Customer Reviews

From Rainbow to Gusto: Stealth and the Design of the Lockheed Blackbird (Library of Flight)

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I worked at P&W on this project and provided some input to the author. This book provides an excellent detailed description of the mostly classified activities in the late 1950's leading up to the design of the A-12 and SR 71 articles. Well worth the time to read. Brings back lots of memories of my career.

I received this book for Christmas, and could not put it down. The writing is not tops, but the subject matter and the narrative on how the stealth design happened is captivating. Suhler did an excellent job researching for the book; it shows through all the footnotes, references, and diagrams. It is too bad many of the original drawings and diagrams don't come out very well in the printing of the book. Despite that, it was a very enjoyable read.

Paul Suhler faced a daunting task while researching the true history of the A-12 and SR-71. The project, one of the CIA's blackest, was cloaked in secrecy and a false history.

The CIA had protected the plane's true history by constructing a false back story to mask the real development path that lead from Lincoln Laboratory in Bedford, Massachusetts through Washington, DC to Los Angeles and onto Groom Lake's Area 51.

Suhler's desire to tell the true story led many important contributors to step forward and offer previously unpublished, classified information. He was given exclusive access to a private memoir my deceased father had written four years prior to his death. Suhler reveals for the first time that the graceful slope of the chines owed their creation, not to a desire to increase stability as has been popularly reported, but to a requirement to create the world's first stealth aircraft.

This book should be on every aviation history scholar's bookshelf. For a deeper understanding of the forces at play that led to the development of the Blackbird, one should also include "Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and the U-2 Affair" by Michael Beschloss.

I bought this book to use as a reference for a paper I was writing, and it also sounded interesting.
I really enjoyed the information about the stealth technology from the U-2 program. This book went into a lot of detail about the people working on the programs, and had many quotes that added a lot to the story. It acknowledged that in some cases there were discrepancies between accounts, which is to be expected.
Enjoyable to read, intriguing details about what it was like working on such secretive projects back then.