Death didn’t get him this time, and for that he was grateful. But somebody needed to fix this un-start problem, fast. With his feet firmly planted on the earth again, Collins discussed the issue of the un-starts with Bill Park during his debrief. Park was Lockheed’s chief flight-test pilot and he always sat patiently with the project pilots after their flights, listening intently about what went on during the flight and what needed work. No detail was too small. Park agreed with Collins; the un-start problem was major and had to be fixed before somebody died. Park was the liaison between the project pilots and Kelly Johnson, and Park was directed to Lockheed’s thermodynamicist Ben Rich to get the un-start problem solved. Park had experienced his own share of un-starts, and giving Ben Rich an ultimatum was not something he had any problem with.
Rich’s office was sparely decorated with a few trophies and some plaques on the walls. There were papers everywhere, and pencils with the erasers gone. A hand-cranked calculator and a metal slide rule sat on Rich’s desk. Park set his flight helmet down—it had its own crack, similar to Collins’s—and pointed to it. “Fix it,” Park said. “And I mean the un-start problem, not my helmet. Time to suit up, Ben. Time for you to see how it feels.” The pilots figured that the only way to get Ben Rich to understand just how unacceptable this un-start business was would be to have Rich experience the nightmare scenario himself, and there just happened to be a two-seater version of the Oxcart on base. The Air Force was currently testing its drone-carrying version of the Oxcart, the M-21/D-21, in the skies over Groom Lake, and the pilots had seen the two-seater going in and out of the hangar all week. Park told Ben Rich the time had come for him to take a Mach 3 ride.
In a burst of what he would later describe as “a crazy moment of weakness,” Ben Rich agreed. Rich was a self-described Jewish nerd. Totally unathletic, he was a kid who never made the high school baseball team. Before joining Skunk Works, Ben Rich had only one claim to fame: being awarded a patent for designing a nickel-chromium heating system that prevented a pilot’s penis from freezing to his urine elimination pipe. He was a design wizard, not an airplane cowboy. He’d never come close to flying supersonic before, and he had absolutely no desire to go that fast. But he was chief engineer for Skunk Works, so fixing the un-start problem was his job. “I’ll do it,” Ben Rich said.
Before Ben Rich could get into the world’s fastest aircraft, he had to go through a battery of physical tests. You can’t just climb into an aircraft that gets up to ninety thousand feet without being checked out in a pressure suit in an altitude chamber first. The flight surgeons on base prepped Rich for tests, the way they usually did pilots. Rich passed the physical and a few early stress tests but when he got to the pressure-chamber test—the one that simulated ejection at fifty thousand feet—things did not go as the engineer had planned. The moment the chamber door closed behind Ben Rich, he panicked. “I was sucking oxygen like a marathon runner and screaming, ‘Get me out of here!’” Rich later recalled. Without ever getting close to simulating what it was like to fly at Mach 3, let alone experiencing an un-start at that speed, Ben Rich admitted in his memoir that he had still nearly dropped dead from fright.
But the point was made. Rich dedicated all his efforts to fixing the un-start problem. Like so many engineering challenges facing the scientists at Area 51, fixing it involved great ingenuity. In this case, Rich and his team didn’t exactly fix the problem. Instead, they created a go-around that made things not so life-threatening for the pilots. Rich invented an electronic control that made sure that when one engine experienced an un-start, the second engine dropped its power as well. The control switch would then restart both engines at the same time. After the new fix, pilots were notified of the un-start by a loud buzzing noise in the cockpit. And as far as nearly getting knocked unconscious at 2,000 miles per hour, Oxcart pilots could cross that off their lists of concerns.
In addition to the problems the pilots were having getting the airplane up to speed, there were problems with the electronic countermeasures, or ECMs. The reports being analyzed back at Langley said if Operation Skylark was to happen over Cuba, cruise speed would have to be at a minimum Mach 2.8, because there was a real chance that the Soviet radar systems in Cuba would be able to detect Oxcart flights and possibly even shoot them down. While Project Palladium officers continue to work on jamming methods, the Office of Special Activities at the Pentagon decided that the solution lay in working to enhance stealth. The phenomenally low radar cross section on the Oxcart had to be lowered even further. This meant that Lockheed physicist Edward Lovick and the radar cross-section team were summoned back to Area 51.