Martin had caught glimpses of General LeMay, shorter than he’d expected but chomping on his signature cigar like he did on the cover of magazines. Martin had also seen General Doolittle, of the harrowing World War II Doolittle Raid. Harry Martin never shook hands with any of the generals; they were busy and way above his pay grade. Besides, Martin’s left hand was wrapped in a bandage, which made work slightly challenging, although he was most grateful to still have a thumb. Martin had been working with a saw and a pipe the week before when his tool slipped and nearly severed his most important finger. Fortunately, a flight surgeon was working with a project pilot in the hangar next door and Martin got his thumb sewn together fast.
It was April 25, 1962. Just a few buildings down from where Martin worked, Lockheed test pilot Louis Schalk sat in a recliner inside a Quonset hut taking a nap when a man from the Agency put a hand on his shoulder and said, “Lou, wake up!” The Oxcart was ready and it was time for Lou Schalk to fly. Two physiological support division officers helped Schalk into a flight suit, which looked like a coverall. There was no need for a pressure suit because today Schalk was only going to make a taxi test. Out on the tarmac, an engineer rolled up a metal set of stairs and Schalk climbed up into the strange-looking aircraft. There were no observers other than the crew. John Parangosky, who authored a secret interagency monograph called “The Oxcart History,” declassified in 2007, noted that if anyone had been watching he would have been unable to process what he was looking at. “A casual observer would have been startled by the appearance of this vehicle; he would have perhaps noticed especially its extremely long, slim shape, its two enormous jet engines, its long, sharp projecting nose, and its swept-back wings which appeared far too short to support the fuselage in flight.” It was a revolutionary airplane, Parangosky wrote, able to fly at three times the speed of sound for more than three thousand miles without refueling—all the way from Nevada to DC in less than an hour. “Toward the end of its flight, when fuel began to run low, it could cruise at over 90,000 feet.”
But of course there were no casual observers present at Area 51. On that sunny day at Area 51 in April of 1962, this was the only A-12 Oxcart that Lockheed had completed for the CIA so far.
As for all the remarkable things the aircraft had been meticulously designed to do, it wasn’t able to do any of them yet. Sitting on the tarmac, the aircraft was 160,000 pounds of titanium outfitted with millions of dollars’ worth of expensive equipment that no one yet knew how to work, certainly not above seventy thousand feet. Like its predecessor the U-2, the Oxcart was an aircraft without a manual. Unlike the U-2, this aircraft was technologically forty years ahead of its time. Some of the records the Oxcart would soon set would hold all the way into the new millennium.
Lou Schalk fired up the engines and began rolling down the runway for the taxi test. To everyone’s surprise, including Lou Schalk’s, the aircraft unexpectedly got lift. Given the enormous engine power, the aircraft suddenly started flying—lifting up just twenty feet off the ground. Stunned and horrified, Kelly Johnson watched from the control tower. “The aircraft began wobbling,” Johnson wrote in his notes, which “set up lateral oscillations which were horrible to see.” Johnson feared the airplane might crash before its first official flight. Schalk was equally surprised and decided not to try to circle around. Instead he set the plane down as quickly as he could. This meant landing in the dry lake bed, nearly two miles beyond where the runway ended. When it hit the earth, the aircraft sent up a huge cloud of dust, obscuring it from view. Schalk turned the plane around and drove back toward the control towers, still engulfed in a cloud of dust and dirt. When he got back, the Lockheed engineers ran up to the airplane on the metal rack of stairs. Kelly Johnson had only four words for Schalk: “What in Hell, Lou?” For about fifteen very tense minutes, Johnson had thought Lou Schalk had wrecked the CIA’s only Oxcart spy plane.