Lovick was granted his top secret security clearance and briefed on the U-2 aircraft. He learned about the death of test pilot Robert Sieker at Area 51, just four months before. “My first assignment at Lockheed came as a direct result of this tragedy,” Lovick recalls. Sieker’s death had inadvertently played a role in the invention of the most significant military application of the twentieth century, and it led Ed Lovick to become known as the grandfather of stealth. What the Boston Group at MIT had attempted to do—add stealth features via paint to an existing airplane—had proved futile. But what Lovick and his team would soon discover was that stealth could be achieved if it was designed as a feature in the early drawing boards.
“The purpose of stealth, or antiradar technology,” Lovick explains, “is to keep the enemy from sensing or detecting an aircraft, from tracking it, and therefore from shooting it down. The goal is to trick the enemy’s air defenses though camouflage or concealment.” Camouflage has been one of the most basic foundations of military strength since man first made spears. In ancient warfare, soldiers concealed themselves from the enemy using tree branches as disguise. Millennia later, American independence was gained partly because the British ignored this fundamental; their bright red coats made them easy targets for a band of revolutionaries in drab, ragtag dress. In the animal kingdom, all species depend on antipredator adaptation for survival, from the chameleon, which defines the idea, to the arctic fox, which turns from brown in summer months to white in winter. Lockheed’s U-2s were being tracked over the Soviet Union because they had no camouflage or antiradar technologies, so the Soviets could not only detect the U-2s but also accurately track the spy planes’ precise flight paths.
To stay ahead of the Russians, Richard Bissell envisioned a new spy plane that would outfox Soviet radar. The CIA wanted an airplane with a radar cross section so low it would be close to invisible, the theory being that the Russians couldn’t object to what they didn’t know was there.
The aircraft would be radically different, unlike anything the world had ever seen, or rather, not seen, before. It would beat Soviet advances in radar technology in three fields: height, speed, and stealth. The airplane needed to fly at ninety thousand feet and at a remarkably unprecedented speed of twenty-three hundred miles per hour, or Mach 3. In the late 1950s, for an aircraft to leave the tarmac on its own power and sustain even Mach 2 flight was unheard-of. Speed offered cover. In the event that a Mach 3 aircraft was tracked by radar, that kind of speed would make it extremely difficult to shoot down. By comparison, a U-2, which flew around five hundred miles per hour, would be seen by a Soviet SA-2 missile system approximately ten minutes before it was in shoot-down range, where it would remain for a full five minutes. An aircraft traveling at Mach 3 would be seen by Soviet radar for fewer than a hundred and twenty seconds before it could be fired upon, and it would remain in target range for fewer than twenty seconds. After that twenty-second window closed, the airplane would be too close for a Soviet missile to fire on it. The missile couldn’t chase the airplane because, even though the top speed for a missile at the time was Mach 3.5, once a missile gets that far into the upper atmosphere, it loses precision and speed. Shooting down an airplane flying at three times the speed of sound at ninety thousand feet was equivalent to hitting a bullet whizzing by seventeen miles away with another bullet.
Lockheed was confident the speed element was possible, but it wasn’t in charge of building the jet engines; the Pratt and Whitney corporation was. Height was achievable; Lockheed had mastered flying at seventy thousand feet with the U-2. Stealth was the feature that would be the most challenging, and it was also the single most important feature of the spy plane to the CIA. To create stealth, Lovick and his team had to master minutiae involving radar returns. Eventually, they’d need a wide-open space and a full-size airplane, which is how Ed Lovick and the Lockheed radar cross-section team became the first group of men after the atomic blast to set up shop at Area 51. But first, they did this inside a room within a hangar at Lockheed.