Isegoria

Oxcart pilot Kenneth Collins was taking the experimental spy plane out for a subsonic test run, like a race horse out for a trot, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), when something went wrong:

“Suddenly, the altimeter was rapidly unwinding, indicating a rapid loss of speed,” Collins recalls. In heavy clouds, Collins had no visual references to determine where he was. “I advanced the throttles to counter the loss of airspeed. But instead of responding, and without any warning, the aircraft pitched up and flipped over with me trapped underneath. Then it went into an inverted flat spin.” The Agency’s million-dollar A-12 Oxcart was unrecoverable and crashing. Collins needed to bail out.

Collins had no idea how close he was to the Earth’s surface because he was in the middle of a cloud and couldn’t see out of it. He also did not know if he was over a mountain range, which would mean he had even less time to eject. Collins closed his visor and grabbed the ejection ring that was positioned between his legs. He pushed his head firmly against the headrest and pulled. This kind of radical ejection from a prized top secret aircraft is not easy to forget, and Collins recalls dramatic details. “The canopy of the aircraft flew off and disappeared but I was still upside down, with the aircraft on top of me,” he explains. “Having pulled the D-ring, my boot stirrups snapped back. The explosive system in the seat rocket engaged, shooting me downward and away from the aircraft.” First Collins separated from the Oxcart. Next he separated from his seat. After that, he was a body falling through the air until a small parachute called a drogue snapped open, slowing his body down. In his long history of flying airplanes, this was the first time Collins had ever had to bail out. Falling to Earth, he tried to get a sense of what state he might be over. Was he in Nevada or Utah? The ground below him appeared to be high-desert terrain, low hills but no mountains that he could see. He was still too high up to discern if there were roads. As he floated down, in the distance he spotted the heavy black aircraft tumbling through the air until it disappeared from sight. “I remember seeing a large, black column of smoke rise up from the desert floor and thinking, That’s my airplane.” Only now there was nothing left of it but an incinerated hunk of titanium smoldering on the ground. Fate was a hunter, all right.

[…]

Collins unclipped himself from the parachute and began collecting everything around him. Flight-protocol pages and filmstrips of navigational maps fluttered across the desert. As he hurried to collect the top secret papers, he was surprised to hear a car motor in the distance. Looking up, he saw a pickup truck bouncing toward him along a dirt desert road. “As it got closer, I could see there were three men in the front cab,” Collins recalls. “The truck pulled alongside me and came to a stop. I could see they had my aircraft canopy in the back of their pickup.”

The men, who appeared to be local ranchers, sized up Collins. Because the flight had been subsonic, Collins was wearing a standard flight suit and not a high-altitude pressure suit, which would have made him look like an astronaut or an alien and likely prompted a lot more questions. Instead, the ranchers asked Collins if he wanted a ride. They said they knew exactly where his airplane had crashed, and if he hopped in, they’d give him a ride back to his plane. Until that moment, no civilian without a top secret security clearance had ever laid eyes on the Oxcart, and Collins had strict orders to keep it that way. He’d been briefed on what to do in a security breach such as this one, given a cover story by the Agency that fit perfectly with the proximity to the Nevada Test Site—and with the times. Collins told the ranchers that his aircraft was an F-105 fighter jet and that it had a nuclear weapon on board. The men’s expressions changed from helpful to fearful. “They got very nervous and said if I wanted a ride, I better jump in quick because they were not staying around Wendover for long,” Collins recalls.

The ranchers drove Collins to the nearest highway patrol office. There, he jumped out, took his airplane canopy from the back of the truck, and watched the men speed off. Collins reached into the pocket of his flight suit. Inside, he found the note that read call this number, followed by a telephone number. Also in his pocket was a dime. Inside the highway patrol office, Collins asked the officer on duty where he could find the nearest pay phone. The man pointed around to the side of the building, and using the Agency’s dime, Collins made the phone call that no Agency pilot ever wants to make. A little less than an hour later, Kelly Johnson’s private airplane landed in Wendover, Utah, along with several men from the CIA. After a brief exchange of words so Kelly Johnson could confirm that Collins was physically okay, Collins boarded the airplane. During the two-hour flight to the Lovelace Clinic in New Mexico, no one said a word. “There would be plenty of talking to do during the debriefing,” Collins says, “and with the Agency’s tape recorders taking everything down.” A crash of a CIA spy plane meant someone had some explaining to do.

[…]

“Maintenance guys, security guys, navigators, we all took off in trucks and airplanes and headed to Utah,” Pizzo explains. With Collins confirmed alive, the goal now was to locate every single piece of the wrecked airplane, “every nut, bolt, and sliver of fuselage.”

[…]

Once they found the site, the work crew had a lot of digging to do. The aircraft, Article #123, hadn’t broken apart in flight, but given the speed at which it had hit the earth, huge sections of the airplane had become buried. Critically important was locating every loose piece of the titanium fuselage. The metal was rare and expensive, and the fact that the Agency’s spy plane was hand-forged from titanium was a closely held secret. If a news reporter or a local got a hold of even the smallest piece of the aircraft, its unusual composition would raise questions that might threaten the cover of the entire Oxcart program. Equally critical to national security was making sure the radar-absorbing materials, known as composite and that covered the entire airplane, remained in government control. If a piece of the plane got into the wrong hands, the results could be disastrous: the Russians could learn the secret of stealth.

Along with a crew of more than one hundred men, the Agency brought its own horses to the crash site. Men from Groom Lake took to the desert terrain on horseback and began their search.

[…]

In Air Force culture, when an airplane crashes, someone has to take the blame. Collins explains: “In the SAC [Strategic Air Command] mind-set, if there’s an accident, the wing commander suffers the consequences.” Instead, Collins believes, Holbury tried to get Collins to be the fall guy. “Holbury didn’t want blame; he wanted a star. He wanted to become a general, so he tried to put the blame on me. After the crash, even before the investigation, he requested that I be fired.”

Collins was unwilling to accept that. Fortunately for Collins’s career, Kelly Johnson, the builder of the aircraft, didn’t care about blame as much as he wanted to find out what had gone wrong with his airplane. Listening to Collins describe what had happened during the debriefing, Johnson couldn’t figure out what caused the aircraft to crash. He wondered if there was something Collins had forgotten, or was maybe leaving out. “I was clear in my mind that the crash was a mechanical error and not a pilot error,” Collins explains. “So when Kelly Johnson asked would I try unconventional methods like hypnosis and truth serum, I said yes. I was willing to do anything I could to get to the truth.” While the Pentagon’s accident board conducted a traditional investigation, Collins submitted to a far less conventional way of seeking out the truth of the cause of the crash.

Inside the flight surgeon’s office at Lockheed, Collins sat with a CIA-contracted hypnotist from Boston, “a small, rotund man dressed in a fancy suit,” as Collins recalls. “He tried very hard to put me in a trance, only it didn’t work. I don’t think he realized that hypnotizing a fighter pilot was not as easy as he thought it might be.” Next, Collins was injected with sodium thiopental, also known as truth serum. Collins remembers the day well. “I told my wife, Jane, I was going to work for a few hours, which was unusual to begin with because it was a Sunday. The point of the treatment was to see if I could remember details other than those I relayed in the original debrief with the CIA. But yes, even with the sodium pentothal in my system, everything I said was exactly the same. The treatment takes a lot out of you and after it was over, I was very unsteady on my feet. Three CIA agents brought me home late that Sunday evening. One drove my car, the other two carried me inside and laid me down on the couch. I was still loopy from the drugs. They handed Jane the car keys and left without saying a word.”

[…]

After a lengthy investigation it was determined that a tiny, pencil-size part called a pitot tube had in fact caused the crash. The pitot tube measured the air coming into the aircraft and thereby controlled the airspeed indicator. Unlike in a car, where the driver can feel relative speed, in a plane, without a proper reading from an airspeed indicator, a pilot has no awareness of how fast he is going, and without correct airspeed information a pilot cannot land. When Collins flew into the cloud, the pitot tube reacted adversely to the moisture inside and froze. The false airspeed indicator caused the aircraft to stall. As a result of the stall, the Oxcart flipped upside down and crashed.

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