“Radar works analogous to a bat,” Lovick explains. “The bat squeaks and the sound hits a bug. The squeak gets sent back to the bat and the bat measures time and distance to the bug through the echo it receives.” So how does one get the bug to absorb the squeak? “The way in which to solve the radar problem for us at Lockheed was to create a surface that would redirect radar returns. We needed to send them off in a direction other than back at the Soviet radars. We could also do this by absorbing radar returns, like a diaper absorbs liquid. In theory it was simple. But it turned out to be quite a complicated problem to solve.”
Lovick had been solving problems ever since he was a child growing up in Falls City, Nebraska, during the Depression—for instance, the time he wanted to learn to play the piano but did not want to disturb his family while he practiced. “I took the piano apart and reconfigured its parts to suppress the sound. Then I sent the vibrations from the strings electronically through a small amplifier to a headset I wore.” This was hardly something most fourteen-year-old children were doing in 1933. Four years later, at the age of eighteen, Lovick published his first article on radar, for Radio-Craft magazine. Inspired to think he might have a career in radar technology, he wrote to Lockheed Corporation in faraway California asking for a job. Lockheed turned him down. So he took a minimum-wage job as a radio repairman at a local Montgomery Ward, something that, at the age of ninety-one, he still considers a serendipitous career move. “What I learned at Montgomery Ward, in an employment capacity that today some might perceive as a dead-end job, would later play an important role in my future spy plane career.” Namely, that there is as much to learn from what doesn’t work as from what does.
To learn how to outfox radar, Lovick returned to the trial-and-error principles he’d first cultivated as a child. He set about designing and overseeing the building of Lockheed’s first anechoic chamber to test scale models of Skunk Works’ proposed new spy plane. “An anechoic chamber is an enclosed space covered in energy-absorbing materials, the by-product of which is noiselessness,” Lovick explains. It is so quiet inside the chamber that if a person stands alone inside its four walls, he can hear the blood flowing inside his body. “Particularly loud is the blood in one’s head,” Lovick notes. Only in such a strictly controlled environment could the physicist and his team accurately test how a one-twentieth-scale model would react to radar beams aimed at it. Lockheed’s wood shop built tiny airplane models for the physicists, not unlike the models kids play with. Lovick and the team painstakingly applied radar-absorbing material to the models then strung them up in the anechoic chamber to test. Based on the radar echo results, the shape and design of the spy plane would change. So would its name. Over the next several months, the design numbers for the Archangel-1 went up incrementally, through eleven major changes. This is why the final and official Agency designation for the airplane was Archangel-12, or A-12 for short.
While imaging and then designing Lockheed’s new spy plane, Edward Lovick accompanied Kelly Johnson on trips to Washington, DC. There, the men met with Richard Bissell and President Eisenhower’s science advisers to deliver progress reports and attend briefings on the aircraft. President Eisenhower called it “the Big One.” On these trips to DC, Bissell, whom Lovick knew only as Mr. B., would pepper Kelly Johnson with technical questions about stealth, or “low observables,” which Lovick was responsible for answering. “We shared test data from the chamber work, which was going along fine,” Lovick recalls. “But the Customer always wanted better. No matter how low we felt our observables were, the Customer always wanted them to be lower.” This meant more work. In a final design stage, Skunk Works aerodynamicists and the radar team added downward slopes, called chines, on either side of the body of the aircraft, making the airplane look like a cobra with wings. With the plane’s underbelly now flat, its radar cross section was reduced by an astonishing 90 percent. Still, Richard Bissell wanted a spy plane closer to invisible. Lovick needed a full-scale laboratory. Johnson got an idea: return to Area 51.