The HIDE Project - Stealth in Tulsa

LowObservable

LowObservable

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People - this looks really interesting.

Some of this story has appeared here and there. I think the term HIDE and the link between RW Tulsa and TRA San Diego on the Lightning Bugs came out in SDASM's online archives, and an oral history interview with Bill Bahret came to light very recently that made the AFRL-Tulsa connection. But this looks like a big data dump that connects all the bits and more.

I was in Tulsa ~1994 and got a tour of some of the stuff that was there for the RCS group and for A-12 Avenger II final assembly and test.

It's self-published, so it may be one of those How Grandpa Won The Cold War books that did not get, errm, formally reviewed.


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quellish said:
Briefly and only speculative. Mentions a Rockwell design competed for the contract, which is news to me.
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That's interesting. I knew that Teledyne Micronetics had an RCS range in San Diego in the 60s. So the near-omission of CA from the book suggests that TRA adopted the Bahret/Tulsa stuff for the Lightning Bugs but went its own way for later vehicles.

A further question is how much Micronetics had to do with the Global Analytics kerfuffle ~1984. The indoor range that GA originally commissioned from Harris went with the company to Alcoa>McDonnell Douglas>ATK>Orbital>NG and is next door to General Atomics-ASI's first building.
 
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This patent for an intake radar blocker is by a bunch of the HIDE guys. The Rockwell NA-335 FX had some kind of intake RCS treatment, I previously speculated this might be related.

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LowObservable said:
People - this looks really interesting.

Some of this story has appeared here and there. I think the term HIDE and the link between RW Tulsa and TRA San Diego on the Lightning Bugs came out in SDASM's online archives, and an oral history interview with Bill Bahret came to light very recently that made the AFRL-Tulsa connection. But this looks like a big data dump that connects all the bits and more.

I was in Tulsa ~1994 and got a tour of some of the stuff that was there for the RCS group and for A-12 Avenger II final assembly and test.

It's self-published, so it may be one of those How Grandpa Won The Cold War books that did not get, errm, formally reviewed.


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Thanks for mentioning my book. It is self-published, but was reviewed extensively by the HIDE team members that are still with us. Many, many interviews with the team went into the book. And I was a team member as well.....

Chapter 7 on the Viet Nam drones was the most "investigative" part of the book, because the HIDE team was funded by the CIA to help Ryan with the drones (Model 147H, T, TE etc.). To a person, they still won't talk about the drones today, so I had to really dig!

Enjoy

Craig Baucke
 
Okay, I didn't even know NAA had a plant in Tulsa. OTOH, I suspected something was there because the segments of the ISS External Truss produced by Rocketdyne, a NAA spinoff, were produced there. I had the pleasure of developing an addition to the P4 and S4 modules that could be added at the Cape because they didn't want to ship the modules back to Tulsa. We did it, despite NASA radically shortening the schedule.
 
elmayerle said:
Okay, I didn't even know NAA had a plant in Tulsa. OTOH, I suspected something was there because the segments of the ISS External Truss produced by Rocketdyne, a NAA spinoff, were produced there. I had the pleasure of developing an addition to the P4 and S4 modules that could be added at the Cape because they didn't want to ship the modules back to Tulsa. We did it, despite NASA radically shortening the schedule.
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Yep NAA moved into Air Force Plant 3 in Tulsa in 1962…..they started out as part of the missile and space division, and ended up part of the aircraft division.

The shuttle bay doors, the largest actuated doors in existence at that time, were manufactured outside of my office.
 
Okay, got my copy and have barely started it but already learned a couple things. If I'd looked, it would have been obvious, but he Hound Dog used a scaaled down version of the Navaho's lines. The second is that Chance Vought was the losing bidder in this competition and that suggests an image of a B-52 varrying two Regulus II missiles moified for air-launching. That image makes a temptign "what if" idea.
 

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