Area 51_ An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base - Annie Jacobsen [28]
Every Monday Ray Goudey would fly from Burbank to Groom Lake with Lockheed’s gung-ho young mechanic Bob Murphy beside him in the passenger seat. All week, Murphy worked on the U-2’s engine while Goudey worked with the other test pilots to achieve height. The pilots wore specially designed partial-pressure suits, tight like wet suits, with most of the tubing on the outside; it took two flight surgeons to get a pilot into his suit. Pre-breathing pure oxygen was mandatory and took two full hours, which made for a lot of time in a recliner. The process removed nitrogen from the pilot’s bloodstream and reduced the risk of decompression sickness at high altitude.
In those early days at Area 51, history was being laid down and records were being set. “I was the first guy to go up above sixty-five thousand feet, but I wasn’t supposed to be,” Goudey recalls. “Bob Mayte was scheduled to do the first high-altitude flight but he had a problem with his ears. So I went instead.” Which is how Goudey ended up becoming the first pilot to ever reach that altitude and fly there for a sustained amount of time—a remarkable fact noted in the Lockheed record books and yet kept from the rest of the world until 1998, when the U-2 program was finally declassified. Goudey explains what the view was like at sixty-five thousand feet: “From where I was up above Nevada I could see the Pacific Ocean, which was three hundred miles away.”
Ray Goudey was also the world’s first test pilot to experience engine failure at sixty-four thousand feet, a potentially catastrophic event because the delicate U-2 is a single-engine airplane: if a U-2 loses one engine, it has lost all of them. In Goudey’s case, he glided down four thousand feet and got the engine to restart by using a tactic called windmilling. “Then it quit again,” Goudey explains. He let the plane fall another thirty thousand feet, more than five miles. Down in lower air, Goudey was able to get the engine to restart—and to stay started. Once Goudey was on the ground, it was Bob Murphy’s job to troubleshoot what had happened on the engine. Of course, in 1955, no mechanic in the world had any experience solving a combustion problem on an engine that had quit unexpectedly at sixty-four thousand feet.
Bob Murphy was a twenty-five-year-old flight-test mechanic whose can-do attitude and ability to troubleshoot just about any problem on an aircraft engine meant he was promoted to engine mechanic supervisor the following winter, in 1956. “The romance of the job was the hands-on element of things,” Murphy recalls of those early days at Groom Lake. “There was absolutely no government meddling, which enabled us to get the job done.” There was only one man with any kind of serious oversight at Area 51 and that was Richard Bissell, or Mr. B., as he was known to the men. Most of Bissell’s work involved getting Area 51 to run like an organization or, as he put it, “dealing with the policy matters involved in producing this radically new aircraft.” Shuttling back and forth between Washington and Area 51, Bissell seemed to enjoy the base he ruled over. “He moved around the facility somewhat mysteriously,” Bob Murphy recalls. “He would appear briefly out on the dry lake bed to say hi to the pilots and mechanics and watch the U-2 fly,” Murphy remembers. “Mr. B. always expressed enthusiasm for what we were doing and then he’d disappear again in some unmarked airplane.” But for Murphy, the concern was rarely the Customer, which was Lockheed’s code name for the CIA. Murphy was too busy working with test pilots, often finding himself in charge of overseeing two or three U-2 flights in a single day. “My job was to help the pilots to get the aircraft instruments checked out, get the plane to fly to seventy thousand feet, get