(Image: via Google Patents)
The world of top secret aircraft – also known as black projects – is as intriguing as it is shadowy. For decades myriad highly classified planes and other technologies have been tested at the US Government’s remote proving ground at Groom Lake, better known as Area 51, deep in the Nevada Desert.
Groom was where many of America’s most iconic aircraft first took the the skies, from the Lockheed Skunk Works’ venerable U-2 and mighty A-12 Oxcart spy planes to the diminutive Have Blue technology demonstrator and its operational descendent the F-117A Stealth Fighter.
(Image: USAF, public domain)
But those pioneering aircraft only account for a small number of planes developed and tested at Area 51 since its inception in the 1950s. And in a landscape now dominated by unmanned aerial vehicles, declassified manned aircraft are noticable by their absence, certainly in recent years.
The last two manned jets to be brought out of the black were Northrop’s Tacit Blue and Boeing’s Bird of Prey proof of concept aircraft, in 1996 and 2002 respectively. Tacit Blue, which was developed under the ultra-restricted special access programme Battlefield Surveillance Aircraft-Experimental (BSAX), had been in classified storage since 1985.
But with some suggestion that the development of a Long Range Strike Bomber (LRS-B) may already be well underway, not to mention a much rumoured classified storage facility for retired projects known as Dyson’s Dock, Area 51 makes for a compelling subject and fuels the imagination about what might lurk within its hangars.
And with so much conspiracy theory surrounding the base – which may have helped US authorities keep real classified aircraft under wraps – it’s often hard to separate fact from fiction. So when we see patents like the one above (top), filed by Northrop Grumman in 1994, it’s impossible to know whether such designs ever made it off the drawing board into the realms of classified testing – as wind tunnel models or flying demonstrators/prototypes – or whether such studies represent nothing more than ‘paper aeroplanes’.
For the record, the website Dreamland Resort lists this patent as ‘Northrop’s AMC Design’, or Advanced Manned Concept. The site speculates that the 50-60 ft-long AMC may have been part of a programme to develop an aircraft which would replace the F-15E Strike Eagle after 2020, and was being “tested only a few hundred meters away from another black project developed by Lockheed…”
Dreamland Resort also speculates that British Aerospace may have had some involvement in the Northrop AMC design, perhaps in relation to the UK’s Future Offensive Air System. FOAS was launched in a bid to develop a replacement for the RAF’s ageing Tornado GR4 fleet, but was cancelled in 2005.
One option under consideration by the FOAS study was a stealth strike aircraft, built by BAE Systems, named Replica. While not capable of flight, the Replica demonstrator (also known as Testbed) was used to test key technologies which may have paved the way for BAE’s involvement in the Joint Strike Fighter programme.
Replica is understood to have begun trials in 1994 and remains in use today as a testbed for stealth coatings and other technologies set to be incorporated into the UK’s next generation of UCAVs. The model was last spotted at BAE’s Warton facility in Lancashire in February 2014.
Meanwhile, another classified programme, known as HALO, took off (excuse the pun) around the same time. Running from 1993 to early 1995, HALO made use of a Hawk aircraft to test a series of signature control technologies for use in the development of Replica, Nightjar and Taranis.
Anyway, back to that Northrop AMC design. Can patents alone be trusted as proof that an aircraft design progressed to flight testing? Absolutely not, but they do offer a compelling glimpse into the collective minds of some of the most brilliant engineering companies of our time.
And what’s more, some have come to fruition. This page reveals a plethora of patents (most of them – presumably – unbuilt), including those for Northrop’s YF-23 Black Widow II and Lockheed’s Have Blue (below – source), the latter of which currently lies buried beneath the desert near the expansive runways of Area 51.
In addition, various other proof-of-concept aircraft and classified prototypes are thought to have been built and flown over the years, from the 1970s-era General Dynamics Model 100, aka ‘Sneaky Pete’, which may have formed the basis for the US Navy’s failed A-12 Avenger II project, to rumours of at least one subscale demonstrator fielded during the Advanced Technology Bomber competition, which led to the Northrop B-2 Spirit.
Since there’s no way of substantiating these rumours, however, it’s impossible to say for certain what exists out in the seclusion of the western desert. It seems likely that many of these aircraft – if indeed they were built – may never be revealed publicly for various reasons. And even if they are, their airframes may well have been ploughed into a pit decades before.
Interestingly, however, the Northrop Grumman patent does contain an unusual reference in the section titled Non-Patent Citations. Here, the abstract references the popular 1988 computer flight simulator game by MicroProse Software, titled F-19 Stealth Fighter – itself a much hypothesized and non-existent black project of days gone by.
Related – Boscombe Down Incident: Crashed Black Project or Urban Legend?
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