Now It Can Be Said--He Has the Right Stuff

With his top-secret Stealth fighter prototype crippled and running out of fuelover the Nevada desert, experimental test pilot William C. Park grasped the aircraft’s ejection-seat ring and pulled hard.

As the seat exploded out of the aircraft, it bashed Park’s head against the headrest and knocked him unconscious. Although his parachute deployed, his limp body struck hard against the desert floor, breaking his leg, cracking a vertebra and filling his mouth with dirt. When paramedics reached him, he was told, his heart had stopped beating.

In the first interview ever about flight testing of Lockheed’s secret Stealth fighter, Park this week described his harrowing experience in the 1978 accident. The accident, along with a second Stealth prototype mishap in which Park was not involved, has long been rumored but never confirmed officially by the Air Force.

The F-117A, built by Lockheed’s Skunk Works factory in Burbank, remains the nation’s most secret operational aircraft. The covert Lockheed factory has built 52 F-117As, which are designed to elude detection by enemy radar. Another seven remain to be delivered.

The Stealth fighter, not to be confused with the Northrop B-2 Stealth bomber, is most notable for its unconventional sharply angled fuselage, resembling the facets of a cut gem. Based at the Tonopah Test Range Airfield in Nevada, the jets are carefully screened from public view.

The Air Force released a blurred photograph of the aircraft last year but has said little about its capabilities. The development cost of the Stealth fighter remains classified, but it is widely believed to be a tiny fraction of the $23 billion invested so far in the Northrop Stealth bomber.

Park is retiring today after a three-decade Lockheed career--first as chief test pilot, then as director of flying operations at the Skunk Works, where most of the nation’s secret aircraft have been developed over the last 30 years.

While other test pilots have become famous in recent years, Park’s historic achievements were always shrouded in secrecy. But with his retirement, that is changing. A letter of commendation written this week by Defense Secretary Dick Cheney cited Park for his “immeasurable contribution to our national security.”

“I rank Bill as one of Lockheed’s greatest test pilots, right along with Tony LeVier and Herman (Fish) Salmon,” said Ben Rich, a Lockheed vice president and general manager of the Skunk Works. “He is an outstanding stick man, cool and calm. This country owes him a lot.”

During his long flying career, Park was involved in four aircraft accidents, including one in which he was forced to bail out of a disintegrating SR-71 spy plane traveling more than 2,000 m.p.h. at 80,000 feet altitude.

A thoughtful, amiable man of 62, Park defies the popular image of test pilots as reckless and egotistical personalities, but he regards his survival despite four major mishaps as giving him an almost charmed existence.

“I smile a lot because I am just happy to be here alive,” Park admitted. “I believe that circumstances can occur that you cannot overcome no matter how good you are.”

When Park made the first flight of the Stealth fighter prototype in 1978, the event was so secret that not even Lockheed’s then-Chairman Roy Anderson could be present.

“Aerodynamically, it didn’t look like it would fly at all,” Park recalled. “Stealth (design characteristics aimed at eluding detection by enemy radar) dominated its shape and size more than aerodynamics. It really looks like something that flew in from outer space.”

After the first flight, he was elated with the performance of the fighter. “It flew great,” he said. “It flew like a fighter should fly. It had nice response to the controls.”

But later that same year, the Stealth fighter would nearly kill Park. The aircraft had an aerodynamic flaw, which has since been corrected, that tended to slam the aircraft into the runway on final approach. On May 4, 1978, as Park was preparing to end a test flight, the aircraft hit the runway hard and bent its right landing gear.

Regained Altitude

He quickly applied full power and regained altitude. Thinking that the gear might be simply jammed, he attempted a number of maneuvers to free it, including coming down to the runway on the left landing gear in an effort to jar the right one free. The effort forced the wing into the runway, but Park again was able to pull up.

With fuel running out, Park ejected over the desert at 10,000 feet altitude. Paramedics rescued him quickly, and he credits them with saving his life. He spent six weeks in intensive care and was in a cast for the next six months. “I got really busted up,” he said.

The concussion ended Park’s flying days, and since then he has filled the non-flying job of director of flying operations.

“We knew we had a problem (with the F-117A prototype) but we couldn’t fix it without a long delay in the program, and it was vital that we get the information,” Park said. “I don’t mean we were going haphazardly. We did (the development) fast with a minimum amount of money. We wrecked two airplanes, but they were prototypes and served their purpose.”

Park came into test flying in an era when an instinct for flying was the most important asset of a pilot. Today, most test pilots have advanced science degrees and are graduates of military test pilot schools.

Although Park has no such background, he was held in such high regard by Skunk Works director Rich that Rich obtained a special Air Force exemption for him so he could be the chief pilot for the Stealth fighter, Rich said.

Park was the first person in the 1960s to fly the SR-71 spy plane at its designed speed of three times the speed of sound, still the world’s fastest and highest-flying aircraft.

His ejection from that plane occurred July 30, 1966, during the launching of a top-secret Lockheed MD-21 supersonic drone, in which the drone unexpectedly pitched back into the aircraft and destroyed it.

Officer Died

Park and his reconnaissance officer, Ray Torick, bailed out at three times the speed of sound over the Pacific Ocean. Torick drowned, but a Navy helicopter was able to rescue Park, still in his pressurized spacesuit.

Park also had to eject once from the SR-71’s closely related predecessor, the A-12. That occurred July 9, 1964, when the plane had a hydraulic malfunction on landing approach. Park ejected at about 500 feet altitude, and his parachute opened fully just as his feet touched the desert floor. He was not hurt.

Park piloted an F-104 fighter in 1958 to an altitude of 91,985 feet, beating a world record held by a Soviet pilot. But his name never went into the record book.

After developing the flight routine that enabled him to achieve the record, Park taught it to Air Force pilots and they set the official record in a later flight. “He didn’t want notoriety,” said David Cross, a former Marine pilot and close friend who is writing a screenplay about Park’s life. “He is really a shy man.”

Much of Park’s test-flying career also involved the famed U-2 spy plane. In a rare maneuver, he once successfully landed a U-2 on an aircraft carrier during the late 1960s.

He also once managed to save a U-2 that might have been destroyed. After taking off from Burbank one day in 1962, Park noticed that the U-2’s fuel was not being transferred from the wing tanks to the engines. It turned out that mechanics had forgotten to open the fuel valves. Several miles from the airport, at about 1,000 feet altitude, the U-2’s engines flamed out.

Although visibility was poor, Park decided to glide back to the airport, a maneuver called a dead-stick landing that nobody had ever attempted in a U-2, especially over a populated area.

“It was very tight,” he recalled. “I cleared the runway fence at Burbank by about six inches.”

When the U-2 returned, Rich recalled, “I ran out to the plane and said, ‘Bill, what happened?’ He looked at me and said, ‘I don’t know. I just got here.’ ”