Johnson had met privately with an unnamed official to try to convince the CIA to allow a small cadre of Lockheed scientists and engineers to return to Area 51 for proof-of-concept tests. There and only there, Johnson argued, could his group do what needed to be done to meet the CIA’s grueling radar-evasion demands. During this intense design phase, and despite the secrecy of the project, Lockheed was not the only contractor bidding on the job. Who exactly would land the CIA’s contract to build the U-2’s replacement airplane was still up in the air. The federal government liked to foster competition between defense contractors, which meant aerospace contractor Convair was also in play, hoping to secure the CIA’s hundred-million-dollar contract for itself. Johnson knew reducing the aircraft’s observables was his best shot at getting the contract. Permission was granted, and in the late summer of 1959, fifty Skunk Works employees returned to Area 51.
The days of measuring child-size airplane models in a tiny chamber in Burbank were over. The time had come to put a full-scale model of the world’s first stealth airplane to the test. “On 31 March we started to build a full scale mockup and elevation device to raise the mockup 50 feet in the air for radar tests,” Johnson wrote in documents declassified in July 2007. What Johnson was imagining in this “elevation device” would eventually become the legendary Area 51 pylon, or radar test pole.
Lockheed engineers brought with them a mock-up of the aircraft so detailed that it could easily be mistaken for the real thing. For accurate radar results, the model had to represent everything the real aircraft would be, from the size of the rivets to the slope on the chines. It had taken more than four months to build. When it was done, the wooden airplane, with its 102-foot-long fuselage and 55-foot-long wooden wings, was packed up in a wooden crate in preparation for its journey out to Area 51. Getting it there was a daunting task, and the road from Burbank to Area 51 needed to be prepared in advance. The transport crate had been disguised to look like a generic wide load, but the size made it considerably wider than wide. Crews were dispatched before the trip to remove obstructing road signs and to trim overhanging trees. In a few places along the highway, the road had to be made level.
What kind of cleanup went on at Area 51 before the arrival of Lockheed’s radar cross-section crew remains unknown. Twelve months had passed since the last atomic bomb had been exploded next door; it was code-named Titania, like the mischievous queen of the fairies from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. If there was a formal decontamination of Area 51 or a summation of what the radiation levels were and whether it was safe to return, those details remain classified. As it was, the radar test system Lockheed set up was only temporary. The CIA did not yet have presidential approval to proceed with the A-12. “I had no more than 50 people on the project,” Johnson wrote in a document called History of the Oxcart by the Builder, declassified in 2007. The small group of Skunk Workers bunked down in the Quonset huts where the U-2 pilots and engineers had once lived.
Beginning in the fall of 1959, a Lockheed C-47 shuttled engineers and mechanics from Burbank to Area 51 on Monday mornings and returned them home to their families late Friday afternoons. It was Ed Lovick’s first experience working at what he’d been told was Paradise Ranch. Because of Lovick’s key role in this phase of the project, he was transported in a Lockheed twin-engine Cessna, usually alone with the pilot. He disliked the commute because the fumes from the Cessna made him queasy. But once he arrived and deplaned he would lose himself in the intensity of the radar work going on. In Burbank, in the silence of the anechoic chamber, Lovick had been testing airplane models the size of his shoe. This full-size mock-up would reveal the results of two years’ worth of chamber work. “The only way to get accurate information of how a full-size aircraft would perform in radar testing was to subject the full size mock-up of the A-12 to radar beams,” Lovick explains.
At the edge of the dry lake bed, scientists mounted the airplane on the fifty-five-foot-high pole, centered in a concrete pad that would rise up and down from an underground chamber in the desert floor. “A control room was located underground to one side of the pad. An anemometer and a wind-direction weather vane were located near the edge of the pad, away from the line of sight,” Lovick recalls. The radar antennas, manned and monitored by EG&G, were located a mile away from the pole. “The nose of the mock-up would be tipped down so the radar would see the airplane’s belly, the same way that Soviet radar would see it. It was an elaborate and time-consuming process,” Lovick recalls. “The mock-up that was tested on the pole had to be housed in a hangar on the base at least a mile away. It was carried out and back on special carts.”