For close on eight years, from selection to the programme’s termination, Ken Collins lived and breathed the CIA’s Project ‘Oxcart’ — testing the Mach 3-plus Lockheed A-12 reconnaissance aircraft from Area 51 and operating it over North Vietnam on the ‘Black Shield’ deployment, all in conditions of the utmost secrecy
My first sight and my first knowledge of what I was going to fly came when I went to Area 51 in October 1962. I walked into this hangar with someone who ended up being a friend of mine, Gen Doug Nelson, and here was this big, long, black, beautiful aircraft that almost looked like a spacecraft, in the filtered light coming through the hangar doors. It was just amazing. Not to go too far here, but it was almost breathtaking. I’d never seen anything like it before. That was my introduction to the A-12.”
At this distance, so familiar are we with the lines of the Lockheed A-12 and its successor, the SR-71, it is hard to imagine what seeing the design for the first time during its highly classified ‘black programme’ phase must have been like. That description by Col Kenneth S. Collins, one of the eventual 10 US Air Force pilots seconded to the Central Intelligence Agency for Project ‘Oxcart’ u…
