Lockheed A-12 Blackbird
Lockheed Skunk Works, Clarence Kelly Johnson · 1963
Before you even reach the doors, a long black aircraft with a needle nose and two enormous engines stands on the plaza, tilted slightly as though it were still climbing. It is a Lockheed A-12, the secret spy plane built in Burbank for the CIA in the early 1960s and the direct ancestor of the better known SR-71 Blackbird. This example is a two-seat trainer, the only one ever built, nicknamed the Titanium Goose, and it was used to teach pilots how to fly the fastest aircraft ever put into service.
Walk along it and notice how little there is beyond engines and fuel. The A-12 flew at more than three times the speed of sound at altitudes above eighty thousand feet, and at that speed the skin heated to several hundred degrees, so the airframe is almost entirely titanium, a metal so hard to work with that Lockheed had to invent new tools. The black paint helped radiate heat. The blended shape where the fuselage widens into the wings was designed to scatter radar, making this one of the first stealthy aircraft. The pilot sat in front; in this trainer the instructor sat behind and slightly above, in a raised second cockpit, which is why the canopy looks different from the single-seat version.
The aircraft was built a few miles away in Burbank by the Skunk Works team under Kelly Johnson, tested at a secret base in Nevada and retired in 1968 after the CIA's programme ended. It came to Exposition Park in 1991 and has stood outside ever since, free to see at any hour. With the aviation galleries moving into the Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center, it remains the most visible reminder that Los Angeles was, for half a century, the aerospace capital of the world.
Did You Know? The A-12 leaked fuel on the ground by design, because its tanks were built to seal only when the airframe expanded with heat at three times the speed of sound.
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