Sr 71 Drone - Flying over the SR-71 Blackbird, meet the secretive US spy plane that nobody knew about until it was destroyed.
On Monday, Lockheed Martin, the chief defense officer of the United States, posted on twitter a photo of a mysterious plane behind an A-12 high-flying aircraft.
Sr 71 Drone
High speed packing! The ramjet-powered D-21 was a test vehicle intended to be launched on specially equipped A-12s, which is why it rides on top of the Blackbird shown here. pic.twitter.com/EFcozWjnqr — Lockheed Martin (@LockheedMartin) June 27, 2022
Years Ago, The Lockheed D 21 Drone Made Supersonic History
Called the Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) at the time, its development history was one of difficulty that eventually led to its abandonment until it was found in a hangar nearly ten years later.
Powered by a ramjet, it was intended to conduct rapid strategic reconnaissance over Russia and China during the Cold War in the 1960s.
The Lockheed D-21 was an advanced RPA developed by Lockheed' Skunk Works in the 1960s in collaboration with the US Air Force and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Based on the fast technology of the A-12/YF-12/SR-71 'Blackbird' family, the need for such an aircraft arose when the U-2 spy plane piloted by Gary Powers was shot down. then the Soviet Union, revealing the increasing vulnerability of aviation.
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38 D-21s were built between 1964 and 1967 after development began in October 1962, when the CIA and the United States Air Force (USAF) ordered Lockheed to study the concept of a fast, high-altitude aircraft. a lot.
It would fly at Mach 3.3-3.5, operate at an altitude of 87,000-95,000 feet and a range of 3,000 nautical miles.
The ramjet-powered D-21 was a test vehicle intended to be launched on specially equipped A-12s, which is why it rides on top of the Blackbird shown here. | Lockheed Martin
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It was a stop-gap plan to continue strategic testing until the SR-71 became operational. The D-21 required a mother engine to launch because of its ramjet engine, which required air launch at a certain speed to operate. Initially, Lockheed testers used the M-21 (a variant of the Lockheed A-12) to launch the D-21 drone.
The plan was to launch a D-21 behind an M-21 where a high-resolution camera would open and click pictures while flying in enemy airspace.
The D-21 would then enter global space and release its camera module via parachute, which would then be picked up in the air by a specially equipped transport plane. The drone then self-destructed - preventing it from falling into enemy hands and because it was impossible to land on it.
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Sr 71 Blackbird / A 12 With Gtd 21 Drone
On the fourth flight test, the D-21 experienced an "asymmetric launch" as it passed the bow of the M-21, causing the mothership to stall and collide with the D-21 at Mach 3.25.
Pilots Bill Park and Ray Torick exited the M-21 and landed in the Pacific Ocean. But Torick's flight suit filled with water while at sea, where he drowned. According to other reports, he opened his helmet visor, which allowed water to enter.
After the accident, the M-21 launch program was canceled. But a camp of Air Force officials and engineers believe that instead of launching the plane "from above," it could be launched "from below."
They felt that the D-21 still had value as a potentially successful high-speed aircraft. That's when the B-52 Stratofortress entered the picture.
Lockheed A 12 (m 21/sr 71 Blackbird) With D 21 Drone
It was decided to launch the drone on the wing of the B-52H, making the program even more secretive, now called "Tagboard", while the new code name for the D-21 project was "Senior Bowl".
There have been a few failed launches. But the testers tasted success on June 16, 1968, when the plane took off from the wingtip and flew 3,000 miles at 90,000 feet. It happened after the rocket booster was installed under the D-21 because the big bomb could not develop enough speed to activate the ramjet of the RPA.
After a few more flights, the CIA and the Air Force decided to carry out four operations, all of which were also partial successes, the ultimate goal of retrieving the images never being achieved.
Photographs were not obtained of the D-21's hatch in two successful flights. On the third flight, a D-21 was lost in a heavily defended area, and another D-21 was lost after launch.
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The D-21 program was finally canceled on 15 July 1971, and both B-52s used in the program were returned to their active Air Force units.
It came after a historic coup between the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1971 when President Richard Nixon visited Beijing. China broke with its friend the Soviet Union and normalized relations with the United States.
The need to manage this rapid intelligence system was gone. This period marked the decline of the Soviet Union, which collapsed 20 years later in 1991.
Such plans are unthinkable today, when the direct entry of a military aircraft into the territory of Russia or China could lead to an endless war.
Lockheed A 12
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NATO uses Rafale fighter jets to repel Russian warplanes; The Air Force does 60 launches a month! In the late 1960s and early 70s, American intelligence agencies were eager to access the Lop Nor desert, home to China's growing nuclear and missile programs.
So the CIA began a plan to build an unmanned version of America's iconic spy plane—one that could reach deep into the heart of Chinese territory to find nuclear secrets at high speed and with minimal risk to human pilots.
Lockheed D 21 Egg Drone
Obtaining information about the Soviet Union and China's military power was no easy task at the beginning of the Cold War. Both were closed communities with air defenses that posed a serious threat to any aircraft crossing their airspace.
But the pressure to bring in intelligence at a time when growing tensions with America's communist rivals could easily lead to war led the intelligence community to develop a range of intelligence programs in the 1950s and 1960s that could gather intelligence in restricted areas.
In the late 1950s, the CIA had started one of these programs. The A-12 Oxcart is a lesser-known predecessor of its more famous Air Force cousin, the SR-71 Blackbird. With a very powerful jet engine and a maximum altitude of 95,000 feet, the A-12 will hopefully not penetrate enemy air defenses.
But as a partner in the Oxcart program, the CIA also commissioned a high-powered aircraft from Lockheed Martin in 1962 in a program called the Tagboard.
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Enter D-21. The drone looked like a wing clipped to the fuselage of an A-12, and was supposed to function more or less like a stripped-down, unmanned version of its cousin.
Lockheed converted two A-12s, redesignated M-21s, into mothers, added a second seat for the launch director, and modified the aircraft to carry the drone on its back to the launch site.
Above - a D-21 attached to an M-21 mother ship. Air Force Photo Above - A retired D-21 sits on the runway. Photo by National Museum of the United States Air Force
For the D-21 to begin its mission, the M-21 will need to accelerate to Mach-3.3, at which point the drone's engine will kick in and the aircraft will separate.
Sr 71a Blackbird W/d 21b Drone Hasegawa 02041
The Marquardt XRJ43-MA20S-4 ramjet-powered drone, which flies as high as 95,000 feet and has a low radar cross section, is thought to be free-flying as it flies a pre-planned path over its target and takes pictures.
Restoring these images — old-school films from the days before digital photography — can be tricky. The D-21 was to release its camera and film by parachute, which would be held by a modified C-130 transporter. The rest of the drone later self-destructed after ejecting the payload.
But right after testing the Tagboard Drone, the program suffered a terrible disaster. During a test flight on July 30, 1966, the D-21 drone flying above the M-21 and number 135 lost power in its engine, causing it to crash into the ship.
The Tagboard program thus switched to the B-52H as a delivery vehicle for advanced drones. The change in the aircraft for its launch meant that the engineers had to modify the remaining 15 D-21 drones - and a lot of news - to fit the new mothership and give them rocket boosters to reach Mach 3.3, when their ramjet engines kick in.
Sr 71 Blackbird
The B-52H meeting was a success. Now Washington had to decide where to use drones.
Some observers doubted that posting Tagboard to secure locations was not as dangerous as it sounds. Albert Wheelon, Deputy Director of the CIA
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