Conceived in the 1950s, Blackbirds remain the fastest and highest flying air-breathing production aircraft ever built. In 1959, Lockheed’s chief engineer Kelly Johnson and his team submitted …

Two of the original 18 A-12 aircraft were designated as M-21s with serial numbers 60-6940 and 60-6941. The M-21 was a two-seat version of the A-12, with a pylon on the fuselage centerline …

In June 1963, the Air Force took over the project because it had overall charge of unmanned reconnaissance aircraft. Lockheed eventually built two M-21s and 38 drones, and its test pilot …

The Yakovlev MC-21 (Russian: Яковлев МС-21) is a single-aisle airliner, under development in Russia by the Yakovlev Corporation (formerly known as Irkut Corporation), a branch of the …

Built for a CIA program code-named “Tagboard,” the M-21 carried unpiloted drones for intelligence gathering. These D-21 drones were intended for launch from the M-21 “mother …

6 days ago · There were two M-21 aircraft built, 60-6940 and 60-6941. Aircraft #60-6941 crashed when the aircraft collided with a D-21 during the launch. This crash ended all M-21 sorties. …

Sep 10, 2021 · Lockheed built the aircraft to play a role in Tagboard, the code-name for a Central Intelligence Agency intelligence-gathering program. The aircraft carried an un-piloted D-21 …

In their day, the A-12, YF-12, M-21, D-21, and SR-71 variants outperformed all other jet airplanes in terms of altitude and speed. Now retired, they remain the only production aircraft capable of …

22 December 1964: At Groom Lake, Nevada, a Lockheed M-21, a special two-place variant of the Central Intelligence Agency’s A-12 Oxcart Mach 3 reconnaissance aircraft, took off for the first …

The M-21 was basically an A-12 that was designed to carry and launch the expendable 10 ton D-21 (?mini-Blackbird?) unmanned reconnaissance drone, and two A-12s were built to M-21 …