Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed

by Ben R. Rich

The result stunned the blue-suiters, who thought it was impossible to successfully fire a missile from an airplane speeding at three times the speed of sound. Most air-to-air missiles traveled five, ten, fifteen miles to targets locked on at the same altitude or slightly below or above. We locked onto targets more than a hundred miles away and tens of thousands of feet below. From 80,000 feet, we knocked out drones flying on the deck at 1,500 feet. From 87,000 feet, we hit a drone flying at 40,000 feet. To keep the missile from hitting our own airplane, we added a trapeze device to the missile launch system and used ejection cartridges to drop the missile nose down before it fired and sped off to the target at Mach 6. Our first test of the new system occurred in March 1965. We hit a drone from 36 miles away at a closing rate of 2,000 mph. A few weeks later, we fired the missile from 75,000 feet, while traveling at Mach 3.2, and hit a drone flying at 40,000 feet, 38 miles away. But a few months later we really rocked the Air Force. From 75,000 feet, we hit a low-altitude remote-controlled B-47 flying over the Gulf of Mexico at 1,200 feet from 80 miles off.