Why Lockheed Machinists Almost Couldn't Build the Blackbird

At Lockheed's plant in Burbank, California, titanium wing panels for a secret spy plane started failing within 6 or 7 weeks. Panels made in the winter lasted indefinitely. The airplane was the A-12, the CIA's OXCART, built to fly at more than 3 times the speed of sound. The cause turned out to be something the shop used every day. This documentary follows the Skunk Works shop floor that built the A-12, the YF-12 and the SR-71 out of B-120VCA titanium, a metal the industry barely knew how to roll, cut or join. It covers: why Mach 3 heat ruled out aluminum, and why Kelly Johnson chose titanium over the stainless steel honeycomb of the B-70 Johnson's January 1960 "Titanium Handling" memo, with its security color code, segregated scrap and sign-off line the early titanium deliveries, some 80 percent of them rejected, and the 1961 visit that fixed the supply the first heat-treated parts that shattered when they fell off a desk, and the acid pickling line that was thrown out and rebuilt test coupons for every batch of 10 parts, at tens of thousands a month metal removal at 5 percent of aluminum's rate, Bob Vaughn's machining group, and the Air Force's 1963 machinability tests on B-120VCA a 1,000 pound billet cut down to a 66 pound fitting, and wing extrusions machined for 19 dollars a foot, then 11 drills that lasted 17 holes, and the titanium rivets nobody could find pure enough wire for the banned list, from cadmium-plated wrenches to Pentel pens to Burbank's summer tap water 13 million titanium parts traced back to the mill pour Then the airplane had to fly. The film follows the schedule slips, the J58 engine troubles Johnson called "desperate," the 100,000 dollar trailer that carried the first A-12 to the test site, fuel tanks that leaked from the first fill, foreign object damage that put the workers in coveralls without breast pockets, wiring that cooked in the heat, a camera window that took 3 years and 2 million dollars, and an airframe that grew 4 inches at cruise. It ends with President Lyndon Johnson crediting the "mastery of the metallurgy and fabrication of titanium metal," the 1970 American Society for Metals award, NASA's 16,430-lamp heating test on a YF-12, and the SR-71's record run from Los Angeles to Washington in 1 hour, 4 minutes and 20 seconds. Subscribe to Trade Archive for more stories about the machines, shops and people behind the trades: @tradearchive Sources Burrows, William E. "The Real X-Jet." Air & Space/Smithsonian, March 1, 1999. Butz, J. S., Jr. Air Force/Space Digest, April 1964. Carpenter, Buz. "SR-71 Fun Facts." Roadrunners Internationale. Haupt, Ulrich, and Robert H. Jones. Titanium in Aerospace Structures. Monterey, CA: Naval Postgraduate School, 1968. Johnson, C. L. "History of the OXCART Program." Lockheed Advanced Development Projects, June 1, 1968. CIA FOIA Electronic Reading Room. Johnson, C. L. "Titanium Handling." Memorandum, January 15, 1960. CIA FOIA Electronic Reading Room. Johnson, Clarence L. "Development of the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird." Prepared for Lockheed Horizons, July 1981. CIA FOIA Electronic Reading Room. Johnson, Lyndon B. "The President's News Conference," February 29, 1964. The American Presidency Project. Kleyla, Helen, et al. History of the Office of Special Activities From Inception to 1969. Central Intelligence Agency, Directorate of Science and Technology. Lockheed Martin. "Blackbird: The World's Fastest Plane." Lockheed Martin history feature. Lockheed Martin. "Kelly's 14 Rules." Lockheed Martin Skunk Works. McIninch, Thomas P. "The OXCART Story." Studies in Intelligence. CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence. Merlin, Peter W. "Design and Development of the Blackbird: Challenges and Lessons Learned." AIAA 2009-1522. 47th AIAA Aerospace Sciences Meeting, January 2009. Merlin, Peter W. Mach 3+: NASA/USAF YF-12 Flight Research, 1969–1979. NASA SP-2001-4525. Washington, DC: NASA, 2002. Metcut Research Associates. Machining of Refractory Materials. ASD-TDR-63-581. Cincinnati, July 1963. Robarge, David. Archangel: CIA's Supersonic A-12 Reconnaissance Aircraft. CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence. Schmidt, F. F., and R. A. Wood. Heat Treatment of Titanium and Titanium Alloys. NASA TM X-53445, 1966. Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. "Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird." Object record A19920072000. Tellep, Daniel M. "Clarence Leonard (Kelly) Johnson." In Memorial Tributes, vol. 6. Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1993. Zhang Zhu, et al. "Development of Beta Titanium Alloys." In Titanium '99: Science and Technology. Proceedings of the Ninth World Conference on Titanium, 1999.