Of all the pastimes, the unanimous favorite was flying model airplanes using remote control. “We had two areas for flying model planes,” Trapp recalls. “Out on the grass by the golf course, and on the tarmac out on the dry lake. Sometimes the airplanes would go so far and so high they’d get lost. A guy would come up to me and say, ‘Hey, Charlie, when you’re out in the helicopter, can you keep your eye out for my model plane? It’s got a five-foot wing span and yellow wings.’ We found ways to entertain ourselves at Area 51. We had to; there weren’t any girls.”
The man who took the model airplane flying most seriously was Frank Murray. He was also the chase pilot with the most flying time during Project Oxcart. “You could always find Frank sitting in his room gluing model airplanes together,” Colonel Slater recalls. “That was his idea of fun. Or maybe he was the only guy at 51 who wasn’t half-drunk at eleven o’clock at night.” Which is how Murray accumulated the most flying time. “If somebody’s kid got hurt in the middle of the night, which happened more than you think, and I need a pilot to get someone off base fast, I’d round up Frank,” Colonel Slater explains. When master fuels sergeant Harry Martin’s grandfather died, it was Frank Murray who flew him back east so he could get to the funeral in time. “Frank was always willing to do the job,” Colonel Slater explains. “Most people require time off from flying. Not Frank.”
Murray flew model airplanes to keep his head clear for flying real airplanes. “Everyone had their different thing,” Colonel Slater says. “Bud Wheelon from CIA used to want to play tennis at midnight when he was on base. Some liked to go hunting up in the mountains by the old Sheehan mine. Holbury used to like to make the guard dogs run. Some guys threw rocks at rattlesnakes. I liked to drive around in the jeep and find petrified wood.”
As an Oxcart chase pilot, Murray spent his days and nights chasing the Mach 3 airplane in the F-101. The Voodoo was a two-seat, supersonic jet fighter the Air Force used to accompany the Oxcart on takeoffs and landings. “We flew it with Oxcart up through the special operating area, or Yuletide, which was the airspace just north of the base,” Murray explains. “The Agency had us fly alongside the Oxcart in the Voodoo until we couldn’t keep up with the Oxcart anymore.” Flying chase meant Murray got assigned most of the grunt work and enjoyed little of the glamour. “I was a little jealous of the Oxcart pilots,” he admits. “How can a pilot not be? But I was happy as a pig in the Voodoo. For a farm boy from San Diego, flying chase for the 1129th was a good time.”
Murray flew the F-101 doing just about everything that needed to be done in support of Oxcart operations. This included flying against the Red Dog simulators, observing tanker refuels, overseeing takeoffs and landings, and flying Lockheed photographers around on CIA photo shoots. But Murray’s path in life took a significant redirection when General Ledford, the head of the Office of Special Activities at the Pentagon, decided he wanted to learn how to fly the F-101 while he was overseeing activities at Area 51. Murray recalls: “The general had been a bomber pilot in World War Two but he hadn’t ever flown anything as fast as the Voodoo could go, which was around twelve hundred or thirteen hundred miles per hour. So he decided that he wanted to learn how to fly it and when it came to choosing an IP, an instructor pilot, the general chose me.”