In June of 1966, Richard Helms was made director of the CIA. Now one of the most powerful men in Washington, Helms lobbied hard on Oxcart’s behalf, and in July, the Joint Chiefs of Staff voted in favor of sending Oxcart over North Vietnam to gather intelligence on missile sites there. McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk dug in their heels and again offered dissent. Both men argued that putting CIA planes on the ground at the U.S. Air Force base in Okinawa, Japan, posed too great a political risk. McNamara was playing the same card he had played with John McCone when McCone was running the CIA, namely, that if a CIA spy plane were to get shot down on an espionage mission, the president would face the same backlash that Eisenhower had after the Gary Powers incident.
In August, a vote for or against Oxcart deployment was tallied in the presence of President Johnson. The majority voted against deployment, and the president upheld that decision. The ice around the Oxcart program was getting thin. Colonel Slater responded as best he knew how: when the going gets tough, the tough keep flying. Back at Area 51, he was determined to keep his men mission-ready. There was no point in letting his men know that the program was on the verge of collapse. Who could have imagined that the seminal Oxcart was in danger of being mothballed before it ever got a job? Instead, Slater gave his men a new goal. He wanted them to shave six days off the time it took the squadron to go from mission notification to deployment overseas. It had been a twenty-one-day response time; Slater now wanted it reduced by nearly 30 percent.
Area 51 became like a Boy Scout camp on steroids, a stomping ground for the world’s fastest and now most expensive airplane. The six aircraft that would be used for deployment were put through a whole new battery of flight-simulation tests. Commander Slater kept pilot morale high and Pentagon dissent at bay. A bowling alley was built. The pilots kept in shape playing water sports in the Olympic-size swimming pool. They kept their minds clear flying model airplanes and hitting golf balls off the dry lake bed up into the hills. Even the contractors were encouraged to pick up the pace. Slater challenged a lazy work crew to dig a lake. Five decades later, Groom Lake’s artificial body of water would still be referred to as Slater Lake. With the aircraft now flying at full speed and maximum height, it was time to break performance records. In December of 1966, one of the pilots set a speed record that would last into the twenty-first century. Bill Park flew 10,195 miles in a little over six hours at an average speed of 1,660 miles per hour. Park had flown over all four corners of America and back to the base in less time than most men spend at the office on any given day. To the project pilots itching for missions, it seemed like they could be deployed any day. And then, in January of 1967, tragedy struck.
Project pilot Walt Ray was, by all accounts, a terrific pilot. He and his new wife, Diane, also made for good company with Ken Collins and his wife, Jane. Diane and Jane did not have to keep up any pretenses; they both accepted that they had no idea what their husbands really did besides fly airplanes. The Rays and the Collinses lived close to each other in the San Fernando Valley, and they would often go on holidays together. “Once we took a small prop plane and flew down to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, and spent a couple days down there playing tennis, swimming, and flying around,” Collins recalls. “There were so few runways in Mexico in the early sixties, mostly we landed in big fields. The goats would see us coming, or hear us coming; they’d run away, and we’d land. Walt Ray loved to fly as much as I did. We’d take turns flying the airplane.” Quiet and unassuming, Walt Ray also liked to hunt. “Right after New Year, Walt took me with him on a RON [remain overnight] in Montana. We did some hunting, spent the night in a motel, and flew home,” Roger Andersen remembers. The following day, on the afternoon of January 5, 1967, Walt Ray was flying an Oxcart on a short test flight. At the Ranch, it had been snowing. Walt Ray was passing over the tiny town of Farmington, New Mexico, at exactly 3:22 p.m. when he looked down and saw the black line on his fuel gauge move suddenly, dramatically, and dangerously to the left.
“I have a loss of fuel and I do not know where it is going,” Walt Ray told Colonel Slater through his headset, breaking radio silence to communicate on a radio frequency reserved for emergencies. The transcript would remain classified until 2007. “I think I can make it,” Walt Ray said. He was 130 miles from the tarmac at Area 51, flying subsonic to conserve fuel. But twenty minutes later, over Hanksville, Utah, Ray declared an emergency. He’d gotten the aircraft down to thirty thousand feet when one of its engines flamed out. The sixty-seven-million-dollar spy plane had run out of fuel.