NASA’s SR-71B
831 (former USAF
serial 61-7956)
was shared with
the USAF during
the last period
of operations at
Edwards AFB.
NASArevolutionary ASARS-1, an ultra-high-
resolution ground-mapping radar.
Having completed two further missions
in Europe, 955 returned to Beale, again
via the Barents on July 30. The resolution
obtained by this system enabled US
Navy intelligence officers to keep tags
on which SSBNs were either at sea or in
their pens. This resulted in even more
tasking requests from the navy, and
as a result, on April 5, 1984, Det 4 was
accorded a blanket clearance by the UK
government to permanently assign two
SR-71s to the Suffolk base.Libyan raids
From 1981, Col Muammar Gaddafi,
Libya’s increasingly belligerent leader,
began supporting various terrorist
organizations throughout the world.
During a July 1985 address to the
American Bar Association, President
Reagan named Libya, together with fourother countries, as a ‘confederation of
terrorist states’.
Following ongoing confrontations in
the Gulf of Sidra, the hijacking of a TWA
airliner and the bombing of a nightclub
in West Berlin that killed two US Army
sergeants, Reagan’s patience ran out, and
he ordered air strikes against targets in
Benghazi and Tripoli.
After meticulous planning, the raid
(lasting just 12 minutes) began at 02.00hrs
local on April 15, 1986. It was conducted
by 24 US Navy strike aircraft drawn from
three carriers stationed in the Gulf of Sidra,
together with 18 F-111Fs and four EF-111
Ravens from RAF Lakenheath and RAF
Upper Heyford respectively.
Det 4 flew both of its jets (980 and 960)
to gather BDA imagery for the President,
who had requested photographic
evidence of the raid’s accuracy. Therefore,
each of the three missions — flown
on consecutive days — demandedan airborne spare, should the primary
aircraft suffer a malfunction and have
to abort. Since France and Spain denied
both the strike force and the ‘Habu’
overflight clearance, they were forced
to route around the Iberian Peninsula,
entering the Mediterranean Sea via
the Straits of Gibraltar. This significant
additional mileage in turn required
multiple air refuelings from KC-135 and
KC-10 tankers.
Despite one commentator claiming
that the April 16 SR-71 mission was
fired on by Libyan SAMs, this has been
confirmed as definitively not the case
by Lt Col Ron Tabor, who flew the first
Libya mission and was also the senior
RSO and instructor. In addition, Lt Col
Frank Stampf said, ‘We at SAC HQ, along
with several other ‘special’ agencies
monitoring the progress of the mission
in real time and looking for enemy
reactions, saw no evidence of an actualFEATURE ARTICLE // ‘SKUNK WORKS’ AT 75
108 April 2018 //^ http://www.combataircraft.net
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