Approved for Release: 2013/06/25
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Secret NOFORN
Chapter 1
9
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produce a better aircraft more quickly. In July 1953, the Bell Aircraft Corporation of Buffalo, New York, and the Fairchild Engine and Airplane Corporation of Hagerstown, Maryland, received study contracts to develop an entirely new high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft. In addition, the Glenn L. Martin Company of Baltimore was asked to examine the possibility of improving the already exceptional high-altitude performance of the B-57 Canberra. By January 1954 all three firms had submitted their proposals. Fairchild’s entry was a single-engine plane known as M-195, which had a maximum altitude potential of 67,200 feet; Bell’s was a twin-engine craft called the Model 67 (later the X-16), which had a maximum altitude of 69,500 feet; and Martin’s design was a big-wing version of the B-57 called the Model 294, which was to cruise at 64,000 feet. In March 1954, Seaberg and other engineers at Wright Field, having evaluated the three contending designs, recommended the adoption of both the Martin and Bell proposals. They considered Martin’s version of the B-57 an interim project that could be completed and deployed rapidly while the more advanced concept from Bell was still being developed.¹²
Air Force headquarters soon approved Martin’s proposal to modify the B-57 and was very much interested in the Bell design. But word of the competition for a new reconnaissance airplane had reached another aircraft manufacturer, the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, which submitted an unsolicited design.
Lockheed had first become aware of the reconnaissance aircraft competition in the fall of 1953. John H. (Jack) Carter, who had recently retired from the Air Force to become the assistant director of Lockheed’s Advanced Development Program, was in the Pentagon on business and dropped in to see Eugene P. Kiefer, an old friend and colleague from the Air Force’s Office of Development Planning (more commonly known as AFDAP from its Air Force office symbol). Kiefer told Carter about the competition for a high-flying aircraft and expressed the opinion that the Air Force was going about the search in the wrong way by requiring the new aircraft to be suitable for both strategic and tactical reconnaissance.
Immediately after returning to California, Carter proposed to Lockheed Vice President L. Eugene Root (previously the top civilian official in the Air Force’s Office of Development Planning) that
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¹² The request for proposal, known as “Design Study Requirements, Identification No. 53WC-16507,” has been reprinted in Miller, *Lockheed U-2*, pp. 10-11.
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Secret
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Approved for Release: 2013/06/25