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01:00Transmitting overheard conversations on secret frequencies halfway around the world.
01:06By century's end, they ranged in size from nearly 300,000 pounds to a mere 4 ounces.
01:13Covert operatives on the ground were no match for these airborne agents.
01:22Unlike satellites that toddled around the globe in predictable orbits, spy planes photographed enemy sites when and where they were needed, usually surprising the enemy.
01:34These eyes and ears in the sky came in all shapes and sizes.
01:42Some were operational in the Gulf War, and others flew spy missions in Bosnia and Kosovo.
01:50Even now, a curious array of spy planes are being developed and tested by a young generation of aeronautical geniuses.
02:02Spy planes are small enough to take off from the palm of your hand.
02:08The story of top-secret reconnaissance aircraft really begins midway in the 20th century, in the darkest days of the Cold War.
02:23The big difference between the superpowers at this time was that the U.S. was more or less an open book, and the Soviet Union was a closed book.
02:34The Iron Curtain had descended, and in intelligence-gathering terms, it was a tough nut to crack.
02:44At the Omaha, Nebraska headquarters of the Strategic Air Command, and in Washington, D.C., the belief was that the Soviets had far surpassed the U.S. in bomber production.
02:57Duck!
02:58And cover!
03:01Duck!
03:01In fact, this civil defense training film was required viewing for all American school children, because of the fear of a Soviet nuclear attack.
03:12Many Americans believed that it was only a matter of time before a fleet of Russian bison bombers would soar across the United States, dropping nuclear bombs on every major American city, every military installation, every armament factory.
03:31Then, by 1957, when the Soviets launched the first man-made satellite, Sputnik, these fears reached a fever pitch.
03:43Now it was believed the Russians could deliver nuclear warheads from outer space.
03:48But in truth, all of these fears were based on very sketchy intelligence.
03:54Even three years before Sputnik was launched, President Eisenhower knew this challenge had to be met.
04:05After a series of secret meetings with his closest advisors, Ike made the difficult decision to build something new, a spy plane based on revolutionary technology.
04:18It was codenamed Aquitone, and the CIA was put in charge.
04:28Director Alan Dulles chose his assistant, Richard Bissell, to head the project from Washington.
04:35Funding for Aquitone would come from one of the CIA's many secret accounts.
04:40In fact, the CIA only recently allowed this top-secret footage to be declassified.
04:51The work began on December 9, 1954, in Southern California, in a little-known town called Burbank.
04:58The contractor was Lockheed's Advanced Development Company, nicknamed Skunk Works, after a wartime comic strip.
05:10They were led by an aeronautical engineering genius, Clarence Kelly Johnson.
05:16This spy plane eventually would carry the name U-2, short for Utility 2.
05:21It was given an elaborate cover story, that it was a weather plane designed for scientific experimentation at the highest altitudes.
05:34The top-secret onboard camera was designed by Edwin Land, the man famous for creating the Polaroid camera.
05:43In late August, 1955, just eight months after work began, the U-2 was ready to fly.
05:51It would need to be tested at a secret airfield nearby, but at the time, none existed.
05:59So, the U.S. Air Force colonel, who had been assigned to liaise between the Pentagon and the CIA, chose a site not very far north of the Nevada nuclear test range.
06:13He knew that site because he'd flown over it during nuclear weapons tests.
06:21It was a vast, dry lakebed known as Groom Lake, an innocuous piece of property that eventually became the single most secret airbase in U.S. history.
06:32Today, it's known by another name, Area 51.
06:39Surprisingly, the entire U-2 project continued to remain a secret, even from Soviet spies.
06:46Considering the number of leaks emanating from the Manhattan Project, it seems incredible that the Soviets never infiltrated the black world of the U-2.
06:55That's not hard to understand.
06:58The U-2 program was fairly small.
07:02It was conducted under conditions of extreme secrecy, and it was developed very quickly.
07:10With test pilot Tony Levere in the cockpit, the aircraft tested well.
07:15By July 4th, 1956, it would attempt its first operational sortie, deep into Soviet airspace.
07:25At 6 o'clock in the morning, CIA pilot Harvey Stockman took off from Wiesbaden Air Force Base in West Germany.
07:32While Americans celebrated their independence day, Stockman carefully guided his aircraft over Poland and into Belorussia.
07:43As he flew in the direction of Leningrad, Stockman caught sight of MiG fighters attempting an intercept below.
07:49In that moment, he chose to trust Kelly Johnson's promise that the U-2 flying at an altitude of 70,000 feet was too high to be shot down by MiGs or surface-to-air missiles.
08:10Stockman held to the course and made it home safely with clear reconnaissance photographs of the forbidden territory of the Soviet Union.
08:19But Russian radar had locked on to the U-2 on her maiden spy mission.
08:27Eisenhower understood that the U-2 flights over the Soviet Union would be illegal.
08:34They were plainly illegal in international law.
08:37He was also worried that if they were detected, the Soviets might misinterpret them as being, for instance, a bomber coming to attack them.
08:46Even so, the President was pleased.
08:52Within a year, the U-2's CIA pilots overflying and photographing this immense country proved one thing.
08:59That the reports of the Soviets' massive bomber production had been greatly exaggerated.
09:10The United States always maintained the U-2's cover story, that these flights were strictly scientific, designed to learn more about the weather.
09:18To some extent, the U-2's cover story, that is, until May 1st, 1960.
09:25May Day was one of the most important holidays in the Soviet Union.
09:32It was also the day that CIA pilot Francis Gary Powers was shot out of the sky in his U-2, his aircraft destroyed.
09:40Powers survived the crash, but on the ground, the Soviet military and the KGB awaited him.
09:47Years of hard-won secrecy for the U.S. intelligence community were wiped out in a moment,
09:53as photographs of Powers' capture eventually were carried by every news organization in the world.
09:59It was not until, literally, the May Day incident that the Americans were aware that it didn't just carry weather sampling equipment,
10:14it carried cameras, and its primary mission was not to find out if it's going to be nice and sunny tomorrow,
10:19but if it's going to be nice and sunny over ballistic missile sites inside the Soviet Union.
10:24Powers was convicted of espionage and imprisoned, an event that permanently slammed the door shut on U-2's spy missions over the Soviet Union.
10:41Then, in late summer 1962, a U-2 captured the first images of the Soviet's military buildup in Cuba.
10:48Experts believed the photos revealed the existence of medium-range and intermediate-range ballistic missiles
10:57that placed most major U.S. cities within target range of a nuclear attack.
11:03Within days of the first U-2 overflight, a second U-2 flew a spy mission over Cuba.
11:10It was shot down, and the first American U-2 pilot was killed, flying over enemy territory.
11:23As Soviet ships headed towards Havana Bay with another shipment of armaments,
11:27President John Kennedy called Soviet Premier Khrushchev's bluff.
11:31Good evening, my fellow citizens. This government, as promised, has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet military buildup on the island of Cuba.
11:50He placed a quarantine around the Cuban island.
11:56Khrushchev backed down. The ships made a U-turn and headed back to their homeland.
12:05Today, Russian experts say that indeed there were atomic weapons in Cuba in 1962,
12:10and the Cubans did not have control over them.
12:17Had the American president sent in ground troops or attempted to bomb suspected missile sites,
12:23the Soviets could have retaliated with nuclear weapons.
12:29Photographs from the U-2 flights helped provide the information President Kennedy needed
12:34in order to face down the Soviet premier.
12:42This resilient spy plane has literally overflown the entire world.
12:48In fact, there is no land mass the U-2 has not overflown and photographed.
12:52Even so, by the early 60s, a new supersonic spy plane was being tested and refined in the Nevada desert,
13:05codenamed Oxcart.
13:13Stealthy and sleek, it would become the fastest aircraft on Earth.
13:17While the U-2 was still being tested in the Nevada desert in 1955,
13:34Richard Bissell of the CIA and Kelly Johnson predicted it would fly undetected for a mere two years.
13:39They believed that by then, the Soviets would have the technology to bring down any U-2 in flight over their borders.
13:47But in fact, it took the Soviets five years.
13:50Even so, it was this concern that prompted President Eisenhower and the CIA
13:56to order the engineers at Lockheed's Skunk Works to begin work on the next generation of spy plane.
14:01Code-named Oxcart, the A-12 eventually would be known as the Blackburn.
14:08Even before the U-2 was shot down, President Eisenhower had authorized its replacement with the A-12,
14:17and ultimately the Air Force's successor to the A-12, the SR-71.
14:22It would fly about 10,000 feet higher than the U-2, but most importantly, it would fly three times the speed of sound.
14:28And the missile that shot down the U-2 could never catch the SR-71.
14:35In the summer of 1959, President Eisenhower approved initial funding for the top-secret aircraft.
14:43The money would come from the CIA, a black budget of $4.5 million.
14:50Because the U-2 was so easily visible to Soviet radar, Kelly Johnson designed the A-12 with a reduced radar signature.
15:03Its shape and configuration, as well as the materials from which it was created, all served to defeat radar detectability.
15:11You could say this aircraft was the first stealth spy plane.
15:22It was also the last plane developed with a slide rule instead of a computer.
15:29This stealthy aircraft inhabited the black world of the CIA, the Strategic Air Command, and the Air Force for years.
15:39The Lockheed Skunk Works engineers who developed and built this unique spy plane never put the Lockheed name on any document,
15:50never stamped the drawings with the Skunk Works logo.
15:57There was no cover story.
15:59There was no cover story because nobody would believe it would be anything other than what it was.
16:04Nobody was going to believe it was a weather plane or anything else.
16:07As with most intelligence collection systems, the SR-71 was born secret and stayed that way for a very long time.
16:16Even though thousands of people were working on it, they all had to have special access clearances to learn about the program.
16:23And if you did not need to know about it, you didn't know about it.
16:27By 1960, the CIA tasked Lockheed with finding the pilots to fly the A-12.
16:33Names of potential candidates were drawn from Air Force files.
16:39The CIA was responsible for the intensive security background checks.
16:44Like the U-2 pilots before them, the men who finally were chosen were sheep dipped, meaning they left the Air Force.
16:52Their military status was suspended.
16:56Then they became civilian employees of the Central Intelligence Agency.
17:01Maintaining secrecy within the government was basically through this compartmented system where anybody who was going to be told about Oxcart had to be approved, had to go through security screening, had to sign a special agreement.
17:18In mid-February 1962, the A-12 was ready to fly.
17:26There was one problem.
17:28In its time, the A-12 looked like an aircraft straight out of a science fiction film.
17:33No one had ever seen anything like it, anywhere.
17:39The moment it was airborne, the A-12's secret existence would be revealed to the public.
17:44So, designer Kelly Johnson and his CIA counterparts decided that the aircraft would have to be disassembled in the Skunk Works plant in Burbank, California, and then hauled to the Nevada desert in a specially built trailer under cover of darkness.
18:02And with secrecy assured, on February 26th, 1962, the Oxcart convoy arrived at the secret test site at one o'clock in the afternoon.
18:14The CIA worked out a plan with the Federal Aviation Administration.
18:24Together, they enlarged the restricted airspace around the Groom Lake.
18:29A few civilian air traffic controllers received clearance for Oxcart operations.
18:35Nearby military facilities were also briefed and ordered not to report radar sightings of any unusual aircraft.
18:50The first flight revealed that even in the hands of Lockheed's most experienced test pilot, the A-12 was temperamental and difficult to fly.
18:58By the second flight in May, the problems were minimal and the A-12 went supersonic.
19:11The plane was officially announced in the summer of 1964 by President Lyndon Johnson, seven months after he assumed office.
19:18The system will be used during periods of military hostilities and in other situations in which the United States military forces may be confronting foreign military forces.
19:32Further information on this major advanced aircraft system will be released from time to time at the appropriate military secret classification levels.
19:40Some believe his intention was to use the existence of the A-12 to refute charges that he was soft on defense.
19:52To this day, there's controversy over how the A-12 was used.
19:55According to some experts, in August of 1964, the CIA needed several operational aircraft to overfly Cuba by November 5th.
20:13They reportedly had discovered that immediately after the U.S. presidential election, the Soviets planned to use guided missiles to shoot down every U-2 flying over Cuba.
20:23Without the U-2's reconnaissance photographs, the U.S. intelligence community would never know if the Soviet Union redeployed their missiles to Cuban soil.
20:34They believed that the A-12 was the answer.
20:39The problem was that by November 5th, there was no CIA pilot qualified to fly the extremely temperamental A-12.
20:47Kelly Johnson volunteered Lockheed test pilots for the highly sensitive flights over Cuba.
20:55The CIA record seems to dispute this story.
20:59In his book Skunk Works, author Jay Miller revealed that Kelly Johnson kept his own logs,
21:05logs which suggest the CIA accepted his offer, and on November 10th, the A-12's first operational sortie over denied airspace was accomplished by a civilian commercial employee.
21:19There's no evidence that it was detected by Soviet-made radar in Cuba.
21:24Besides, nothing in the Soviet arsenal could have shot it down.
21:28In fact, during its operational lifetime, more than 100 missiles were fired at the A-12, by then also known as Blackbird.
21:37But none of these aircraft was ever shot down.
21:39One of the most interesting episodes was during the Middle East War in 1973, when the US found it needed more photo intelligence than the satellites could apparently provide.
21:52The Blackbird was assigned the job, but European NATO allies refused to grant it basing rights.
22:01So long missions were flown out of bases on the US East Coast, and the Blackbird flew across the Atlantic, through the Mediterranean, over Egypt, Israel, Syria and Jordan, and back out the way it came.
22:17For the Blackbird, flying faster than Mach 3, these missions from the East Coast of the United States to the Middle East and back were a mere 10 hours long.
22:32But the supersonic speed also called for as many as five to six aerial refuelings.
22:39Blackbird flew this difficult mission at least nine times in just a few months.
22:45In fact, during its lifetime, Blackbird was used for aerial spy missions over Vietnam, Central America, Libya, the Middle East, and North Korea.
23:05But time, politics, and changing economic priorities began to affect this enigmatic spy plane's operational life.
23:12Spy satellites had become more sophisticated, and the CIA was out of the manned aerial reconnaissance business.
23:21As a result, the tremendously high cost of maintaining this supersonic aircraft fell largely to the US Air Force,
23:29which eventually decided the price tag was just too steep.
23:36In November 1989, the fastest aircraft on Earth was retired from operational military service.
23:48Today, remnants of this powerful fleet of spy planes are being housed in aircraft museums around the country.
24:00No manned jet aircraft ever flew faster than Blackbird.
24:06But the changing times demanded more than speed.
24:11Quite simply, the Pentagon decision-makers were interested in a spy plane that didn't attract as much attention and had a lower price tag.
24:19After the U-2 incident, when Francis Gary Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union,
24:32no American president would approve a manned spy flight deep into Soviet airspace.
24:37The threat of a nuclear response was too great.
24:43And so, the American intelligence community found itself between a rock and a very hard place.
24:50The U.S. needed to know what the Soviets were up to, what kind of missiles they were testing,
24:56what sorts of nuclear warheads they could deliver and where.
25:04The U-2 was out. Soviet sands could shoot it down.
25:08And the A-12 wasn't operational.
25:13Spy satellites did offer clear and detailed photographs.
25:18Their presence didn't constitute an act of aggression.
25:21But they had their own very serious drawbacks.
25:25They were visible and predictable.
25:29All an enemy nation needed to do was to camouflage its assets when the satellite passed overhead.
25:39As early as 1948, both the British and the American intelligence agencies used retrofitted bomber airframes
25:46like the B-29, B-47 and B-50 to scout along the borders of the Soviet Union.
25:57But it was difficult for a MiG pilot to tell if the B-47 was a bomber or a reconnaissance airplane,
26:04particularly for an inexperienced Soviet pilot.
26:06This made spying on the Soviet Union with reconditioned bombers far too provocative.
26:16The Air Force needed a nondescript airframe it could fill with a cargo of listening devices, electronic sensors and analysts.
26:25By the early 60s, they found the answer in Boeing's KC-135 jet tanker, a cousin of Boeing's 707 commercial jetliner.
26:35It was given the name RC-135.
26:39This aircraft could fly at high altitudes.
26:48It was large enough to carry all the necessary equipment and operators.
26:52And with its onboard sensors, if atmospheric conditions were almost perfect,
26:58it could see within a 230-mile radius and hear around the world.
27:03Best of all, the RC-135 looked like an airborne tanker or even a commercial jetliner.
27:14The Air Force and Boeing could hide their new spy plane where no enemy would think to look in plain sight.
27:22Since on the exterior of the airplane it looked like a typical C-135,
27:27very few people paid attention to it.
27:29It was what mattered inside that proved the airplane's capability.
27:36Inside were extremely sensitive, top-secret sensors.
27:40So powerful, in fact, they could lock onto an enemy's radar or radio frequencies
27:45and literally eavesdrop on enemy conversations taking place on the ground.
27:49Originally, this top-secret spy plane was designed to monitor the nuclear capabilities of enemy nations,
28:04especially those of the Soviet Union.
28:06But in 1961, even before the RC-135 was fully operational,
28:12Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev announced to the world that Soviet engineers had developed a 100-megaton nuclear bomb.
28:22Boy, this was just a terrifying event because if the Soviets could produce this,
28:32then that meant ultimately that American Minuteman missile silos and other very hardened shelters were quite vulnerable.
28:38Moreover, cities like New York could be erased with a single bomb.
28:44The U.S. had to find out if Khrushchev was bluffing.
28:47A highly classified program called Speedlite began immediately.
29:00The RC-135s flew in very close proximity to what was purported to be a test of this 100-megaton bomb.
29:09On board were extremely high-speed cameras, sensors, spectrometers.
29:15They photographed and recorded detailed information, not only about the blast, but about the after-effects.
29:25When I talked to the crew members, they said they looked at the side of the airplane that faced the atomic detonation
29:31and the paint had been burned off.
29:32Had the detonation, which was not 100 megatons, had in fact been 100 megatons,
29:39the fireball would have been an area the size of Maryland and the airplane would have been vaporized.
29:46While few declassified details are available, experts do know this,
29:50that the crew survived to bring back information on the Soviets' nuclear capability
29:55that no other aircraft could have managed.
29:57As in the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviet Premier was bluffing.
30:04Thanks to the inspiring display of courage on the part of the crew
30:09and to the intelligence-gathering abilities of the RC-135,
30:13the staff at the Pentagon was aware of the bluff.
30:16Sometimes the high demand for secrecy actually inhibits the intelligence-gathering process.
30:27Whether it's a spy plane, a spy satellite or an operative on the ground,
30:33the information must pass through several hands,
30:36from the spy to the analyst and finally to the person who needs it.
30:39Some of the RC-135's missions under the operational name Rivet Joint were so highly classified
30:43that even on board the aircraft, the flight crew was segregated from the electronics intelligence crew working at the back of the airplane.
30:55The flight crew itself did not have the appropriate security clearance.
31:00In one of the airplanes, the Rivet Amber, the latrine was in the back of the airplane.
31:08And for a pilot who had to go to the bathroom, literally the crew in the back sort of had to stop what they were doing
31:14and put hoods over their equipment or whistle or something like that
31:19so that the man with the lower security clearance could go to the latrine.
31:22During the Gulf War in 1991, this kind of secrecy became a severe liability to theater commanders.
31:33It frustrated the RC-135 Rivet Joint crews and onboard observers who risked their lives to get this vital intelligence to the men and women on an already chaotic battlefield.
31:45General Schwarzkopf and his battlefield commanders in particular would say,
31:52what is the Rivet Joint telling us? What are the satellite photos telling us? What are the U-2 photos telling us?
31:57And in a post-Cold War mentality, the people who had those photos in their hands were still locked into this belief that,
32:04I'm sorry, you don't have a clearance. You don't have a need to know.
32:08And in fact, those were people sitting in their cubicles at Fort Meade, Maryland or elsewhere,
32:12who were thousands of miles distant from the battlefield.
32:18Desert Storm and Desert Shield drew two other Boeing 707 reconnaissance aircraft into battle.
32:24The AWAS, an airborne warning and control system developed in the 70s,
32:30and the newest spy plane named Joint Stars.
32:33J-STARS was developed in the open. It wasn't a black program like the U-2 or the Black Bird or the Stealth Fighter or Stealth Bomber.
32:47However, it does have its secrets in the radar processing and indeed four of the radar's ten modes of operations are still classified.
32:57While Rivet Joint eavesdropped on the enemy's conversations and listened in on their plans and AWACS watched the airspace,
33:07Joint Stars flew above and kept its eye in the sky on enemy troop and weapons movements.
33:15Working together, these spy planes dogged the Iraqis from one end of the desert to the other.
33:20One particular J-STARS was success was in providing warning of Saddam Hussein's only real offensive move with his armor at Kafji in the middle of the conflict.
33:37During the battle for the town of Kafji, Joint Stars detected a force of 80 Iraqi vehicles headed directly for the Allies' position.
33:46This urgent information was relayed to the Marine battle commander.
33:52A tactical airstrike was called in and the advancing Iraqis.
33:57His early warning prevented a surprise attack and helped to assure a coalition victory.
34:04Rivet Joint, AWACS and Joint Stars provided this same kind of protective intelligence in 1994 in Bosnia and in Kosovo in 1999.
34:16The theater commanders continue to thirst for instantaneous battlefield reconnaissance.
34:25The American public, the politicians and the military demand increased safety for soldiers in the field.
34:32To satisfy everyone, in the last decade of the 20th century, unmanned, remotely piloted spy planes made their debut in war, in all shapes and sizes.
34:46As American military forces deployed to the Middle East for the Gulf War in 1991, another kind of eye in the sky joined the U-2 Rivet Joint and Joint Stars.
35:04It was an unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV, and it gave theater commanders an entirely new ability to see action on the battlefield, almost as it occurred.
35:18Quite simply, a UAV is an aircraft that flies without a human pilot on board.
35:29The American army began testing them in the 80s.
35:35Most military experts say that UAVs were designed for missions that were either too dangerous, too dull, or too dirty.
35:43In this case, too dirty meant politically sensitive.
35:50Over 30 years had passed since Francis Gary Powers was shot down in his U-2 spy plane over Soviet airspace.
35:58But the fear of another such event still lingered in the corridors of Washington, D.C.
36:06During the 90s, this concern and a low price tag pushed UAV development center stage.
36:12They are still being tested.
36:16In the mid-90s, Lockheed Skunk Works and Boeing created this intriguing UAV called Dark Star.
36:27It was recently canceled.
36:30Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation, a pioneer in the helicopter industry, designed this unique unmanned spy plane.
36:42Called Seifer.
36:43And there are many others.
36:46But during the Gulf War in 1991, and several years later in Bosnia, a UAV called Pioneer flew successful reconnaissance missions for the American Army, the Navy, and the Marines.
37:00The Air Force flew a UAV named Predator.
37:07The political environment of the Bosnia theater did not necessarily allow an armed, manned aircraft to overfly parts of the country.
37:18Whereas an unarmed surveillance type asset, such as the Predator, were more easily employed.
37:23Predator is actually flown by Air Force rated pilots from a ground station that includes a virtual cockpit.
37:33The pilot has a stick, a rudder, and all the aircraft instruments that a normal pilot would use to fly an airplane.
37:40Predator carries an airborne video camera whose battlefield imagery is available to ground commanders in almost real time.
37:56Predator was used in the Balkan theater of operations almost continually off and on since late 1995-96 to monitor convoy and troop movements amongst the roads,
38:06to search out marshaling areas, to find hidden arsenals such as tanks, anti-aircraft artillery, even airplanes.
38:19In 1999, after the final hostilities had ceased and both the U.S. and NATO forces had moved in to maintain peace between Serbian forces and NATO in Kosovo,
38:28the Soviets took over the Pristina airfield.
38:33This imagery was provided by Predator.
38:36Russian MiGs are seen on the ramp.
38:39Trucks are loaded with Russian air crews and maintenance workers.
38:43The NATO theater commander tasked with securing this airfield got the information about the Russian presence from Predator quickly at a very politically sensitive time.
38:54This imagery was also made available via satellite to NATO headquarters in Belgium and to the Pentagon, thousands of miles away in Washington.
39:04The detailed surveillance that Predator provided may have helped to avoid a conflict with the Russians by revealing the true extent of their assets.
39:14No reconnaissance pilot's life was ever at risk.
39:21In February 1998, as Predator operated in the Balkans, another UAV was being tested at Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert.
39:28The Global Hawk.
39:29You're talking about a vehicle that can stay aloft over 35 hours and be self-deployable.
39:42We could fly from Edwards Air Force Base where we are right now and up to the state of Illinois, we could image the whole state of Illinois over 40,000 square nautical miles and then fly back to Edwards all in one mission.
39:55While Predator is flown by a virtual pilot from a ground station, Global Hawk's flight path is pre-programmed by computer and can be mostly autonomous.
40:13In the typical scenario, you're going to have three global hawks that are on station, so 24 hours a day, you're going to have one airborne imagery in the battlefield.
40:32Global Hawk has an incredible array of high resolution sensors on board that can see through clouds and fog day or night.
40:42All from an altitude of up to 65,000 feet.
40:51Like Predator, it offers almost instantaneous battlefield imagery to theater commanders.
40:57Experts believe it will be operational by the year 2003.
41:04Global Hawk's onboard equipment is commercial off the shelf, so it is unclassified.
41:09In fact, most UAVs do not live in the world of black budgets and secret airfields, even though their missions may be top secret.
41:18Aeronautical engineering firms across the country continue to create, test, and refine even newer unmanned aerial vehicles.
41:34Meanwhile, an entirely new class of miniaturized, almost undetectable spy planes are being created to patrol cities and suburbs.
41:47With the threat of urban terrorism increasing, tomorrow's battleground may include a city's skyscrapers or its water supply.
42:05The enemy's weapons might contain chemical and biological agents that poison the air and water.
42:14What kind of spy plane can warn of an enemy's movements in a federal office building?
42:21A mall?
42:23A mall?
42:24On a city street?
42:25Or near a reservoir?
42:32And can this same aerial spy technology be used in the more traditional warfighting scenarios?
42:38It would seem so, as spy planes with no more than a six-inch wingspan are being developed and tested.
42:52They're called micro-aerial vehicles, MAVs.
42:57They're the brainchild of a little-known arm of the Department of Defense known as DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
43:11DARPA has operated at the very edge of public awareness for years.
43:16It funded the research and development for some of the most unique and far-sighted defense technologies
43:22that in later years were used in the F-117 Stealth, the B-2 Bomber, and even the Internet.
43:32The micro-aer vehicle clearly falls in that category.
43:35It's not clear today that the micro-aer vehicle is going to find operational utility any time soon,
43:41but it does show lots of promise and it's worth the small investment that's being made.
43:45DARPA defined a micro-aer vehicle as an aircraft with dimensions no larger than six inches in any direction.
43:55And it had to perform a military mission.
43:58These restrictions forced the creators to think outside the box in order to invent an entirely new species of aircraft.
44:06MAVs are small enough to be carried in a soldier's backpack.
44:17The MAV is potentially an ideal source of information, visual information and maybe even acoustic information,
44:25letting the foot soldier know where his opposition is and in what numbers.
44:29During the Vietnam War, both Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army forces camouflaged themselves in the foliage of the surrounding jungle.
44:41The only way for the American soldier to detect them was to be close enough to see motion or to hear some small movement.
44:52In a jungle setting armed with an MAV, the foot soldier would have instant reconnaissance.
44:57He would know exactly where the opposition was, how many were there, and what sort of weapons they carried.
45:08A micro vehicle is really a revolution in soldier sensing.
45:16The idea of being able to have something that you can project in the air,
45:21that can fly where you want it, when you want it there,
45:23to be able to take pictures and transmit those pictures back to you in real time,
45:28is a capability that is not in the current military structure, but one that's truly needed.
45:34Combat in desert terrain will prove to be one of the greater challenges for the micro air vehicle.
45:41It relies on its ability to blend against the backdrop of trees or buildings.
45:46The flat, endless, monochromatic desert landscape offers no camouflage, no place to hide.
45:55But the chance to use these amazing spy planes in this desert environment does exist.
46:01In the Gulf War, it's not out of the question, for example, that we might have taken MAVs,
46:09dropped them in numbers from a larger aircraft,
46:12and allowed them to settle in on areas where we suspected illegal activity.
46:19Three, two, one, launch.
46:22Experts say the micro air vehicle will have to earn its way into the soldiers' bag of tricks.
46:33Once DARPA proves they can fly and carry the necessary payloads,
46:37the defense contractors who build MAVs will have to soldier-proof them.
46:41How can I make a shell that is durable enough that I could hand it to a soldier?
46:51They can run it through a river as they're doing a river crossing.
46:55They can bang it around just like they bang around all of the rest of their things,
46:59which is a normal thing to do when you're in the field,
47:01and still be able to survive and be able to, when I need it, accomplish the mission that I need it for.
47:08Experts believe it will take another 20 years before MAVs are operational.
47:14Launch.
47:16In the meantime, DARPA has found no need to cloak micro air vehicles in a veil of secrecy.
47:23There are no closed doors hiding this new technology.
47:28Yet black programs have always been at the core of spy plane development.
47:41As far back as the late 80s when the SR-71 Blackbird was mothballed,
47:46there was speculation about its successor.
47:48Today, even trained observers in the U.S. and Europe report seeing lights in the sky.
47:58Unusual aircraft moving at max speeds, then suddenly changing directions.
48:05Much of this activity is reported near the legendary secret airfield at Groom Lake, Nevada, known as Area 51.
48:12How much of this is myth, how much of it is reality is something that we simply don't know.
48:20It's entirely possible that one or more unacknowledged aircraft were built, flown and put into storage in the late 80s and early 1990s.
48:28There's an intriguing story about one so-called mystery spy plane.
48:35It is known by the name Aurora.
48:41Just as Blackbird was built to succeed the U-2, some experts believe that this was the aircraft created to succeed Blackbird.
48:49That Aurora inhabited the secret world of the CIA and Air Force black budgets for years.
48:55It was said to fly eight to ten times the speed of sound, reportedly soaring at an altitude of well over a hundred thousand feet.
49:10Aurora was supposed to be able to take off from the United States, fly a reconnaissance mission over the Soviet Union and return without landing.
49:17That's very ambitious.
49:20Maybe we're looking at Aurora today when we look at the Lockheed Martin X-33.
49:26A lot of people have wondered where some of that advanced technology came from.
49:32Proof that these mystery spy crafts did or did not exist may lie hidden for generations to come.
49:39There's a very large black budget still. There's a very secret test site at Groom Lake still.
49:47But on balance, I don't believe that there's anything flying and going operational out there that we don't know about.
49:55All the facts about these spy planes may never be known.
50:05But who's to say?
50:08Fifty years ago, no one believed that a lightweight single-engine glider would become the grandfather of modern aerial espionage.
50:16It may be impossible to predict what forms spy planes of the future will take.
50:27But whatever aircraft this new generation of designers creates, one thing is certain.
50:35Soldiers and generals will always rely upon them
50:38to patrol the skies of potential adversaries, to photograph, to listen,
50:48and to transmit back their vital intelligence.
50:51To the left hand ...
50:58To the right reef as the nice percentage of the other aircraft.
51:02To the right wing of the stars will always be the same tonadish.
51:04To the right wing of the stars, there will be an incredible power of the mission that they are known as the average,
51:08one of the most champs of the belle flam números,
51:13and that they don't have any absolute power of the stars.
51:18To the right wing of the stars of the Lord was on top of the earth.