fleeting glimpse into the world of classified flight tests that I’d just gotten. The “golden age of flight test” that had made Edwards Air Force Base a modern icon, I realized, never really ended. Instead, the whole thing went black. The modern-day Chuck Yeagers, whoever they were, would “never be recognized by the general public.” I wondered how many taxpayer-funded discoveries about aerospace engineering were realized in the black world, never to see the light of day. How many scientists spent their lives working out breakthroughs to cutting-edge engineering problems whose results would never appear in the peer-reviewed literature?

  Looking at the résumés from the program notes, I realized that there must be many others like them. If there were pilots flying classified aircraft, then there must be classified support crews, engineers, manufacturers, all of whose résumés might look like that of Dan Vanderhorst. I suspected that I might be able to find other biographies with equally telling blank spots and absences. It could be a new approach toward intelligence gathering: résumé intelligence, or RESUMINT.

  I explored military Web sites for keywords I knew to be associated with classified flight-test projects. Several assumptions helped with the search: First, I knew that an Air Force test pilot would probably have attended the Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base. Second, I imagined the pilots would have been assigned to a squadron known to be associated with black projects subsequent to completing their test pilot education. Squadrons such as the 6513th Flight Test Squadron (the “Red Hats,” who flew stolen Soviet aircraft), the 413th Flight Test Squadron (the 6513th’s descendant after an early 1990s reorganization), and the “Classified Flight Test Squadron” or the “Special Projects Flight Test Squadron” were all units that fit this assumption. Other phrases, like “data masked,” would signal information that had been redacted in an unclassified electronic document. Finally, the phrase “AFFTC, DET. 3” attached to any pilot’s biography would also be revealing, based on numerous indications that the black site at Groom Lake is the Third Detachment of the Air Force Flight Test Center (AFFTC).

  The search for résumés yielded far more than I had hoped. From these keyword searches I found many more pilots and more black aircraft. A local paper in Bird of Prey pilot Doug Benjamin’s hometown of La Crosse, Wisconsin, described a plaque on the pilot’s wall that he received upon his retirement from the Air Force in 2000. The plaque showed four aircraft covered in black sheets. His parents told a local journalist that Benjamin couldn’t talk about what he had done for the Air Force during the last five years of his military career. Assuming that one of the covered aircraft was the Bird of Prey, that means that between about 1994 and 2000, Benjamin flew three still-classified aircraft.

  My friend Peter Merlin, who works at Edwards Air Force Base right next to the secure North Base section, told me about a pilot named Frank T. Birk. In the 1960s, Birk was a “Raven”—a nominally civilian pilot who’d transferred from the Air Force to the CIA to fly secret missions over Laos during the Vietnam War. After the war, Birk attended test pilot school, becoming the Air Force’s most highly decorated pilot before retiring. Birk died in 1993 when a Ranger 2000 aircraft trainer he was testing crashed near Manching, Germany. According to Merlin, who attended Birk’s funeral, the pilot’s eulogy stated that he had made the first flight of a “classified technology demonstrator” in 1985 and had won the Bobby Bond Memorial Aviator Award for his work on that project.

  The biography of a man named Colonel Dennis F. Sager stated that he commanded a classified flight test squadron during the early to mid-1990s and that he shepherded a “classified prototype” called the YF-113G from development through first flight.

  Then I found the biography of Colonel Joseph A. Lanni, hosted on the Edwards Air Force Base Web site during Lanni’s tenure as the commander of the 412th Flight Test Wing. Lanni spent five years in the black world, from August 1992 through June 1997. He first flew for the 6513th Flight Test Squadron (the Red Hats), then the 413th Flight Test Squadron. From July 1995 until June 1997, Lanni commanded the “classified flight test squadron.” Lanni’s biography stated he flew “numerous classified prototypes,” including an unknown aircraft called the YF-24.

  As I built up a collection of pilot résumés and biographies, I realized I could use these scraps of information to concoct an analytic problem not unlike the word problems found on college entrance exams: “Dan Vanderhorst flew seven classified aircraft between 1980 and 2004. He did fly TACIT BLUE. He did not fly the Bird of Prey. Doug Benjamin flew four classified aircraft between 1994 and 2000. He did fly the Bird of Prey but was the only Air Force pilot to do so . . . ,” and so on.

  The information I had was,
of course, incomplete, but when I solved my word problem, something rather dramatic jumped out from the fragments: At minimum, the United States has researched, developed, and flown between seven and eleven manned aircraft between the 1980s and the present, all of which remain classified. In solving my problem, a few other pieces of information came out as a side effect: Sometime during the late 1980s or 1990s, the Air Force formed at least one unnumbered squadron dedicated entirely to classified flight testing, the Special Projects Flight Test Squadron. Another discovery was that at some point in the 1990s or early 2000s, the Air Force’s unacknowledged flight test infrastructure grew to the size of an entire wing—one of the largest unit sizes in the Air Force.

  Another curious discovery in these searches was that names of astronauts kept coming up. Three-time spaceflight veteran Donald R. McMonagle, for example, was the “operations officer of the 6513th Test Squadron at Edwards AFB” just prior to becoming an astronaut in 1987. Carl E. Walz, a four-time space shuttle veteran, “served as a Flight Test Manager at Detachment 3, Air Force Flight Test Center,” before joining NASA in 1990. Before becoming an astronaut in 1985, Colonel John N. Casper served as the “Operations Officer and later Commander of the 6513th Test Squadron . . . He was then assigned to Headquarters USAF at the Pentagon and was Deputy Chief of the Special Projects Office . . .” It made sense in a way. If astronauts were guys with the “right stuff,” and if the bulk of experimental flight testing went black in the 1970s and 1980s, then it made sense that a significant number of astronauts flew classified aircraft just before their selection to join NASA.

  RESUMINT was paying off. Searching specifically for redacted information in résumés was much like hunting for secret bases by looking for missing satellite photos. Searching for the phrase “data masked” brought up a list detailing the reassignments of senior Air Force officers. A man named Colonel Terry Tichenor was being transferred from Hanscom Air Force Base to become the commander of the operations group at a “data masked” location. Colonel Gregory Jaspers, a former stealth fighter pilot from the plane’s black days in Nevada, was moving out of his job as the commander of the data masked operations group, replacing Colonel Thomas Masiello as the commander of a data masked wing. Masiello was going on to become the inspector general at Air Force Materiel Command at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, the major Air Force command responsible for “management, research, acquisition, development, testing and maintenance of existing and future weapons systems and their components.” In official Air Force documents, the “data masked” phrase was associated with two types of units: classified flight-test outfits and off-the-books Special Forces units. Because these guys all had flight-test experience (and weren’t commandos), the evidence suggested they were some of the commanding officers of the Air Force’s black flight-test installations and programs.