Friday, July 5, 2019

The last A -12 in production, 1964


3 comments:

  1. I had never heard of this bird so I had to look it up. Here is something that I found highly amusing on wiki:

    Because the A-12 was well ahead of its time, many new technologies had to be invented specifically for the Oxcart project with some remaining in use in present day. One of the biggest problems that engineers faced at that time was working with titanium.[9]

    In his book Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed, Ben Rich stated, "Our supplier, Titanium Metals Corporation, had only limited reserves of the precious alloy, so the CIA conducted a worldwide search and using third parties and dummy companies, managed to unobtrusively purchase the base metal from one of the world's leading exporters – the Soviet Union. The Russians never had an inkling of how they were actually contributing to the creation of the airplane being rushed into construction to spy on their homeland.

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    Replies
    1. I have that very book on my shelf, haven't had time to read it yet.

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  2. Still holds altitude and speed records.

    Lockheed and Johnson put this puppy together from scratch in four years from 1958 to 1962. We are unable to do projects like that that fast anymore. It is absolutely true that IQs are declining.

    More at

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_A-12

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