Reconnaissance RF-100As: ‘Slick Chick’
The early 1950s were the years of the Cold War on
many fronts, and the Korean war on a Far Eastern
front. The Communist countries were re-arming
with some haste and in great secrecy, and intelligence
information was needed, the kind of intelligence that
concerned itself with the makeup of Russian and East
German armoured divisions or Czechoslovakian
motorized infantry units. And the best way to get that
kind of data, it seemed, was to make some high-speed
dashes along or across the borders of Soviet-bloc
countries while taking some pictures.
So NAA modified a half-dozen F-100As to a tactical
reconnaissance configuration during March
and April 1955. For the record, they were NAA F-
100A Nos 40-43 (AF53-1545/-1548), 46 (-1551) and
49 (-1554). The 20-mm nose cannon, ammunition
boxes, chutes and feed mechanisms, were removed
from the nose and the resulting volume was filled
with five reconnaissance camera systems that looked
ahead and to each side of the airplane.
Soon dubbed ‘Slick Chick’, the RF-100A didn’t
particularly deserve that name. The camera systems
wouldn’t fit inside the fuselage contour, and were
covered in part by external fairings on the outboard
edges of the fuselage belly, extending from below the
windshield to nearly the trailing edge of the wing. It
was an obvious recognition feature. The RF-100As
carried four droppable fuel tanks, because the flight
profile called for a lot of afterburner use, and there
was no provision for aerial refuelling.
The first RF-100A, after some delays, was ready to
fly its final check flight on a Saturday. Project pilot
Jim Brooks had just married Martha Tilton, former
vocalist with the Benny Goodman band, and so Bob
Baker offered to make the flight, scheduled to ferry
the plane from Palmdale to Sacramento for final
installation of Government-furnished equipment.
Baker wrote, ‘I took off from Palmdale and went
through 35,000 ft (10,670m) in a hurry; the
afterburner was turned up and tuned for over 50,000
ft (15,244 m). I felt the nose dropping as Mach
number increased through .92 to .93, and the stick
would not come back any further. The Mach started
to increase rapidly to .95, and George Smith’s recent
bailout at supersonic speed crossed my mind.
‘I also was familiar with a pitch control reversal just
below Mach one, and I didn’t want that. So I
chopped the power, opened the speed brake and, as
the Mach number decreased, the nose came back up.
As I descended, I was able to reduce the minimum
indicated airspeed from 250 down to 200 knots and,
with the stick all the way back, I touched down at 190
knots on what is now the orbiter (NASA space
shuttle) runway.
‘Nobody went home that night; the whole
engineering team came up from Los Angeles. By
noon Sunday, the problem was still unsolved. Then I
reminded “‘Stormy”’ (Harrison Storms) that I’d been
pressurized when the problem occurred. So we set up
for an engine run, and I pressurized the cockpit, and
the stick would not go all the way back.
“There was a bell crank on the right side of the
cockpit in the control linkage that goes from the stick
to the stabilizer actuator. A special piece of
equipment, unique to ‘Slick Chick” bulged into the
cockpit and its cover plate jammed the bell crank
when the airplane was pressurized. The fix was the
classic aircraft industry fix, made with a hammer.
One of our guys crawled into the cockpit with a
hammer, dented the cover plate in the tight spot, and
the bell crank was free to move again. We delivered
the aircraft that way.’
One of the pilots who flew ‘Slick Chick’ missions
remembers a typical one: ‘We’d take off from Hahn
or one of the other German bases near the border, get
to altitude, go full burner, accelerate until we were
going as fast as we could, and then zip over the border
on a straight supersonic dash. The cameras were
turned on, and started shooting. You stayed straight
to stay supersonic, because turns really ate up your
speed.
“We'd go out to some predetermined point, start a
climbing turn, gain altitude, and start to dive, still in
the turn. We’d be supersonic when we headed into
the return run. The flight paths looked a little like a
keyhole pattern, so we called them “‘keyhole’’ flights.
“Sometimes we’d see them scrambling MiGs, but
they never got near us. I think I got shot at a few times
by flak, but the gunners weren’t that good then. They
sharpened up later.’
Four of the ‘Slick Chicks’ were later rehabilitated
and updated according to letter contract AF-04(606)
7099, issued 8 October 1958. These may have been
the aircraft sent to Taiwan. Among the ‘Slick Chicks’
that operated in the Far East was one photographed
over Japan, with the spurious tail number 32600 that
had been assigned to a Northrop F-89D (AF53-
2600).
