At Beale Air Force Base, in California, you would think that the SR-71 Blackbird program would be the biggest, blackest, and deepest secret. You would be wrong.
At Beale Air Force Base in California, you might assume that the SR-71 Blackbird program was the most deeply classified secret. However, that wasn’t the case—the most closely guarded project was actually the Senior Bowl.
Documents from the Air Force Test Center History Office state that President Dwight Eisenhower halted all manned flights over the Soviet Union after Francis Gary Powers’ U-2 spy plane was shot down on May 1, 1960. Although the U.S. government intended to rely on satellites for reconnaissance, that technology was still several years from being operational. In the interim, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) concluded that unmanned drones could bridge the gap until satellite systems became fully viable.
For this reason, during the 1960s, Lockheed’s famed “Skunk Works” developed the D-21, a highly advanced remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) intended to conduct high-speed, high-altitude strategic reconnaissance missions over hostile territory.
Because of its ramjet engine, the D-21 needed a carrier aircraft to launch it to the required speed for the engine to ignite. In the early tests, Lockheed used an M-21—essentially a modified SR-71 Blackbird—to launch the D-21 drone. The D-21 was released from the back of the M-21. After completing its reconnaissance run, it was supposed to jettison a hatch containing the photographic equipment, which would then be recovered either in mid-air or after it landed in the recovery area.
On the fourth test flight, the D-21 encountered an “asymmetric unstart” as it moved through the bow wake of the M-21, causing the mothership to pitch up and strike the drone at Mach 3.25. The crew, Bill Park and Ray Torick, ejected from the M-21, but Torick’s flight suit tore and filled with water when he hit the ocean, and he drowned.
Following the accident that claimed the life of test flight engineer Ray Torick, the M-21 launch program was terminated. Even so, testers still believed the D-21 had significant potential as a reconnaissance platform and chose to deploy it from B-52H bombers under a highly classified test initiative called Tagboard. The project itself was then given a new code name: Senior Bowl.
It was Kelly Johnson, the president of Skunk Works, who proposed using the B-52. Acting on his recommendation, two B-52s—tail numbers 61#0021 and 60#0036—were modified for the program. Both aircraft remain in the U.S. Air Force (USAF) inventory. An ultra-secret unit, the 4200th Test Squadron, was established at Beale to support the effort.
Only a handful of SR-71 crew members were briefed on the program; out of necessity, one of them was Richard “Butch” Sheffield, an SR-71 RSO who had already been read into Oxcart in 1965. In his unpublished book, he recalls being on the flight line with SR-71 pilot Bob Spencer. As they were taxiing out, they noticed a B-52 carrying a drone beneath its wing. Spencer asked, “What is that under that B-52?” He replied, “I have no idea.” In reality, he knew but was not allowed to tell Spencer the truth.
These two B-52s were parked at the far end of the runway, isolated from all other operations.
The D-21 drones were flown on four missions over communist China, but none of them achieved complete success. On two flights, the aircraft performed as planned, yet the film capsule in the D-21’s hatch was never recovered. The remaining two operational sorties failed—one drone was lost over a heavily defended region, and the other vanished without a trace shortly after launch.
The primary purpose of the D-21 was to fly over China and photograph its nuclear weapons testing complex located in the remote west-central region of the country near Lop Nor. After the mission, the pictures were intended to be dropped into the ocean and retrieved by the U.S. Navy. During the Cold War, this intelligence was considered crucial to the United States’ defense.
The fourth and final D-21 mission occurred on March 20, 1971, and was carried out by drone D-21 #527. Specialists from the 4200th Support Squadron and Skunk Works later determined that #527 had likely experienced a malfunction and was believed to have crashed near Lop Nor. Today, this particular drone is displayed in China’s national aviation museum, confirming that it made it close to its intended target.
Project Senior Bowl ran from January 1968 until July 15, 1971. After the Soviet Union collapsed, Ben Rich—by then the retired president of Lockheed’s Skunk Works—finally had the chance to visit Russia. While in Moscow, the KGB presented him with what they believed were the remains of a stealth fighter that had crashed on their soil. In reality, the wreckage turned out to be components and fragments of the missing D-21 drone.
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Photo by U.S. Air Force
