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A CIA article on the subject says, 'The A-12 arrived at CIA Headquarters aboard five wide-load trucks, and it required two enormous cranes to lift the 39,000-pound airframe onto its three-pylon mount to be assembled in 10 days. However both remain amazing examples of the peak of a certain kind of technological innovation, and the A-12 at least has not been forgotten by the CIA in 2007 one of the remaining A-12 fuselages was mounted in front of CIA headquarters. In yet another twist of irony, the 'Dragon Lady' – the U-2 which the SR-71 and A-12 had been intended to replace – remains in service today, providing a flexibility and versatility still unmatched by surveillance satellites.Īs with the A-12, the Accutron was eventually superseded by more practical technology – first lower cost quartz watches, which appeared for the first time in 1969-70, and then by ubiquitous, atomic-clock-controlled time signals served to cell phones. The A-12 was replaced in service by the SR-71, which had two seats for both a pilot and a reconnaissance officer, and which was operated until 1998 by the Air Force and 1999 by NASA. Colonel Frank Murray flew four of these missions, and also flew the last flight ever of an A-12 when one codenamed 'Article 131' was flown from the top secret base at Groom Lake, Nevada, to storage in Palmdale, Arizona. Instead, the A-12s were flown to Okinawa, and were used as part of Project BLACK SHIELD, which consisted of a total of 29 sorties flown primarily over North Vietnam, but also over Laos and North Korea, including a mission that located the USS Pueblo after its capture by the North Korean navy in the 1968 incident now known by the name of the captured vessel. A single-seat aircraft operating under the authority of the CIA, it was never used in its intended mission of clandestine overflights of the Soviet Union.

The A-12 was not destined to have a long operational life.

Bulova watch accutron astronaut case serial number lookup