The A-12 was the product of Project Oxcart, a secret military program to develop a high-speed, high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft. First flown in 1962, the A-12 was built by Lockheed’s Advanced Development Projects office, now known as Skunk Works. The A-12 was capable of performing sensitive intelligence-gathering missions while flying at speeds over Mach 3, or three times the speed of sound. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) used A-12s for surveillance missions until 1968. Later versions, known as the SR-71 Blackbird, served in reconnaissance and test missions for the U.S. Air Force and NASA through the 1990s.
welcome to the flight deck here at the Intrepid Museum today we're going to be talking about a very special plane that's here our Lockheed a12 which is often confused for an SR71 Blackbird a lot of people don't know that the a12 never carried any kind of weapons it was purely for reconnaissance and photography the pilots during this time would use cameras underneath the fuselage in order to take pictures of what was happening on the ground in Vietnam and Korea the a12 could fly faster than Mach 3 because of this and the g-forces that the pilots experienced they had to actually wear space suits
when they were in the cockpit it also flew so fast that the skin on the outside of the aircraft could hit up to 1,000° fah the second a12 ever produced there's actually a black and white photograph of our aircraft sitting on what looks like a telephone pole inverted that was used to test radar at Area 51 thank you for joining me today as I talked about my favorite aircraft here at the Intrepid Museum our H1 off
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