April 1986
Hey, Ridley, ya got any Beeman's? Loan me some, will you - I'll pay you back later.
There was a distinct "Right stuff" vibe in the air. Dick Scobee and his passenger walked toward a sleek jet sitting on the tarmac. At first glance the silhouette was unmistakable...
"Is that a F-104 Starfighter ?" the passenger asked
"No it isn't. It is a F-120 Starflyer. Mostly identical, with serious improvements."
"And with a refueling probe."
"Well, that's the point of the entire program. We tested space plane refueling with the subscale shuttles, but we soon found plain old jet fighter could do a better job."
Soon the two F-120s were airborne, climbing fast.
"Three...
...two...
...one..."
Both pilots pushed the rocket throttle forward and the two F-120s climbed in close formation, far above 100 000 ft. As the sky turned dark, the two aircrafts literally entered space. As they arced in a ballistic parabola, Scobee used its RCS thrusters to fall behind his wingman, John Blaha. He was now some feet below the twin tail pipes, one rocket, one J-79. He could see his Blaha Starflyer belly, with the conformal refueling pack. Meanwhile Scobee passenger flicked a switch, and a refueling probe sprouted out of their aircraft nose. Slightly above their head, a drogue floated out of the pack. Acting on the RCS, Scobee catched the hose and stuck the probe on it.
"John, ready for propellant transfer"
"Roger"
Scobee felt a slight vibration as gallons of hydrogen peroxide flowed from one aircraft to each other. The two pilots struggled to remain in close formation for a minute or more. There was no question the manoeuver was a delicate ballet, happening during a zero G parabola far above 100 000 ft. Scobee was no longer worried, however. Over the last months they had gradually extended the refueling envelope in time and altitude, taking more and more peroxide. If all went well, soon they would make the big jump – flying well above 150 000 ft thanks to a high-altitude refueling. Scobee disengaged the probe and re-entered the atmosphere. How far along were they in mastering that daring technique. Scobee had started many years before with the subscale shuttles, then moved to the F-120s. Early flight tests had involved F-120s trailing KC-135s in zero G parabolas from 33 000 ft. Then F-120 had been given "buddy packs" and started propellant transfers between them – first, kerosene, then, hydrogen peroxide. They had flow higher and higher. They had learned how to fly synchronized ballistic parabolas and get closer and closer.
On the evening Blaha and Scobee relaxed around some beers, with their passengers.
"That was one hell of a flight" Blaha said "Reminds me of The Right Stuff finale, when Yeager crashes the F-104. That rocket powered Starfighter is one hell of a business."
"You know," Scobee said "Kaufman got a lot of flak for the way he portrayed Gus Grissom as an emotional wreck unable to get his hands out of the fucking Mercury hatch. But you have to realize their original script had Yeager late life equally bad - and entirely wrong. The original script painted him as a frustrated, failed astronaut that pushed his F-104 too high and crashes as a result. Yeager however didn't jumped into an ordinary F-104 just like that.
First, it was not the usual Starfighter but a NF-104A, this sleek bird's father. That peculiar F-104 had a rocket booster in the tail, and it was used as a poor's man, cheap alternative to the X-15 to train military astronauts. And Yeager was involved in that training program at Edwards AFB.
Yeager crashed one NF-104A in December 1963 but the other two flew as late as December 1971.
"I actually flew it in 1971" Blaha said.
"And then, as the last NF-104As were grounded, the space shuttle was cancelled eight months after Boeing Supersonic Transport. The twin cancellations pissed off Nixon, who needed California aerospace workers votes for the coming 1972 Presidential election. So Tricky Dick requested the National Academies aerospace committees to get a thorough review of every single high-speed aircraft program in the United States.
The National Academies did a good job and their extensive reports got Nixon funding three major programs: the X-27 family of sub-scale space shuttles, the 2707-300 prototypes and demonstrators build with Japan – and the F-120. That is, Lockheed's revamped NF-104A.
In 1972 Lockheed managed to get funding for three XF-120 birds to train NASA and Air Force pilots and future astronauts. Then - you know Lockheed and their Skunk Works – nothing can stop them. So they imagined first, the F-120A, the ultimate Starfighter. I think they did not went very far with this project"Scobee concluded.
"Or maybe it turned black" Blaha said. "I can't tell you more, it is still classified. Let's say that the F-120 MIPCC engine is related to another J-79 bird, the Phantom. The ultimate Phantom" Blaha joked.
...
PUNCH A HOLE IN THE SKY
An oral history of The Right Stuff
By: Alex French and Howie Khan.
Before writer-director Philip Kaufman brought Tom Wolfe's book The Right Stuff to the big screen in 1983, onscreen astronauts were little more than alien quarry or asteroid bait. In Kaufman's hands, however, spaceflight became a far more human pursuit—a story not of external threats but inner resolve. With its three-hour-plus run time and unconventional structure, the film—which tells the story of test pilots like Chuck Yeager and Gordon Cooper as they break the sound barrier and launch toward the exosphere—was almost as daring as its subject. (Kaufman calls it “the longest movie ever made without a plot.”)
But it introduced an entire cinematic genre, what Quentin Tarantino has called the “hip epic,” inspiring everyone from Michael Bay to James Cameron, who hired its cinematographer for Titanic. Its dialog has become a go-to signifier of human accomplishment; director Rian Johnson celebrated landing his Star Wars gig by tweeting a clip from the movie. “Phil really pulled it off,” George Lucas says. None other than Christopher Nolan has called it “an almost perfect movie.”
...
DAN WINTERS In 1979, Hollywood producers Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff (Rocky, Raging Bull) paid $350,000 to purchase the film rights to The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe's runaway best seller about the space race. I was in New York and called Tom Wolfe and said I wanted to meet. And he said, “Come on over to the house for breakfast.” At 8:30 in the morning Tom was dressed in his whites. We were eating grapefruits. He managed to get the slices out without soiling himself. And I said, “Tom, we think we’re going to change the ending a little bit. Yours felt a little bit rushed.” I couldn’t have said that to any writer but I could to him, because we had this long relationship. He said, “Well, after working on the book for years, my wife said to me that if I didn’t finish the book in a month she was going to divorce me.”
WOLFE: The Right Stuff was going to be a book that went from the Mercury program in the early ’60s to the Apollo space mission in 1975. I had just finished the Mercury section and I was starting on Gemini, and my wife came in and said, “I’ve got great news for you.” I said, “What news?” She said, “You finished the book!” I had to write three books to finance this reporting stint.
Meanwhile James Michener was writting his very own Right Stuff book, except it was a fiction, a novel. Unlike me, Michener covered Gemini and Apollo, so maybe his wife was more relaxed than mine. Michener later sold his novel not to Hollywood, but to a TV channel, and they made a great serie about it.
Michener once told me the novel original ending had Apollo astronauts fried by a solar flare on the surface. Then in 1974 the Soviets made a stunning, 180 degree turn and disclosed their very own Apollo, sending a spaceship to the Moon, albeit with nobody on board. The next year one of their Soyuz linked with an Apollo, and Michener changed its novel ending. He got his astronauts rescued by Soviet unmanned landers and rovers, followed by NASA and Soviet cosmonauts exploring the Moon together.
IRWIN WINKLER (PRODUCER): There was a competition with Universal to buy Tom Wolfe's book. They wanted it for John Belushi as a comedy.
ROBERT CHARTOFF (PRODUCER): Like the Airplane ! series. Can you believe that ?
WINKLER: We wanted to make a serious film. Kaufman wanted his audience to feel the adrenaline rush that early test pilots experienced as they chased the sound barrier, as well as the violence inherent in breaking free from, and reentering, Earth's atmosphere.
CHARTOFF: We bought the book for $350,000, which was a lot at the time.
WINKLER: We hired Bill Goldman to write the screenplay.
CHARTOFF: Probably the hottest writer in Hollywood.
WINKLER: But Bill's script didn't include the Chuck Yeager character, the epitome of “the right stuff.” So we started looking for other writers.
GEORGE LUCAS: I was born and raised in the Bay Area, so when I got out of film school at USC I wanted to come back. Francis Coppola wanted to get out of Hollywood, so the two of us, we decided we'd move to San Francisco. There was a cadre of people here who were making movies, but more with a San Franciscan sensibility than a Hollywood sensibility. Phil Kaufman was living here. He worked on Raiders for about a week. [Laughs.] He came up with the idea for the ark.
At least Kaufman was a gentleman. There was a teenager working on Raiders, what was his name ? Mike Bey ?
KAUFMAN
Not Mike Bey but Michael Bay. He was interning with George when he was fifteen, filing the storyboards for Raiders, which he thought was going to be terrible. His opinion changed after seeing it in the theater and he was so impressed by the experience that he decided to become a film director. By this point however his relation with George had badly soured, and I think it didn't helped his career, which went down the drain pretty fast. I have no clue what happened to him afterwards.
GEORGE LUCAS
Don't you know ? He went to work with Globus and Golan, you know, the Cannon company that made a fortune producing B-movies with good scripts but low budgets. Just before the company went bankrupt in 1992, he made their Capitain America sequel that was critically panned and such a dud, it sunk Cannon.
PHILIP KAUFMAN: Tom Wolfe didn’t want to write the screenplay. He just didn’t feel that was his métier. I wound up outlining the script, and when Chartoff and Winkler asked me to write it, I turned around the first draft in about eight weeks. I really wanted to go back to Tom Wolfe’s attitude, atmosphere, and humor. I really wanted to find that Tom Wolfe quality, the craziness of the American circus—how the astronauts would be defined publicly by a Life magazine story while the truth was far more interesting, important, and heroic.
PETER KAUFMAN (PRODUCTION ASSISTANT): Phil and Walter Murch made a great trailer to show Alan Ladd Jr. that making the movie was possible. This was back when Francis Coppola had American Zoetrope, and we rented some offices up off of Little Fox Theater. We had a little editing room. We’d find Walter asleep in there in the morning after working all night.
HARRY SHEARER “Our characters had no written lines,” Harry Shearer says of the recruiters he and Jeff Goldblum played in the movie. “Phil said, ‘You and Jeff improvised. Hopefully it will be funny.”
Harry Shearer later played an important role in the show The Simpsons, and paid a tribute to Tom Wolfe a couple of times.
"Most people remember "Deep Space Homer" spoof of The Right Stuff, when Homer walks to the launch pad – we even mimicked Bill Conti music for that sequence" Shearer laughes. "But there is another tribute to Kauffman masterpiece in a later episode. In "She of little faith" Homer and Flanders starts a model rocket space race. Homer rocket goes astray and destroys the church, and Lisa lose faith in a church perverted by Mr. Burns greed. Well, the entire first act when they launch the hamster was a tribute to The Right Stuff, complete with the scared-to-death astronaut hamster wife dressed in a miniature Jackie Kennedy pink Chanel suit and pillbox hat.
CALEB DESCHANEL: Phil and I had mutual friends in San Francisco. I’d gone to school with George Lucas. I knew Walter Murch. They were all part of the same small group of San Francisco filmmakers, with Francis Ford Coppola. Phil sent me the script. I loved it, it’s the kind of thing I grew up loving. My father, Paul Jules Deschanel (a former French citizen, naturalised American in 1939), was an engineer for Martin, who built Titan rockets. When I was a kid I’d build rockets. My dad helped me until I tried to build a liquid fuel rocket using nitric acid and alcohol. He was afraid I was going to blow myself up.
MARY JO DESCHANEL: Annie Glenn was already cast, and I just had an appointment to meet the casting director and read. I hadn’t been acting because I was having kids. I felt out of practice. Overnight, the actress who had the part asked for more money and fell out. So I didn’t know it when I went in, but they were looking for someone. The casting director said, “Do you know how to stutter?” And I said, “No, but I can try.”
TOM WOLFE: Having Dennis Quaid play Gordon Cooper was a good stroke. Cooper, as a pilot, didn’t have much of a background. He was an OK military pilot. They chose him because he was so cool. He fell asleep on the launchpad. These holds would go on for hours. He also fell asleep during a spaceflight. He was an absolutely cool human being.
YEAGER: Some of my friends played extras, such as Korky Kevorkian, a pilot and fruit farmer from Reedley, California. I played a bartender at Pancho's.
PHILIP KAUFMAN: We started looking around for someone who could play Yeager. Then my wife, Rose, and I went to a poetry reading in San Francisco and Sam Shepard was reading. Rose poked me and said, “There's your guy.” I said, “For what?” She said, “Yeager.” Sam had a cowboy quality to him. He was Gary Cooper.
GEOFFREY KIRKLAND (PRODUCTION DESIGNER): Phil got this amazing collection of research from NASA and the Navy. He set up a library in his trailer.
PHILIP KAUFMAN: Research went on in every area, all through the movie. When the actors showed up, each of them got a book that we had prepared with 30 to 40 pages on each character— every damn thing we could find.
PETER KAUFMAN: I'd go to the Soviet embassy in San Francisco with a copy of the book, and they would give me footage of Star City. They were really helpful, the Russians. And we got footage from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Air Force that hadn't been widely seen.
PHILIP KAUFMAN: We combined the great NASA footage with pieces that were built on the set. We were pioneering in that kind of insertion of actors into historical events. For example, we combined footage of the real Alan Shepard being loaded into the capsule with Scott Glenn doing it on the stage. We had Scott Glenn shaking hands with Kennedy; they did the same thing in Forrest Gump and made a big thing out of spending a million dollars to do it. We did that in one afternoon.
PHILIP KAUFMAN: We discovered that the motion control effects George was doing on Star Wars didn't create the grittier effect we wanted.
CALEB DESCHANEL: Getting to outer space can be violent. We used rear projection on the scenes where Yeager was trying to break the sound barrier. Phil used footage from an experimental filmmaker, Jordan Belson, who created images of moving lights that streak by you to give a representation of what it was like to get to that point just beyond something that anybody had ever done before.
PETER KAUFMAN: Belson worked in a little apartment in San Francisco. I don’t think anyone from the production went in. He did all of his effects in a little light box with smoke. He’d bring his footage in. We’d all be amazed.
GUTIERREZ: We did various kinds of shaky-cam movement to give it a sense of urgency. We attached a vibrator to the lens or a power drill to the camera mount to make it all move like crazy.
CALEB DESCHANEL: At one point I shook the camera so hard, I gave my operator a black eye.
CHARTOFF: Today it would be CGI.
CALEB DESCHANEL: There were these wonderful guys who built these models that were really beautifully detailed. These guys loved their planes. At one point when the guy was flying the X-1, he landed it too hard. It burst into pieces. He was a burly guy who had built this thing. He went over to it and picked it up. He was in tears.
KIRKLAND: The B-29 we had was the only one left flying in the World. It belonged to the Confederate Air Force. They called it Fifi. Those folks are amazing. They told us that maintenance of such an old, big aircraft is a nightmare and swallows money like a black hole. But the CAF hanged on, and Fifi is still flying today. The only B-29 that is airworthy in the world.
GUTIERREZ: Some of the reentry shots of the Mercury capsule, the close-ups, were shot on a stage with a 4-foot-tall model.
HARRIS: I knew that capsule inside and out. I knew what all the gauges were and everything. You’re just using your imagination. Like a kid, you know, climbing under a bunch of blankets pretending you’re going to the moon.
FRED WARD: Grissom actually died in a prelaunch test. I heard the recording of the incident.
PHILIP KAUFMAN: Gus was a fucking hero.
SHEARER: Late in the process we were called up to the Bay Area for the shoot on the aircraft carrier.
WARD: The USS Coral Sea.
CALEB DESCHANEL: They gave us two lectures. Both of them had to do with not getting killed. These huge cables catch the planes when they land. Every once in a while they go snap. If you're there when they snap, they just cut you in half.
CALEB DESCHANEL: We sent Dennis Quaid up with a test pilot aboard a Navy attack jet, a Skyhawk. He had a Nagra recorder in the cockpit. Phil leans over to the pilot and says, “Give him an exciting ride.” So they go up and come back down 20 minutes later, and Dennis is green. The sound guy goes in to get his Nagra, and Dennis had thrown up all over it. In the dailies, you see Dennis smiling, and then the pilot starts doing barrel rolls, and Dennis disappears from the frame. We asked Dennis about it and he said, “Oh, I had my script on the floor and I was just checking my lines.” It was total bullshit.
PHILIP KAUFMAN: We were shooting at Van Nuys and somehow Caleb and I found ourselves sitting with Dennis in a little airplane. Suddenly we noticed Dennis was talking to the control tower and the plane was moving! We said, “What the fuck's going on here!?” Dennis had learned how to fly during the shoot, and suddenly he takes off. Caleb and I were terrified.
CALEB DESCHANEL: I went up in an F-100, an old two-seater jet, with a test pilot for Lockheed. There were times we would pull out of a dive and I'd actually lose my vision. Everything became sort of a dark reddish brown and then I'd go blind. Then we put a camera in a wingtip gas tank on an F-104 to get some shots. And then other shots we did with a guy named Art Scholl, a really wonderful pilot who could do incredible maneuvers. Unfortunately, he died doing footage on Top Gun.
PHILIP KAUFMAN The real thrill, however, was another F-104 flight. The Starfighter you see in the movie was not similar to the one Yeager crashed in 1963. That peculiar F-104 had a rocket engine in the tail. Pretty much the Wile E. Coyote Starfighter, to fly at the edge of space, hopefully coming down in one piece. Yeager did not. The concept looked so insane, so dangerous, we felt that no such aircraft could reasonnably exists in our days. How wrong were we. Yeager told us Lockheed had more aircrafts like this, called F-120s, and they were two-seaters. Lockheed, NASA and the military were flying passengers at the edge of space, yet that program was mostly unknown to the outside world. It was to good to be true. It did not took long before we asked NASA or the military if we could hitch a ride, but they flatly refused. Then we got a call from Lockheed. They had their own F-120, unrelated to NASA or the military programs. The company was using that F-120 to fly their people to the edge of space – pilots, managers, scientists. Lockheed executives were willing to get that program out of the ghetto, and fly politicians like Bill Nelson or Jack Garn to the edge of space. A connection to our movie would be one hell of a bonanza for them, hence they were willing to cooperate and extremely enthusiast about the entire thing.
CALEB DESCHANEL
And I was the one they picked up. Sam Shepard insurance evidently refused he took such risk. Philip already had enough work on the ground. So they picked me. The pilot was an amazing fellow with the name of John Blaha, and we did a trio of flights, and got some amazing footage. Seeing Earth curvature from 130 000 ft was completely mind-blowing. The astronauts call this "the overview effect" and goes on to say it a life-changing experience. I second that argument. I felt it could become some kind of massive culture shift. I told Lockheed their intuition was right, that thing could become huge. And surely it become a mass phenomenon. Lockheed keep telling us we did it, but the seed had already been planted by Apollo 8 at Christmas 1968 – you know, the blue marble standing above the greyish lunar landscape.
ED HARRIS
We all gathered to see Caleb flight. The amazing thing was, flying in the rear seat of a F-120 was close enough from riding a Mercury capsule. First, there isn't much room – Caleb told me "don't you ever complain about our Mercury capsule set." What's more, the ride is quite similar to what Shepard and Grissom endured in the first two Mercury flights. Unlike Gagarine, and unlike Glenn, they didn't go into orbit. The rocket just shot the capsule into space like a cannonball, and it was over in 15 minutes. Caleb ride on the F-120 was quite similar – once the aircraft high and fast, it went into a ballistic trajectory similar to an artillery shell. Boom and zoom – that's how Scobee and Blaha called it.
PETER KAUFMAN: With the help of Dolby technicians, we helped create new standards for the use of Dolby sound.
PHILIP KAUFMAN: When the rockets took off, the theater would rumble. I looked down the row at the premier and Kissinger was sitting there and I said, “I want to see those chins vibrating.” When the rockets launched, I went up in the projection room and I said, “Louder.” I went back down and the whole fucking theater was shaking. The chins were vibrating.
CALEB DESCHANEL: Phil wanted the movie to be really visceral. He always said that he wanted to pass out vomit bags at the screenings. He really wanted people to have the experience of what it was like in the X-1 cockpit or the Friendship capsule. You guess that Lockheed F-120 business greatly helped there.
LADD: The film is a classic, but I think of it as a box office flop at the same time.
GEORGE LUCAS: The pivotal movie before The Right Stuff was 2001; that was like floating down a river. The Right Stuff had more of a documentary edge. It's seamless—the standard until Christopher Nolan Gravity.
CALEB DESCHANEL
As I told you earlier, I’d gone to school with George Lucas. By 1986 he was a little depressed by his divorce with Marcia, and by that enormous box office bomb that was Howard the Duck.
So I remembered Lockheed, and proposed they flew George as passenger on a F-120. Lucas was quite excited by the idea "I'll be R2D2 in the backseat of Luke X-wing", he joked.
Lockheed was also excited, for the same reasons. George flight was the major breakthrough they had hoped for, and from this moment, the entire business snowballed into a major hit with the public. Just like many others, George considers this flight at the edge of space as a life-changing experience. "You guess it influenced my writting of the Star Wars sequels."
PHILIP KAUFMAN: The last line an actor says is Dennis Quaid's. He's going up after he's launched, total grace under pressure. “The sun is coming through the window now,” he says. “Oh Lord, what a heavenly light.” And then Bill Conti amazing theme kick-off for the grand finale, with Levon Helm narration of the Mercury 7 respective fates. Levon Helm had that voice that Tom Wolfe ascribed to Chuck Yeager, that sort of West Virginia drawl that Sam didn’t have. That’s why I had Levon as the narrator of the movie.
SHEARER: It's a stunning piece of work.
...
After he flew the last NF-104A in 1971, John Blaha considered an astronaut career. He could have gone to NASA, but soon learned that the military had interesting projects. The Air Force was bringing back the MOL space laboratory, in the shape of a NASA Big Gemini. And to train the future astronauts, Lockheed would build a much upgraded NF-104, the F-120. Little did Blaha knew that the F-120 was on a collision course with the F-4X. The ultimate Phantom was to be build with Irani and Israel funding. The reason was the MiG-25.
JOHN BLAHA
Today the National Academies high speed study is mostly forgotten yet it had a massive, lasting impact on America aeronautics. One company that thoroughly analyzed the Academies report was Lockheed. By 1971 they were on the brink of bankruptcy and were rescued by the Nixon administration. In the end what saved the company was the military shift toward stealth technology, in 1975. Before that date however ruthless Lockheed executive Karl Kotchian was determined to save the company at any cost. His activism would ultimately backfire in 1976 when the bribery scandals exploded in his face.
Lockheed had once the CL-1200 project competing with the YF-16 and YF-17. They corrected a major flaw of the F-104 design – the T-tail dangerous stall characteristics. Lockheed ultimately merged the NTF-104X and CL-1200 projects into the Lockheed XF-120, the 120 standing for 120 000 ft, the highest altitude ever reached by the old NF-104A. The name was also a nod to the fictious Gilbert XF-120 from an old 1956 movie. Only much later was it revealed that Lockheed already had a F-117 in development – the famous stealth strike aircraft.
A quick check of Lockheed projects shows that the NF-104A was the CL-586. Two atempts were made to improve it. The CL-747 was essentially a two-place version of the NF-104A - for NASA. It was to have a TF-104G fuselage. The Starfighter production line did not close until 1979, at least in Italy.
The CL-772 was a far more ambitious atempt at improving the NF-104A. It was known as the Aerospace Trainer II. While the NF-104A peaked at 120800 ft, CL-772 was to climb three time higher, above 300 000 ft. To achieve that, the big J-79 engine would be replaced by a far small J-85. There, a quick comparison of J-79 and J-85 is necessary. It shows that the J-85 is four times shorter, ten times lighter, with only half the diameter of a J-79.
Because the J-85 was much smaller in both length and diameter, the rocket pack would no longer be tail-mounted A lot of the F-104 internal fuselage would now be available for the rocket. The AR-4 was to be far more powerful, with more propellant, than the NF-104A AR-2. There would be four rockets instead of one, within the fuselage, in a circular pattern around the J-85. It is obvious that he CL-772 philosophy was «screw the jet, makes room for the rocket.»
Unfortunately the J-85 is far less powerful than the J-79 – barely 1500 kg of thrust, 1/5 of the J-79. With so little jet thrust, and with a large load of rocket propellant the CL-772 might have some difficulties to get off the ground. The J-79 was an extremely powerful engine that got the NF-104A to high altitude and height without the rocket. It is doubtful a J-85 could achieve similar performance. Starting the rocket earlier and lower would eat into high altitude performance, since rockets are far more voracious than jets. After they got a contract to build more NF-104A Lockheed made a quick review of the CL-772 but went with the CL-747 instead. It was essentially blended with the CL-1200 Lancer, another Starfighter derivative.
Thanks to endorsement of the F-120 by ASEB in 1972, three aircrafts were build with NASA funding. The Lockheed XF-120A was the NASA variant for suborbital flight. It was a two-seater with both MIPCC and rocket booster.
It didn't took long for Lockheed to spin the F-120 as an interim fighter to shoot down Soviet MiG-25s. The F-120B, F-120C and F-120D were Lockheed variants, some single-seater, other with Italy F-104S RG-21 radar and a pair of AIM-7E Sparrow underwing. Some had the tail-mounted H2O2 rocket, some did not.
Lockheed proposed the F-120 as a cheap alternative to Iran and Israel F-4X Super Phantom. Both aircrafts had a similar engine, the MIPCC J-79. The F-120 would zoom-climb above the MiG-25R and shoot it down using the Sparrows. With Iran and Israel committed to the F-4X, Lockheed went to Japan, Taiwan and all the European users of the F-104G with mostly negative results.
As an alternative, single-seat or two-seats F-120s could be used as trainers for the F-4X. Pilots would learn snap-up, zoom-climb, and AIM-7 launches to kill MiG-25R. The F-4X used water for the MIPCC system. Lockheed proposed to use H2O2 instead, since the tail-mounted rocket booster already used peroxide. A large conformal, belly tank would house the MIPCC and rocket common oxidizer.
...
John Blaha and Tom Cooper
"The secret history of the Super Phantom " - Osprey Combat aircrafts, 2004
TOM COOPER
Iran-based U.S. reconnaissance operations targeting the USSR explored routes along which bombers could penetrate Soviet air space. In the late 1960s, American pilots flying Iranian RF-5A recon planes flew over the former USSR in order to find and photograph newly-constructed military installations.
At the time it was very unusual for the Pentagon and the Congress to receive a letter of intent for an arms buy from a “Third World country.” Few took seriously Iran’s requests for General Dynamics F-111 fighter-bombers starting in 1964. Instead, the Iranian air force had to make do with 100 much-less-powerful Northrop F-5A/B Freedom Fighters.
Since the late 1950s, the Imperial Iranian Air Force (IIAF), in cooperation with the USAF, had been flying highly secret reconnaissance flights over the USSR. Initially, lighter aircraft (even transports) were used, and several were shot down by Soviet fighters. From 1968 onwards, in recognition of the good relationship between the USA and Iran, 12 Northrop RF-5A aircraft were delivered to the IIAF, however, all was not quite as it seemed. In fact it appears that officially these aircraft never actually existed – their serial numbers were deleted from Northrop’s production list to make them ‘deniable’. In addition, the aircraft were actually flown by USAF pilots until 1971 under an operation known as Dark Gene and were used to make covert reconnaissance sorties across the border into the USSR, gathering mainly ELINT. It is understood that two of these aircraft were actually shot down inside the USSR whilst being flown by USAF pilots – they ejected and, presumably after pleading that they were actually training IIRAF pilots and simply got lost, they were quietly allowed to return to Iran, although this has yet to be confirmed.
However, although the RF-5A’s were useful and presumably helped generate some interesting intelligence, it wasn’t really what the USAF pilots wanted to be piloting when they crossed over the border into the USSR – something with a little more grunt was called for and the RF-4 fitted the bill nicely. In addition, the Shah, who presumably was kept informed of the intelligence obtained by the RF-5A overflights, was keen for Iran to play an even more active role in this activity and offered to pay for the RF-4s. A solution was agreed – Iran would pay for the RF-4s and they would be flown by mixed crews of USAF and IIAF personnel, allowing the IIAF crews to gain valuable operational experience.
As a fully qualified pilot with strong connections to several U.S. aerospace companies – not to mention to the U.S. intelligence establishment — the Shah was able to personally negotiate arms deals with American politicians. In 1967 he managed to secure a deal for 32 F-4Ds.
At the time, Great Britain was in the process of withdrawing from its possessions east of the Suez. The Shah skillfully presented himself to the U.S. public as a protector of peace and stability in the Middle East who could fill the vacuum the British were creating. In 1969, the Shah successfully negotiated another deal — this time for 130 F-4Es, then the latest variant of that type. In 1971, the United States sold a batch of McDonnell Douglas RF-4 Phantoms to Iran. The RF-4’s advanced reconnaissance capabilities were a true eye-opener for the Iranians. The RF-4 was faster and longer-ranged than any other comparable combat aircraft in that part of the world at that time. In following years Iranian RF-4s flew hundreds of clandestine reconnaissance sorties deep over Saudi Arabia, Iraq, South Yemen and the Soviet Union.
The Iranians kept on pushing. After a major study about future air-defense requirements, the Iranian air force concluded that Iran’s rugged terrain dictated the acquisition of airborne early warning platforms and interceptors equipped with long-range radars and weaponry.
The Shah flew into action again. Sometime between 1971 and 1974, he requested a briefing on the Lockheed YF-12 – the stillborn interceptor variant of the famous SR-71 Blackbird, a Mach-three-capable strategic reconnaissance aircraft. Both RF-5 and RF-4 were now too vulnerable to Soviet air defense networks.
On 28 November 1973 an Iranian RF-4C, flown by an IIAF pilot Maj Shokouhnia with USAF Col John Saunders in the rear seat, was detected inside the USSR. The RF-4C made a run for the border and was at Mach 1.4 when it was intercepted by a MiG-21 flown by Capt Gennady Eliseev. Col Saunders began firing out decoy flares to try and prevent the MiG from locking on a heat-seeking missile, eventually using all the 54 flares carried. The MiG-21 finally managed to launch two R-3S missiles at the RF-4C, but both missed. However, whilst turning hard to limit the chances of the MiG achieving a good lock-on, the RF-4C had lost some airspeed, allowing the MiG-21 to suddenly cut a corner and close up. It is presumed that Capt Gennady Eliseev then made a conscious decision to ram the RF-4C to prevent it escaping, as the MiG-21 aircraft rammed the aircraft from the left and below, near the engine nozzles, probably cutting off the tail of the RF-4C, throwing it into a high-speed dive. Capt Gennady Eliseev was killed in the collision and was posthumously decorated with the ‘Hero of the Soviet Union’ medal. Maj Shokouhnia and Col Saunders both ejected and were captured by Soviet ground forces. They used their cover story as briefed and, as the RF-4C had impacted the ground at something like Mach 2, there was little if any evidence the Soviets could use to prove otherwise.
It was quietly agreed that Maj Shokouhnia and Col Saunders would be returned to Iran in exchange for a cartridge from a Soviet reconnaissance satellite that had accidentally landed in Iran. Both Maj Shokouhnia and Col Saunders were decorated for their exploit. It is believed that Maj Shokouhnia, left Iran during the revolution in 1979, but later returned and was executed in 1980. Col Saunders returned to more normal duties and has never spoken officially about his activities in Iran during this period.
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November 30, 1973
The honorable James R. Schlesinger
Secretary of defense, The Pentagon
Over the last several years the government of Iran has acquired sixty C-130 Hercules, and in the course of this program our Lockheed people have developped a close working relationship Iranian officials. It has been a particular pleasure to have had a series of wide-ranging conversations with the Shah and members of his staffconcerning the defense requirements of their country. From this close relationship we recognize iran's need for greater surveillance control capabilities Aircrafts of the very high very fast F-12 type would complement the existing iranian systems and their future airplanes. The F-12 type vehicle has demonstrated penetration and survivability against modern defenses by flying at speeds in excess of Mach 3 and altitudes of 80 000 ft while carrying sophisticated sensors and electronic systems.
The purpose of this letter is to request your approval of our plan to modify for the government of Iran, on a commercial basis, of existing stored A-12 airplanes into F-12 type aircraft.
The F-12 surveillance system we propose for Iran will have the capability to execute very high very fast airborne surveillance of airspace, land masses and the adjacent persian gulf and arabian sea.
From a single Iranian base the entire iranian border can be surveyed in one a half hour supported by Iranian tanker aircraft. The arabian sea can be surveyed by electronic sensors in four hours.
The enclosure to this letter consists has several graphs comparing the F-12 flight envelope with the F-14, F-15, F-4, F-5, and the Soviet MiG-25.
In order to supply F-12 type airplanes to Iran we would need your approval to purchase fromour government all nine idle A-12 aircrafts, engines, spares,which had been out of use and in storage since September 1967. We would modify the complete forebody of the airplanes to a surveillance control version tailored to the particular requirements of the user.
We believe the acquisition of F-12 type aircraft by Iran would materially strengthen its defense posture. Before we go forward, we need your agreement that a specific purpose for the F-12 may be submitted to the Shah of Iran and if such a proposal is accepted your approval to then acquire on behalf of the government of Iran at a negociated price the inactive A-12 aircrafts. This commercial undertaking would, of course, be subject to all government controls and licensing. Your consideration of these actions is respectfully requested.
Sincerely,
Carl Kotchian.
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TOM COOPER
The A-12 / SR-71 deal never materialized, but the two next did. One was the Iranian order for 80 F-14 Tomcats. The other was for seven Boeing E-3 Sentry AWACS. While the E-3 was still in development as of 1973, the Tomcat was ready … sort of. In fact, the F-14 and E-3 both faced fierce resistance in the U.S. Congress owing to their cost and complexity. The Shah ordered the Iranian bank Mehli to credit Grumman so that the company could build the 80 F-14s for Iran.
Encouraged by this step, other investors followed and Congress was left with little choice but to continue financing the U.S. Navy’s own acquisition of the F-14. After all, the Navy couldn’t let some Third World country get the world’s best interceptor while it bought none for itself.The Iranians were perfectly aware that they weren’t just buying aircraft. They insisted on acquiring the entire weapon system including aircraft, avionics, weapons and support infrastructure. That’s why Iran remains capable of operating its surviving F-14s today.
Iran has a long border with what was then the southern part of the USSR and during the 1970’s, before the revolution that saw the Shah deposed, Iran maintained a good relationship with the USA. As part of this close relationship it was agreed that various long-range radars and listening posts could be established in Iran to enable the USA to monitor activities behind the Iron Curtain. However, it was also realised that, as the border between the USSR and Iran contained a number of significant gaps in overlapping radar cover, a low-flying reconnaissance aircraft could easily get over the border and take some useful photographs of areas of interest. When these cross-border flights were eventually detected they would have the added advantage of stirring up a hornets next of activity by other radar and SAM sites, allowing valuable intelligence on their location and operating frequencies to be scooped up by high-flying ELINT aircraft and listening posts positioned just the other side of the border. This ELINT activity was probably part of ‘Project Ibex’, but a more pro-active reconnaissance programme also took place around the same time.
In 1971 the first six RF-4s arrived in Iran, officially these were RF-4Es, however, sources involved have indicated that the airframes were actually highly unusual RF-4Cs. In fact it appears that these aircraft had been specially built for this operation and contained various specialised ELINT equipment, making them the most expensive F-4s ever built. To date no authentic photos of these unique RF-5As and the expensive RF-4Cs have been discovered.
A number of these first six aircraft were delivered without the production number being officially listed and are generally referred to as UKIs – Unknown Iranians, some others were probably part of the 72-0266 to 720269 serials later acknowledged as delivered to Iran. Eventually, somewhere between 22 and 25 RF-4 airframes were delivered to Iran, the precise number is impossible to determine. Flown by mixed USAF and IIAF crews, the six RF-4Cs averaged two missions a month over the USSR from 1971 through to 1978. If they were shot down, the cover story was that the USAF crewmember was training the IIAF crewman and that they were on a navigation-training sortie, had got lost in bad weather and had inadvertently strayed over the border into the USSR. In actual fact it is understood that at least two of these ‘Iranian’ RF-4Cs were shot down inside the USSR by Soviet fighters, the first in 1973 and the second in 1976. Some details of the 1973 incident have emerged. In response to these overflights, the USSR began overflying Iran with the MiG-25RBSh and various attempts were made to intercept the aircraft with the IIAF F-4D and F-4E.
After the first F-4s arrived, the IIAF also received some RF-4Es, and operations were intensified. The Soviets were, understandably, concerned about Iran's massive re-armament, and starred their own reconnaissance missions over the country. IIAF interceptors - especially F-4Ds - repeatedly tried to catch the MiG-25Rs, but this proved a very difficult task as the routes flown by the overflying 'Foxbats' were carefully chosen. The Shah was not interested in a direct confrontation with the USSR, so as the mutual airspace violations intensified, he offered to stop IIAF - and American - overflights if the Soviets would do the same. This offer was repeated, and turned down, several times. The IIAF was therefore ordered to fly two or more missions over the USSR for every 'Foxbat' flight, initiating a 'tit for tat' campaign.
“The Shah and our commanders were increasingly worried about the overflights of Soviet MiG-25s. Each time our F-4s failed to intercept one of the Russian intruders we tried something new. We came closer and closer, and in 1975 a MiG-25R was finally damaged by a Sparrow, but the jet made it back over the border before crashing.
This was a dangerous game, however, for the Soviets downed one of our RF-4s soon afterwards. 'The situation became very tense, and in 1976 the IIAF purchased six AQM-37 target drones from an Italian company and put us, and our brand new F-14s, to the test. Of the five drones launched by Phantom lIs, which simulated MiG-25s flying at speed and altitude, four were shot down by AIM-54s. One Phoenix missed due to a systems failure.
Apparently, sometime in 1976, one IIAF F-4E eventually managed to hit a MiG-25RBSh, but it made it back over the border into Russia before it crashed. The loss of the second RF-4C over Russia later in 1976 may well have been in response to this incident.
The arrival of the IIAF F-14 Tomcat put an end to the overflights of Iran by the MiG-25RBSh, particularly after one had been intercepted over the Caspian Sea in Oct 1978 by two IIAF F-14s, who then maintained a radar lock-on to the MiG-25 for over a minute, no doubt giving the MiG-25 pilot something to think about.
Meanwhile, on the other side of Iraq, Israel his own, very similar air war against MiG-25R.
In March 71 four MiG-25’s were delivered to Egypt by Antonov AN-22 Cock transport aircraft, along with Soviet pilots and technicians. The first aircraft was re-assembled and flew from Cairo West airfield on 26 Mar 71 - on this test flight, which was monitored by Israeli and US intelligence services, the aircraft reached Mach 3.2 and 63,000ft. On the second test flight the aircraft reached 73,000ft, displaying a performance well in excess of the Israeli F-4 Phantom. It was initially thought that the Foxbat’s were the interceptor version, because at this time the existence of the Foxbat B was unknown.
On 10 October 1971 two of the Foxbat’s made a high altitude run down the Mediterranean at Mach 2.5 only 17 miles of the coast of Israel - two IAF F-4’s attempted to intercept the Foxbat’s without success.
On 6 November a single Foxbat really embarrassed the IAF by flying directly over Sinai at Mach 2.5 and 75,000ft to take photographs of Israeli defensive positions in the Mitla Pass area. However, the IAF were waiting for the Foxbat and had 2 stripped down F-4E’s on standby armed with AIM-7E Sparrow missiles. The MiG-25 cruising at 76,000 ft was attacked head-on by the two F-4’s in a ‘snap-up’ high-angle attack from 44,000ft. However, the attack failed because the proximity fuses on the AIM-7E missiles could not cope with the Mach 3 closing speed of the Foxbat and by the time they detonated the aircraft was out of their lethal radius. Nevertheless, it must have given the Foxbat pilot a rather unpleasant surprise when he saw the missiles hurtling up towards him!!
The second overflight occurred on 10 March 1972 when 2 Foxbat’s again overflew Sinai at Mach 2.5 and 75,000ft, this time to photograph the Israeli airbase at Refidim near Bir Gafgafa. The final overflight of Sinai occurred on 16 May 1972 when two Foxbat’s flew down the length of the western coast of Sinai from Port Said to Sharm el Sheikh photographing various Israeli defensive positions. However, the aircraft were always flown by Russian pilots and maintained by Russian technicians. Eventually, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat grew increasingly frustrated that the USSR would neither train Egyptian pilots to fly the Foxbat’s or actually sell the aircraft to Egypt. In Jul 72 Sadat gave the Soviet Union one week to either sell the Egyptians the aircraft or remove them and by 16 Jul 72 the Foxbat’s were back in Russia.
The Israeli air force was decided to get something better than Phantom to kill MiG-25R. With the F-14 and F-15 in the flight test phase, an interim solution was needed.
The Mach 3 Phantom
In the 1960s the development of high-performance reconnaissance cameras offered greater resolution, but at a price- many of these systems were large and heavy and the current high-altitude spyplane of the time, the first generation variants of the Lockheed U-2, were unable to carry them. One of the premier recon optical systems developed at this time was the General Dynamics HIAC-1- a long range, oblique camera with a focal length of 66 inches that allowed stand-off reconnaissance from high altitudes. The first examples of HIAC-1 were heavy- the prototype camera system weighed over 3,500 lbs, much more than any other camera system in use at the time. The only aircraft in the USAF inventory that could carry the HIAC-1 was the RB-57F, a modification of the Martin B-57 Canberra.
Over the course of the RB-57F's operational career, Israel had made repeated requests of obtaining the RB-57F and the HIAC-1 for its own reconnaissance needs, but the requests were always denied by the US State Department and the Defense Department on the grounds that the technology used in the RB-57F would upset the strategic balance in the Middle East. However, a compromise was reached- by 1971 the HIAC-1 had been steadily improved and lightened to the point that it weighed just under 1,500 lbs and that a pod-mounted HIAC-1 carried by the McDonnell Douglas F-4E Phantom, already in the Israeli inventory, would be permissible. Also developed by General Dynamics, the pod-mounted HIAC-1 was designated G-139 and underwent an intensive flight test program with a USAF RF-4C aircraft and the first G-139 pods were delivered to Israel in October 1971.
The Israelis found the G-139/HIAC-1 system useful as it allowed the Phantoms to get imagery of Egyptian defenses along the Suez Canal without having to enter the SAM umbrella. But there was a significant issue, the pod was still a heavy store and it generated a significant amount of drag- it limited the Phantoms to a maximum speed of Mach 1.5 and a maximum altitude just under 50,000 feet, not to mention the challenge of handling a G-139-laden F-4E at high altitude.
As a result, the special projects division of General Dynamics began work in January 1972 on ways to improve the F-4E's performance to offset the burden of carrying the pod.
The first improvements came with getting the most out of the Phantom's J79 engines. Engineers found that the Phantom's intakes were limiting the performance possible from the J79. A new inlet was designed that was not only larger than the standard F-4 inlet, but it featured a new shape that better managed the airflow to the engines with series of new variable-geometry ramps. General Dynamics refined the PCC system so that the water droplets were very fine at 10 microns to cool the air without having any pooling of water in the engine. Two large water tanks were installed on external blisters along the sides of the F-4E, each blister with three tanks. Each blister could carry 2,500 lbs of demineralized water- since the interior of the Phantom was pretty packed as it was, scabbing these blisters on the fuselage eased the modification and engineering process.
General Dynamics' modifications led to this version of the Phantom being unofficially designated the F-4X- at this point still carrying the large G-139/HIAC-1 pod underneath on the centerline station. With Israeli funding supplementing internal corporate, work on the F-4X continued through 1972 and refinements to the PCC system and inlets led to a calculated increase in the J79 thrust at high altitude well over 150 percent.
Then something unexpected happened. After the Space Shuttle cancellation MIPCC technology got into the spotline. Work had already been done with PCC on another of General Dynamics' products, the Convair F-106 Delta Dart, but it never was incorporated into the design. In addition, the USAF's Arnold Engineering Development Center in Tennessee had tested PCC in engine test cells with both the J57 and J75 engines. One J75 engine was run at maximum afterburner for 40 hours with PCC! It had also been looked at by Vought for the aborted F8U-3 Crusader III design (though never flown) and McDonnell had used a rudimentary PCC system in 1962 to break several world speed records with the pre-production F-4 Phantom.
It was identified by the National Academies as a useful, promising technology for future satellite launch vehicles. Because of the F-4X the J-79 was selected as a possible demonstrator engine. Except that the J-79 powered, not only the Phantom, but also the F-104, Rockwell A-5 Vigilante and General Dyanmics B-58 Hustler... the end result was that from 1972 onwards all of these aerospace companies fought teeth and nail to get a contract for a flying testbed.
That's the moment when John Blaha become involved in both F-120 and F-4X programs.
On 12 April 1973 General Dyanmics formally submitted the F-4X proposal to the USAF. Additional funding for more work then came from the USAF which was using the podded HIAC-1 system for stand-off reconnaissance in Korea and were encountering the same issues the Israelis were having in using standard Phantoms with the large camera pod.
The following year the design was further refined, but with the Israelis having continued misgivings about using the HIAC-1 in a pod, the design leap was made to incorporate the HIAC-1 into F-4X's nose- with the latest HIAC-1 versions getting even lighter than the 1,500 lb version used in the G-139 pod, integrating the camera into the nose improved performance by eliminating the drag-inducing pod. Designated RF-4X, this version of the Phantom was now capable of cruising at Mach 2.4 at high altitude with burst capability to Mach 3.2.
This level of performance now began to alarm the US State Department- up to this point Mach 3+ aircraft were the sole purview of the United States and Soviet Union and in some diplomatic circles there were concerns about the Israelis integrating nuclear weapons delivery with the RF-4X. To allay the State Department's concerns, General Dynamics removed the AN/APQ-120 radar from the nose which would now only house the HIAC-1 and its associated environmental control systems.
Permission to sell the RF-4X to the Israelis was approved and on November 1974 an Israeli F-4E was flown to General Dynamics in Fort Worth for a mock up study. For five months engineers used the F-4E as the basis of a full-scale mock-up created with cardboard and tape- both the Mach 3 intakes and the PCC water tanks were mocked up on the Phantom on one side as well as the modified nose housing for the HIAC-1 camera.
By March 1975 several factors were now working against the RF-4X, the biggest of which was time. The Israeli Air Force wanted the system as soon as possible but it was clear that the integration of the camera, intakes and PCC system was going to take more time than originally estimated.
With the McDonnell Douglas F-15 winding up its flight test program and soon to become operational in the following year to replace the Phantom in USAF service, it was politically unpalatable to keep funding the RF-4X which offered a level of performance that exceeded that of the Eagle in some flight regimes.
The USAF insisted upon further studies of the PCC system despite the fact that there were already nearly 20 years of data on pre-compressor cooling, some of which done by the USAF itself. Compounded with the engineering delays, Israel and the RF-4X proponents in the USAF lost interest and it might have been canceled. Israel however got wind of early, promising results in MIPCC research by Lockheed and NASA over the F-120 suborbital trainer.
Crucially, this helped the Israelis to fund the RF-4X in its entirety and they were finally able to afford the HIAC-1 component. In the end three F-4E Phantoms were modified as F-4X aircraft and delivered to the Israeli Air Force from late 1977. In IDF service the HIAC-1 was code-named "Shablul", the Hebrew word for "snail". The first operational flights began in 1976 with the aircraft capable of cruising at 80,000 feet at Mach 2.4 with burst capability to Mach 3. The pilot and systems officer wore full pressure suits from the David Clark Company which also made the pressure suits used by USAF U-2 and SR-71 crews as well as astronauts. Many of the missions flown still remain classified but it is known that Iraq was a frequent target through the 1980s. One of the aircraft is now on public display at the Israeli Air Force Museum.
Hence by 1977 Israel was actively developing the RF-4X. It was hardly a surprise when the Shah learned about the aircrafts, since Israel and Iran were growing closer at the time.
...
From the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 until the Iranian Revolution and the fall of the Pahlavi dynasty in 1979, Israel and Iran maintained close ties. Iran was the second Muslim-majority country to recognize Israel as a sovereign state after Turkey. Israel viewed Iran as a natural ally as a non-Arab power on the edge of the Arab world, in accordance with David Ben Gurion's concept of an alliance of the periphery. Israel had a permanent delegation in Tehran which served as a de facto embassy, before Ambassadors were exchanged in the late 1970s. After the Six-Day War, Iran supplied Israel with a significant portion of its oil needs and Iranian oil was shipped to European markets via the joint Israeli-Iranian Eilat-Ashkelon pipeline. Brisk trade between the countries continued until 1979, with Israeli construction firms and engineers active in Iran. El Al, the Israeli national airline, operated direct flights between Tel Aviv and Tehran.
Iranian-Israeli military links and projects were kept secret, but they are believed to have been wide-ranging, for example the joint military project Project Flower (1977–79), an Iranian-Israeli attempt to develop a new missile.
On 18 July 1977, Iranian Vice Minister of War General Hassan Toufanian traveled to Israel where he met with Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan and Minister of Defense Ezer Weizmann. They discussed a number of joint Israeli-Iranian military projects, among them Project Flower. This project focused on the development of a longer range Gabriel anti-ship missile and a future submarine-launched variant. Iranian concerns over missile and nuclear developments in India and Pakistan were also discussed. The following year, Iran supplied Israel with $280 million worth of oil as a down payment. A team of Iranian experts began construction of a missile assembly facility near Sirjan, in south central Iran, and a missile test range near Rafsanjan.Yaakov Shapiro, the Defense Ministry official in charge of coordinating the negotiations with Iran from 1975 to 1978, recalls: "In Iran they treated us like kings. We did business with them on a stunning scale. Without the ties with Iran, we would not have had the money to develop weaponry that is today in the front line of the defense of the State of Israel."
During the July 1977 meeting between Toufanian, Weizmann and Dayan Project Flower was discussed... as was the RF-4X. Infact, because of the Shah extensive connections within America aerospace companies, Iran had closely followed development of the RF-4X since 1972. Interest had grown after November 1973. On November 28 a RF-4C had been rammed by a MiG-21. A week later, Lockheed's Carl Kotchian proposal to sold stored A-12 Oxcart to Iran had been rejected. Meanwhile the official sale contract of Tomcat to Iran only happened in January 1974; by 1973 it had been plagued by Grumman quasi-bankruptcy. The Shah had astutely played the situation to its advantage, offering to rescue Grumman if the Tomcat was ever cancelled. This placed the US Navy into an impossible situation and crushed F-14 opponents in Congress.
Hence as late 1973 the Shah saw the F-4X as a last ditch option to get a MiG-25 killer in service. Once the Tomcat deal was secured, Iran focused on the RF-4X variant again. In 1975 Iran actually loaned Israel some money to get three RF-4X in service with the IDF/AF. In the name of Project DARK GENE and IBEX the Shah then insisted to get some of the Iranian Air Force Phantoms transformed into RF-4X similar to Israel's.
When the United States State Departement refused in 1976, the Shah requested help from Israel again. First some Iranian engineers were send to Israel for an extensive study of the RF-4X. Transformation of standard Phantoms into RF-4X soon proved impossible. So the Shah went for a different approach: one Israeli RF-4X would be flown to Iran and used for border penetrations into the Soviet Union. The Shah long term strategy was to provide Israel with money so that they got more RF-4Xs with the hope that some of these aircrafts could be bought by the IRIAF... someday. Even today it is hard to guess how much the United States knew about Israel – Iran machinations.
By 1974 the Shah also entered discussions with Turkey and Pakistan - all F-104 users. Lockheed used these countries as brokers when proponing Iran the RF-120C. It was the suborbital trainer provided with the KA-80 camera. Lockheed proposal was made after the A-12 deal was blocked by the State Departement in November 1973. The RF-120C would zoom-climb to 150 000 ft and snap photos from high there. From such a vantage point it would not need to cross the dangerous border with the Soviet Union. Interestingly enough, both Turkey and Pakistan had borders with Iran... and the Soviet Union.
Lockheed also discussed the RF-120C with Taiwan, since the ROCAF used large numbers of Starfighters... some of them used to spy Communist China.
Now back to 1976 and Viktor Belenko delivery of an intact MiG-25 Foxbat to Japan.
You have to realize that, as of 1972, Air Force fighter jocks were pissed-off because their Phantoms were unable to shoot Foxbats. Hell, that's the reason why we build both F-14 and F-15, the former with the AIM-54 Phoenix, the later with awesome performance. Once the two super interceptors in service, they used to train against SR-71s simulating the Foxbat.
JOHN BLAHA
"We flew the SR-71 to provide the fighters radar practice at finding, tracking, locking on, intercepting, and simulated firing of their sophisticated F-14 Phoenix missile and the F-15's AIM-7M at a high-altitude, high-speed target. The Tomcat Chase missions were flown over the Pacific Ocean and Eagle Bait missions in the Nellis AFB training area, north of Las Vegas, Nevada. To maximize scarce, high-altitude/high-speed intercept practice for the fighters against the SR-71, we "stacked the deck" in their favor to avoid a multitude of missed intercepts, and consequently, wasted time. The practice intercepts were conducted in a very controlled environment, favoring a successful outcome by the fighters. Both the SR-71 and fighters were on a common ground control intercept (GCI) frequency, so the fighters could be vectored for the head-on intercept and we could talk to each other to help set it up. We flew a precise straight-line track that was communicated to the GCI controller and fighters well in advance of our arrival. All aircraft had their transponders onfor positive radar identification, and no DEF systems were to be used. We kept the SR-71 at a constant altitude, airspeed, and heading as the fighters maneuvered for their head-on attack. GCI controllers provided constant range and bearing for the fighters to their target (the SR-71), so they could hunt for us on their aircraft radar.
Even under these highly controlled flying conditions, the F-14s and F-15s had extreme difficulty achieving a satisfactory SR-71 "kill." The majority of missed intercepts for the fighters were because of two parameters that influence the intercept geometry greatly: the altitude difference between the SR-71 and the fighters, and the extreme closing velocity between the two aircraft. At the start of the "Eagle Bait" missions, the F-15s discovered that their Fire Control System (PCS) speed gate (the (the computed closing velocity between two aircraft) was not large enough to accommodate their extreme closing velocity against the SR.71. Software changes to their computers solved that problem.
If the fighters decided not to climb and remained at twenty-five thousand feet, for example, their missiles found it extremely difficult to climb up fifty-five thousand feet (against gravity) to achieve a kill against the SR-71. Another factor in our favor was the small guidance fins on their missiles. They are optimized in size for guiding a missile to its target in the thicker air from the ground up to around forty thousand feet. At eighty thousand feet the air is so At eighty thousand feet the air is so thin that full deflection of the missile's guidance fins can barely turn it. As the missile races towards the SR-71 at Mach 3 or greater, the closing velocity between the two now becomes Mach 6, or about one mile every second! The missile's predicted impact point in front of the SR-71 has to be perfectly planned early on by the fighter's PCS because as they race towards each other at Mach 6, it becomes increasingly more difficult for the missile to maneuver. Until the latest technology of Air-to-Air missiles came along (the AMRAAM, a fire-and-forget missile with a range of about 35 miles), all the long-range Soviet and US missiles required the aircraft's radar to continue tracking the SR-71 long after the missiles were launched. They had to remain locked-on to the SR-71 in order for their PCS to relay tracking information back to the missile, so it could make appropriate corrections, racing towards the target. By turning on our DEF systems we could easily deny the fighters any meaningful radar information to guide their missiles. All I ever heard on the radios from the fighters as they sped underneath us was, "Ah damn it, we're too late!".
Meanwhile we learned from Belenko that the Soviet MiG-25s had equally hard times against the SR-71 border flights. The Soviet tried every trick they could think about, emplacing a trio or even a quartet of MiG-25s on the Blackbird flight corridors – to no avail.
Enter the Skunk Works. I remember Clarence Johnson and Ben Rich poking fun at the frustrated Phantom, Foxbat, Eagle and Tomcat pilots. "You are attacking our SR-71s the wrong way. That is, you try from below, not from above."
The Italians Starfighters are unique among F-104s because they can fire AIM-7E Sparrow medium range air to air missiles, just like Phantoms.
By 1971 Lockheed was trying very hard to get back on the combat aircraft business. But the F-16 and F-18 ruined their efforts. So Lockheed tried a different trick. They packed a F-104S radar and a pair of Sparrows on a XF-120. In 1974 Lockheed build a fourth XF-120- they called it the F-120A Starflyer - on their own dime. It was a single seater, and it could loft a pair of AIM-7E above 100 000 ft.
In 1975 Lockheed pilots used the F-120A astonishing performance to zoom climb to 150 000 ft and then fall back into the atmosphere... and get a radar lock on a SR-71 flying below (at 80 000 ft !). Needless to say, Lockheed stunt made a lot of people angry in the Pentagon. I can understand them: a revamped Starfighter bet the crap out Phantoms, Eagles, Tomcats, Blackbirds – and Foxbats. So you guess, the F-120A was short-lived. This did not stopped Lockheed and they tried another trick. If their aircraft couldn't be used as an interceptor, well, how about a reconnaissance aircraft ?
Enter Taiwan. Their ROCAF was in the front line to spy Communist China. Hence they were given all kind of different spy planes. They got RF-100As "Slick Chick". They got RF-101 Voodoos and RF-104G Starfighters. All of them thundered over the Taiwan strait at low level and then penetrated Communist China airspace like bats outta hell. They also got both RB-57 and U-2 for high altitude reconnaissance.
Communist China was rightly pissed-off and ROCAF losses were heavy – a dozen of aircrafts and their crews were lost within the span of the 60's. From time to time a lone ROCAF spy fligt turned into a full-blown air battle.
In the end the Chinese airspace become unpenetrable with SA-2s and, what's worse, Nixon went to Mao in 1972. Lockheed however did an unexpected offer to Taiwan in 1974. They proposed a RF-120C with a powerful camera, the KA-80.
The HYAC (for "high acuity") balloon camera of 1956 was increased in size for the KH-1 Corona - to 24 inches focal length. Then lenses from one of the Corona cameras were later adapted for the Panoramic Camera, or PanCam, which was initially developed for the U-2 and later used in the SR-71 and then even later adapted for Apollo. It was also carried by the first stealth drone ever, Ryan AQM-91 Firefly.
Since the basic China reconnaissance problem started with the absence of good maps, let alone precise knowledge of where key facilities were, the Firefly's reconnaissance sensor had to take up the slack. Designed by spy camera specialist Itek, the KA-80A Optical Bar Camera was unique in its combination of resolution and area coverage. A Firefly following the track of Interstate 80 from New York City could image a strip all the way into Utah, easily wide enough to take in the entire New York and Chicago metropolitan areas (including Kennedy, LaGuardia and Newark airports), with a peak resolution good enough to tell a mid-size from a compact car, and an off-track resolution good enough to identify aircraft types. The KA-80A is still used on the U-2 and has been an important reason to retain the type in service.
So in some way the same camera had been used on balloons, U-2s, SR-71s, Corona and Apollo, each with quite different flight regimes !
Lockheed once again used their XF-120B aircraft, mouting the KH-80 camera in place of the second seat. The RF-120C mission would be neither RF-100A nor U-2, nor SR-71 nor satellite but a strange mix of them all.
No penetration of the Chinese airspace could be made because of the SA-2 SAM batteries. So the RF-120C would instead zoom climb to 150 000 ft above Taiwan strait and from high there snap pictures of Communist China. Lockheed proposal went nowhere since by 1976 Taiwan was left out in the cold in favor of Communist China.
Once again Lockheed activism made the State Department nervous. They tried to block the RF-120C. Undaunted, Lockheed touted the RF-120C as a civilian aircraft for remote sensing – just like their ER-2. Since the KA-80 was blocked, they got around the obstacle through the Apollo Panoramic Camera. It was a derivative of an aerial reconnaissance camera known as the U-2 IRIS II. Thar camera had a 61-centimeter focal length and from a 425-kilometer orbit could produce ground resolution of between 7.6 to 10.7 meters, meaning that a photographic interpreter could spot and identify large objects like buildings and some ships. It was an optical bar design, which enabled it to photograph a long thin image on a long strip of film at high resolution, and yet still remain compact enough to fit within the camera bay of an airplane or a spacecraft. It had a 61-centimeter focal length and from a 425-kilometer orbit could produce ground resolution of between 7.6 to 10.7 meters, meaning that a photographic interpreter could spot and identify large objects like buildings and some ships.
JOHN BLAHA
While the F-120 never got into military service as an interceptor or spy plane, it found a major role as an Aerospace trainer for NASA, the military, and Lockheed. The company didn't lost time flying passengers at the edge of space.
As for the F-4X story, it finally leaked into the press (probably with Israel tacit agreement). The aircraft was the basis of Craig Thomas techno-thriller Fireghost, later adapted into a movie by Clint Eastwood.
MIKE MULLANE
We got a pretty good joke about the F-4X and F-120 later. Let me tell that's story.
West Berlin was the best place to get eyeball to eyeball with the enemy, so the Air Force flew us there. This was 1987 and the infamous Berlin Wall still had two years of life left in it. We attended various classified briefings and got a helicopter tour of the Iron Curtain, flying over death strips guarded from watchtowers and barricaded with razor wire.
One evening we donned our uniforms, passed through a border checkpoint, and walked into East Berlin for supper. The city was still considered occupied and the military personnel of the occupying countries could pass into one another’s zones, although it was a one-sided passage. The East didn’t allow their troops into the West, knowing they would never come back.
In our walk from West to East we traveled back to 1945. Color had yet to come to this part of the world. Everything was gray and drab, even the clothing of the women. Remote-control TV cameras mounted on buildings watched us and other pedestrians. The streets were heavily patrolled by Kalashnikov-toting East German and Soviet guards. They glared at us like we were the enemy, which, of course, we were. As we passed one pair of guards, I pointed to a medal on my chest and said to John Blaha (class of 1980) in an intentionally loud voice, “And I got this one for killing ten commies.” The hostile expressions of the guards didn’t change. Apparently they didn’t speak English, which was probably a good thing for me.
Our Air Force host led us to his favorite East Berlin restaurant. I was prepared to be disappointed, but the place was clean, brightly lit, and staffed with young and beautiful East German frauleins. As we entered, the rest of the patrons, all East German and Soviet military officers, gave us their best game face. We ignored them. Several tables were shoved together to accommodate our entourage and we got down to the business of drinking. We were soon a rowdy spectacle for the rest of the crowd. They stared at us with disapproving expressions, as if laughing and smiling were forbidden in the workers’ paradise.
Later in the evening an intoxicated John Blaha grabbed a vase of daffodils and began to peer into each bloom with the focus of a horticulturist. I wondered if he had slipped into alcohol poisoning, but he whispered to me, “I’ll bet the KGB has bugged this vase. They’re probably in a back room listening to everything we’re saying. Well, I’ll give them something to think about.” He lifted the flowers to his mouth like a microphone and began to speak loudly into their blooms: “Mike, wasn’t that briefing about our new F-99 Mach 7 fighter really interesting?” Then he handed the vase to me.
I joined in the fun. “Yeah, and to think Mach 7 is its single -engine speed.”
The others at the table picked up on our disinformation campaign and the vase of flowers went from hand to hand while the rest of our group made even more outrageous claims about secret weapon systems we had recently seen or flown. Meanwhile, the humorless commie diners stared at us as if we were mad. Since we were talking into daffodil blooms, I could understand their bewilderment.
When the vase finally made it back to Blaha, he closed the floor show by speaking into it in an exceptionally loud voice. “Why is it that visiting Soviet basketball teams never play the Celtics or Lakers? Whenever they come to the USA they always play some piss-poor university team. What are they…pussies?” We all wondered how that would translate back in the Kremlin.
Imagine my shock when, several months later, Blaha ran into my office with a newspaper article describing how the Soviets, for the first time in history, were going to allow their basketball team to play an exhibition game with an NBA team. “I told you that vase was bugged,” Blaha shouted. We laughed at the image of an army of KGB spies hunting for that F-99 fighter.
