Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed

by Ben R. Rich

Ben, take a look at that,” he said, pointing to a deep dent near the crown. As Bill described it, he was cruising at sixty-five thousand feet on a clear, crisp morning above New Mexico, when suddenly, with his airplane blistering at 2.7 Mach, he was deafened by a loud bang and violently flung forward in his harness, smashing his head against the cockpit glass and almost knocked unconscious. “It felt like a couple of the L.A. Rams shaking me as hard as they could,” Bill said. The problem was called an “unstart.” It occurred when air entering one of the two engines was impeded by the angle of the airplane’s pitch or yaw and in only milliseconds decreased its efficiency from 80 percent to 20 percent. The movable-spike inlet control could correct the problem in about ten seconds, but meanwhile the pilot was flung around helplessly, battered all over the cockpit. Bill Park and Lou Schalk and several of our other pilots were experiencing these awful “unstarts” as much as twenty times in ten minutes. The damndest part was that the pilot often couldn’t tell which engine was affected and sometimes he turned off the wrong one to get a relight and was left with no power at all. This happened to a Blackbird over West Virginia. The pilot struggled to relight both engines as the airplane plunged toward earth. Finally at thirty thousand feet, the two engines came alive with a tremendous sonic boom that shattered windows for miles and toppled a factory’s tall chimney, crushing two workers...