Idaho man honored for spy plane work

BOISE – Jack Layton used to go to work on Monday and come home Friday, forbidden to even whisper to his family what he did for a living on a project so secret it was known only as “Oxcart.”

Earlier this month, the former CIA pilot from eastern Idaho was honored publicly at the spy agency’s Virginia headquarters for his role in developing the SR-71 Blackbird, the supersonic jet that the United States used during the Cold War to snoop behind the Iron Curtain, hostile Korea and North Vietnam.

Layton, now 79, remembers he once had to eject from one of the plane’s prototypes, known as the A-12 or YF-12, after it caught fire. In all, he spent more than six years in the 1960s helping develop a plane that eventually flew spy missions from 1966 to 1998 at speeds more than three times that of sound – so fast that if enemy missiles were launched, the standard maneuver was to hit the throttle.

“It was like six sticks of dynamite going off, and all of a sudden you’re flying half sideways,” Layton said of the experience.

The planes Layton flew were conceived after the U-2 spy plane, a slow, high-altitude aircraft, had become vulnerable to Russian missiles. The SR-71 became one of the world’s fastest and highest-flying aircraft. In 1976, one set a speed record of 2,193 mph, according to Lockheed Martin.

In all, 32 were built, including 12 destroyed in accidents – some of them fatal.

“Each time they climbed into the cockpit, they headed to the very edge of the technical horizon – a place of unknown yet palpable danger,” said Gen. Michael V. Hayden, director of the Central Intelligence Agency.