AP 118 · No. 10 Section II · Aircraft Plate 259 / 324

Plate 259 of 324 · Cold War · Mach 3 strategic reconnaissance aircraft

Lockheed A-12

A-12 60-6925 (Article 122), painted as Lockheed A-12 60-6925 (Article 122), the first production-standard A-12, as displayed on the flight deck of USS Intrepid at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum, New York: the CIA’s single-seat Mach 3 reconnaissance aircraft and forerunner of the SR-71, with one cockpit and a camera bay behind it, a long flat-sided forebody edged by sharp chines running to the nose, a thin delta wing with two Pratt & Whitney J58 engines in nacelles at mid-span, each with a pointed inlet spike, two inward-canted all-moving fins on the nacelles and a short flattened tail cone: overall weathered satin black with no national insignia, lettering or serial, a yellow ‘RESCUE’ placard and a red-and-white ejection-seat triangle on both sides of the forebody, small red marks at the fin pivots, red inlet linings and red exhaust blanking plates, as photographed aboard Intrepid in 2016–23 (no A-12 is in a UK museum; shape from the airwar.ru A-12 three-view and the SR-71 drawing, checked against photographs; the small stencils are not legible in any photograph and are plain blocks).

3D model

Turn it over

A procedural model built in Blender from published dimensions, drawings and photographs, painted as Lockheed A-12 60-6925 (Article 122), the first production-standard A-12, as displayed on the flight deck of USS Intrepid at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum, New York: the CIA’s single-seat Mach 3 reconnaissance aircraft and forerunner of the SR-71, with one cockpit and a camera bay behind it, a long flat-sided forebody edged by sharp chines running to the nose, a thin delta wing with two Pratt & Whitney J58 engines in nacelles at mid-span, each with a pointed inlet spike, two inward-canted all-moving fins on the nacelles and a short flattened tail cone: overall weathered satin black with no national insignia, lettering or serial, a yellow ‘RESCUE’ placard and a red-and-white ejection-seat triangle on both sides of the forebody, small red marks at the fin pivots, red inlet linings and red exhaust blanking plates, as photographed aboard Intrepid in 2016–23 (no A-12 is in a UK museum; shape from the airwar.ru A-12 three-view and the SR-71 drawing, checked against photographs; the small stencils are not legible in any photograph and are plain blocks). Drag to orbit, scroll or pinch to zoom · download .glb (907 KB)

Data plate

Specification

First flight, number built and top speed are for the whole family (A-12 (Project Oxcart)); engine, crew and dimensions are for the A-12 60-6925 (Article 122) modelled here.

History

The A-12

Even before Francis Gary Powers’s U-2 was shot down over the Soviet Union in May 1960, the CIA knew the U-2’s height would not keep it safe for long. It wanted a successor that would fly so high and so fast that it could not be caught, and also be hard to see on radar. Kelly Johnson’s Skunk Works at Lockheed won the contract in 1959 with a design called A-12, the twelfth in a series of studies, and the programme was named Oxcart. To survive the heat of flight at more than three times the speed of sound the airframe was made almost entirely of titanium, a metal Lockheed had to learn to work and much of which came, through front companies, from the Soviet Union. The chines along the forebody and the inward-canted fins helped to reduce its radar return.

The first A-12 was taken by road to the secret test base at Groom Lake, Nevada, and made its first flight on 25 April 1962, with Lockheed’s Lou Schalk at the controls. The J58 engines were not yet ready, so the early flights were made with lower-powered J75s. Thirteen A-12s were built, twelve single-seaters and one two-seat trainer, and the same airframe was developed into the YF-12 interceptor, the M-21 drone carrier and the US Air Force’s two-seat SR-71. Testing was long and hard, and five A-12s were lost in accidents.

The A-12 was never flown over the Soviet Union. Its only operational missions, under the name Black Shield, were flown from Kadena on Okinawa from 31 May 1967, over North Vietnam and, after the USS Pueblo was seized in January 1968, over North Korea. By then the Air Force’s SR-71 was entering service, and the government would not pay for two fleets. The A-12s were withdrawn in June 1968 and stored at Lockheed’s Palmdale plant, and their existence was not made public until the 1980s. No A-12 is in a UK museum.

This airframe

A-12 60-6925 (Article 122)

60-6925The airframe modelled

60-6925, Lockheed Article 122, was the second A-12 built and the first to production standard. Before it flew it spent several months mounted on a pole at Groom Lake for radar cross-section tests, and it was then used mainly for test flying in Nevada. With the rest of the fleet it was stored at Palmdale from 1968. In 1991 it went on display in New York on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Intrepid, now the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum. The model shows it as photographs of it aboard Intrepid in 2016–23 do: overall weathered satin black with no national insignia, lettering or serial; a yellow ‘RESCUE’ placard and a red-and-white ejection-seat triangle on both sides of the forebody; small red marks at the fin pivots; red linings in the inlets and red blanking plates in the exhausts. Its shape comes from a three-view of the A-12 and from the SR-71 drawing used for the SR-71 in this Hangar, checked against photographs. The small stencils cannot be read in any photograph and are shown as plain blocks.

Where to see one

Not on charge

Survivors are in US museums, among them 60-6925 aboard the Intrepid in New York. None is in a UK museum.

All 324 plates

Profiles and models are procedural interpretations built in Blender from published dimensions, three-view drawings and photographs of each airframe. Treat the museum aircraft as the reference.