“It was simply an attempt to hide what would today be called a spy-plane.”Ĭlarence “Kelly” Johnson next to an early U-2. “The X-16 was the most blatant misuse of the X-vehicle designation system,” Dennis Jenkins, Tony Landis and Jay Miller wrote in the NASA monograph American X-Vehicles: An Inventory-X-1 to X-50. This “X-plane” moniker is how the branch refers to experimental aircraft used for research-rather than actual missions.īut this was likely a means to conceal the nature of the program. To hide the true nature of the program from Soviet spies, the Air Force referred to Bell’s aircraft as the X-16. The flying branch also asked the Martin Company to modify its B-57 bomber-a license-produced version of the English Electric Canberra-as a more immediate solution. The Air Force redacted descriptions of the camera equipment and their schematics in the document-the only portions the flying branch redacted.Īlmost a year after starting the MX-2147 program, the Air Force chose Bell’s offering over Fairchild’s proposal. We don’t know what sort of cameras Bell’s plane were supposed to carry. These motors would later go on to serve a number of American military aircraft like the B-52 bomber, KC-135 tanker and Lockheed’s U-2. Company drawings show a plane with swept-back wings, under-wing engine pods and a combination of large landing gear in the fuselage and small wheels on the wing tips.Ī version of Pratt and Whitney’s then-new J-57 engine would power the new spy plane. This first-generation fighter jet couldn’t get high enough to intercept the proposed American spy.īell’s proposed Models 103 and 105 looked very similar to Boeing’s contemporary B-47 bomber. The aircraft would have to get up to 65,000 feet and stay there for the bulk of the flight, according to Bell’s study.Īt the required altitude, the Air Force believed that the aerial spy would be safe from the Kremlin’s newest fighter, the MiG-17. The resulting MX-2147 project demanded a plane that could fly a 3,000-mile round trip without refueling. The scientists also thought unmanned drones, rockets and balloons might work. The Beacon Hill team recommended the Air Force come up with a manned spy plane that could soar far above the Soviets’ defense network. “They are crucial to some of the most fundamental aims in our national policy.” “In the post-war world, intelligence and reconnaissance are more important to the United States by several orders of magnitude than ever before,” the final Beacon Hill report declared to Air Force officials. In 1952, a collection of academics known as the Beacon Hill Study Group gathered in Boston, Massachusetts to look into the Air Force’s intelligence gap. At top - a Martin RB-57D, in the foreground, flies in formation with a standard B-57A bomber. “Aerial reconnaissance of the Soviet Union and surrounding areas had become a very dangerous business,” Gregory Pedlow and Donald Welzenbach wrote in the CIA’s official history of the U-2 program.Ībove-Bell’s Model 103, left, and Model 105, center, along with a schematic of the Model 105’s interior with the camera bays redacted. Two years later, the Air Force lost a pair RB-29 intelligence aircraft over the Pacific in the space of five months. Navy Privateer patrol plane over the Baltic sea. In 1950, Soviet fighters shot down a U.S. And after seeing the outcome of Allied bombing campaigns over Germany and Japan, the Soviet Union had rapidly expanded its air defenses. Reconnaissance planes available during the era-mostly converted bombers-couldn’t outrun enemy fighters or avoid radars. In both World Wars and during the fighting in Korea, American aircraft had snapped photographs from the sky to help out troops on the ground.īut the Air Force hadn’t really considered the prospect of secretly spying on a foreign country from the air during peacetime. When Bell submitted its report, the Pentagon had few options for snooping on the Soviet Union. But the tactics of aerial spying had changed. At the time, high-altitude aerial spies were fairly theoretical-and on the edge of what was possible.
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