It had a brief "unofficial" hop a few days prior on April 26, 1962, or was it April 25? When test pilot Louis Schalk got the plane airborne at 20 feet during a high-speed taxi run.
I am reading the new book “The Impossible Factory “by Josh Dean. It’s a good book that I would recommend.
Their first flight did not go well. The trouble, Kelly Johnson later wrote, was a stunning failure of pre-flight inspection.
The improper hooking up of the rudder pedals and the nose wheel steering. The rudder and the nose wheel turned in the opposite direction from those desired! Chief test pilot Lou Schalk flew the A-12 about a mile and a half at an altitude of 20 feet before touching back down in a cloud of dust on an emergency dirt runway built on the dry lake bed to accommodate contingencies like this.
The early flights used the less powerful J 75 engines. The J 58 were being worked on by Pratt and Whitney and they were powerful! How powerful? Twice the horsepower of all the engines on the Queen Mary cruise ship which weighs 81,000 tons. The plane's top speed at Mach 3 was twice the speed of a bullet. The plane covered a football field distance in 1/10 of a second.
Test flying to A-12 introduced all sorts of complications. It flew so fast that the first approved test flights. The area was just too small pilots had to fly in a constant bank just to stay inside the boundaries which meant they were always feeling G forces. This problem was solved when the flying area was extended to the entire continental United States. It wasn’t until 1967 that the A-12 went operational during the Vietnam War. The first Black bird was then canceled in 1968 and the SR-71 took over.
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