ScienceDirect - Technol Rep Tohoku Univ ... - Garryck Osborne

248 The Hunt for Zero Point
was one element of the mystery. In its final design form, Kingfish had
been at least twice as capable as the variant that is recorded in official
agency files.
The final iteration of Kingfish was optimized to cruise at 125,000 feet
at a speed of Mach 6.25. It had contained a great many "firsts," including
two powerful ramjets—a radical form of power plant that, to this day, has
never been deployed on an operational aircraft—a blended, stealthy
airframe shape composed of high-temperature steel and a special heatresistant
substance called "pyro-ceram" that also acted as a highly effective
radar-absorbent material.
Kingfish would have streaked far above the Soviets' air defenses, twice
as fast as any aircraft the Russians ever consigned to the drawing board;
and it would have been all but invisible to radar.
Kind of chilling, too, was the fact that its specification was a nearperfect
match for most people's idea of what Aurora should look like—
and Widmer had designed the aircraft almost 30 years before rumors of a
high-speed Mach 6-8 reconnaissance plane had begun circulating in
JDWand Aviation Week.
That the CIA bought the A-12 instead of Kingfish is, of course, an
enormous tribute to the Lockheed project team, which went on to
overcome unprecedented design challenges to make the A-12/SR-71
Blackbird a reality. But while Blackbird is now a museum piece, the finer
details of Kingfish, the loser in the CIA contest of 1958-59, will forever
remain locked inside Widmer's head.
At the end of the competition, the CIA moved in and ordered all the
blueprints, plans and files to be shredded. They also told him never to
talk about it again.
I asked what effect this had had upon him.
"At the time, the CIA were in their glory," he replied. "I don't want to
go into detail about the kind of life I had to lead . . . how I had to conduct
myself, my family and so forth."
"Was it very restrictive?"
Widmer looked over his shoulder at the minder, who must have
detected the change in mood. The minder looked at me and I looked at
Widmer.
The former chief designer continued. I could see that he was determined
to say his piece. "It was unbelievable. It wasn't just restrictive. It
was counter to my conscience and morals and so forth."
"The whole business of black program secrecy?"
He nodded and I got the sense he was speaking not so much for himself
as the younger members of his team, the people who'd looked to him for