Image:A12Blackbird.JPG

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A-12 in Museum.

This picture shows a one-of-a-kind A-12 trainer with an extra cockpit for the instructor.

I took this picture in Aug 2004 at the California ScienCenter's Roy A. Anderson Blackbird Exhibit & Garden in Los Angeles.

Regular A-12s were one-seater spy planes built for CIA. Compare to the later SR-71 which were two-seater spy planes built for USAF. Compare to the YF-12 interceptor which has a pointy nose cone. All three types of airplanes A-12, SR-71 and YF-12 are designed with different capabilities for different missions and have distinct exterior features though they look very similar. Even press release photos from the government sometimes mixed up the pictures. It is unknown if the mix up was intentional or not because these projects were in secrecy and unclassified pictures were hard to come by.

On 26 January 1960, the CIA ordered twelve A-12 aircraft. After SR-71 was chosen to replace the A-12, May 8th, 1968 saw the last operational mission of an A-12, which was over North Korea. After this, all A-12s were sent back to Palmdale to be put into storage for several decades before going to museums around the United States. This particular specimen in LA is the only A-12 trainer ever built. It was put on display in 2003.

The plaque at the exhibit said the following:
Spy in the sky
The A-12 Blackbird flew high and light
A-12 Trainer Specs
Material: Titanium
Length: 31.2 meters (102 feet, 3 inches)
Wingspan: 16.9 meters (55 feet, 7 inches)
Height: 5.6 meters (18 feet, 6 inches)
Takeoff weight: 53,000 kg 117,000 pounds)
Landing weight: 23,600 kg (52,000 pounds)
Speed: Mach 2.0, twice the speed of sound
Altitude: 18,000 meters (60,000 feet)
Engines: 2 Pratt & Whitney I-75 engines, each rated at 17,000 pounds of thrust
First flight: January 1963
Number of flights: 614
Hours of flight: 1,076 hours flying time

Did you know?
The A-12 trainer has two cockpits: one for an instructor and one for a pilot in training. Black paint on the plane's nose kept reflected sunlight from blinding the pilots.

Built for extreme performance
The Skunk Works, a special classified-projects group at the Lockheed Aircraft Company, made huge advances in aircraft technology to build the A-12. Since the A-12 as the first titanium aircraft, the project team discovered a lot about how to work with this challenging metal.

The A-12 team developed new methods so fuels and oil could stand up to the extreme heat in the plane's engine. They also tested new ways to make aircraft less visible to radar.

[edit] Licensing

I, the creator of this work, hereby grant the permission to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.
Subject to disclaimers.

Kowloonese 09:08, 26 Aug 2004 (UTC)

[edit] External links

• Info about this particular exhibit
• Differences between the A-12 and SR-71

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• A-12 OXCART
• Talk:Lockheed YF-12
• Talk:A-12 OXCART

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