By now, Barnes had gotten friendly with the X-15 pilots. Even though they had never met in person, a great rapport had developed between them; understandable, given how much time they spent communicating on headset during flights. Barnes cared about the pilots’ safety more than he cared about what his site manager perceived to be insubordination on his part. So Barnes told Dryden exactly what he believed was true. “I’ve been in radar long enough to know there’s no such thing as an inherent problem in radar,” Barnes said. “I agree with the airplane. If you don’t fix your radar, you’re gonna kill one of the pilots one of these days.”
There was a deathly silence on the network. Back at Dryden, the communication had been overheard by the pilots who were in the pilots’ lounge. X-15 pilot “Joe Walker got on a headset and said, ‘Effective immediately, there will be no X-15 flights until the radar problem is fixed.’” Now Dryden had no choice but to get on it. First, they flew up to the Beatty tracking station in a T-33, where they flew calibration flights to compare radar data with the airplane’s altimeter. At Ely, they did the same thing. Barnes was right. The radar at Beatty was correct. Though both agreed with their data, the Dryden Flight Research Center and the Ely tracking station were off by two thousand feet. The radars were torn down and reassembled, to no avail. It was finally discovered that they were vintage radars, left over from World War II, and they had never been retrofitted with the field modification the way the radar at Beatty had. Unitech got a huge Christmas bonus, and no one got killed.
Of major significance for Barnes was that somewhere off in the black operations ether a man named John Grace had been listening as the whole scenario went down. John Grace worked for the CIA, and Barnes’s name rang a bell. Grace asked his staff to look into this Barnes character, the man whose unique confidence in radar had wound up saving the day. Grace wanted to get Barnes hired for a project that would be coming to Groom Lake—something that even Barnes had been in the dark on back then.
Working at Beatty meant running multiple jobs, and there was a second aircraft Barnes was in charge of tracking—the XB-70. This experimental program was all that remained of General LeMay’s once-beloved B-70 bomber now that it had been canceled by Congress, despite four billion dollars invested. The X in front of B-70 indicated that the bomber was now an experimental test bed for supersonic transport. It was a behemoth of an airplane, the fastest-flying six-engined aircraft in the world. On June 8, 1966, the mission for the day was a photo op with the XB-70 as the centerpiece. An F-4, an F-5, a T-38, and an F-104 would fly in formation alongside. Barnes was in charge of monitoring telemetry, radar, and communications from the Beatty tracking station. “General Electrics had built the engines on all six airplanes flying that day,” Barnes says. “They wanted a photograph of all their aircraft flying in a tight formation for the cover of their shareholders’ meeting manual that year.”
It was a clear day, with very little natural turbulence in the air. The six aircraft took off from Dryden and headed west. About thirty minutes later, the pilots began getting into formation over the Mojave Desert. Barnes was monitoring data and listening on headphones. Using his personal Fischer recording system, Barnes was also taping the pilot transmissions. For this particular photo op, the X-15 pilot, Joe Walker, whom Barnes had gotten to know well, was flying in the F-104. Walker was on the right wing of the aircraft and was trying to hold his position when turbulence by the XB-70’s six engines made him uncomfortable. “Walker came on the radio and spoke very clearly,” Barnes recalls. “He said, ‘I’m opposing this mission. It is too turbulent and it has no scientific value.’”
Only a few seconds later, a catastrophic midair collision occurred. “We heard the pilots screaming, ‘Midair! Midair! And I realized at first the XB-70 didn’t know it had been hit,” Barnes remembers. Joe Walker’s F-104 had slammed into the much larger airplane, caught fire, and exploded. On the XB-70, both vertical stabilizers had been shorn off, and the airplane began to crash. Continuing to pick up speed, the XB-70 whirled uncontrollably into a flat spin. As it headed toward the ground, parts of the aircraft tore loose. One of the XB-70 pilots, Al White, ejected. The other, Major Carl Cross, was trapped inside the airplane as it slammed into the desert floor. There, just a few miles from Barstow, California, it exploded into flames.