Lockheed D-21 - Operational History

Operational History

Four operational missions with the D-21B took place under the codename of Senior Bowl. These were conducted over the People's Republic of China from 9 November 1969 to 20 March 1971 to spy on the Lop Nor nuclear test site. The USAF's 4200th Support Squadron, based at Beale Air Force Base, California, flew the missions, usually from Andersen Air Force Base in Guam.

The Chinese never spotted the D-21B, but it failed to turn around and continued straight on, crashing somewhere in the Soviet Union. Another test flight was conducted on 20 February 1970 in a successful attempt to correct any problems. The second operational mission, however, was not until 16 December 1970. The D-21B made it all the way to Lop Nor and back to the recovery point, but the hatch had a partial parachute failure and was lost at sea.

During the third operational mission, on 4 March 1971, the D-21B flew to Lop Nor and returned, jettisoning the hatch. It deployed its parachute, but the midair recovery failed. The destroyer that tried to retrieve the hatch from the water ran it down and it sank. The fourth, and last, flight of the D-21B was on 20 March 1971. It was lost over China on the final segment of the route. Wreckage of this lost D-21B was found by local authority in Yunnan province, China. In 2010, after being dumped in the junkyard of China Aviation Museum for years, the wreckage was finally officially moved to the exhibition area.

On 23 July 1971, the D-21B program was canceled, due to the poor success rate, the introduction of a new generation of photo reconnaissance satellites, and President Richard Nixon's rapprochement with China. A total of 38 D-21 and D-21B drones were built with 21 expended in launches. The remaining 17 were initially stored at Norton Air Force Base, California, then moved to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base "boneyard" near Tucson, Arizona, in 1976 and 1977. With the base open to the public, the D-21 drones were quickly spotted and photographed. The Air Force called them GTD-21Bs with the GT standing for Ground Training.

The fate of the D-21 that had disappeared on the first operational flight was finally revealed in February 1986 when an official from the CIA returned a panel to Ben Rich that he had been given by a Soviet KGB agent. The drone had self-destructed over Siberia and the Soviets had recovered the wreckage. The Tupolev design bureau reverse-engineered the wreck and came up with plans for a Soviet copy, named the Voron (Raven), but it was never built.

In the late 1990s, NASA considered using a D-21 to test a hybrid "rocket-based combined cycle" engine, which operates as a ramjet or rocket, depending on its flight regime. This idea was abandoned, and NASA used a derivative of the agency's X-43A hypersonic test vehicle for the experiments.