Fulton's Skyhook

Flight Journal, Oct 2004 by Purvis, Pete

An early method of crew extraction

October 1962: I'm a brand-new graduate of the Navy Test Pilot School at Pax River-the Naval Air Test Center at Patuxent River, Maryland-40 miles down the Chesapeake Bay from the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis from which I graduated in 1957.

I hardly can believe I'm here; I'll fly the newest Navy aircraft and perform amazing aerial feats. I'll push the envelope in the true "right stuff" tradition of those before me: Clark Gable, Errol Flynn-and the real ones such as Scott Crossfield and Chuck Yeager.

The Center had three test divisions. Class standing or "exigencies of the service" dictated where you went. The school identified only the outstanding student in each class; the rest of us only knew that we weren't the outstanding student.

We all dreamed of being in Flight Test-then the highest on the ziggurat of NATC test divisions, where you practiced the intricacies of flying qualities and performance testing that my class had struggled with 16 hours a day for the past nine months. The largest division, Weapons Systems Test, tested new radars and avionics and dropped bombs. The remaining test division, Service Test, did cats-and-dogs work: aero-medical equipment, cockpit design and displays and engine performance-such as flying through thunderstorms to see if an engine flamed out.

I landed at Service Test where at least you could fly often and in a variety of airplanes. But in my case, I wound up mostly flying what I had been flying before-the Grumman S-2 anti-submarine patrol plane-a rugged (did Grumman build any other kind?), stubby, twin-engine airplane with a huge tail and a foreshortened nose that looked as though it had plowed into the hangar door. Not a pretty sight, but a very capable ASW machine for the '50s and '60s. I had 1,500 hours in "Stoofs" (S-2Fs) and 275 carrier landings on a carrier in the North Atlantic. I wanted to fly jets and bag landings in carrier-suitability tests. But I was the only S-2 pilot in my class, and the Navy needed my experience for Skyhook. Fledgling test pilots fresh out of test pilot school usually don't get their own projects straightaway. I was lucky to get one, and as it turned out, it was a good one.

Skyhook was the name Robert Edison Fulton Jr. gave to his Fulton Recovery System, a gadget designed to pull people and things up from remote places on the end of a rope.

The Navy's Office of Naval Research (ONR) began to fund Skyhook development in 1950. By 1958, they had installed the system on a P-2V and had advanced enough to attempt a human pick-up. On August 12, that first person was Marine S/Sgt. Levi Woods of the elite 1st Force Recon Co.

In 1961, ONR found an operational use for Skyhook: a secret mission to check out an abandoned Soviet spy station on an Arctic ice island. Because Navy funding had dried up, they turned to the CIA, as it had been pursuing its own Skyhook development. To execute the mission, the Agency put Skyhook on a B-17, dropped Air Force intelligence officer Capt. James Smith and ONR scientist Lt. j.g. Leonard LeShack onto the island and picked them up six days later, along with whatever useful electronic eavesdropping equipment and documents the Soviets had left behind. This was the first operational use of Skyhook.

Skyhook's inventor, Bob Fulton, is one of the most fascinating people I've met. He's a direct descendant of Robert Fulton of steamboat fame, and possibly related to Thomas Edison, a family name that appears among his forebears before the light bulb's invention. That he harbored an inventor's gene is not surprising. He is a true Renaissance man: inventor, poet, author, artist, photographer, engineer and adventurer.

After he graduated from Harvard in 1931, Bob studied architecture for a year in Vienna, but afterward, instead of sailing home to New York, he rode his motorcycle east through the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan and French Indochina. After tramp steamer trips from Haiphong to Shanghai and then to Japan, he boarded an ocean liner to San Francisco and then rode his bike across the U.S. and arrived in New York on Christmas Eve 1933. He chronicled his daring 18-month trip on film, which he showed touring the U.S. and described in a captivating adventure book.

During WW II, Bob invented an aerial gunnery trainer that's used widely by the American armed forces. After the War, he invented the Airphibian, which combined the family auto with the airplane. The market never materialized, but the CAA did certify the machine.

I first met Bob at Pax River in 1963 as he was climbing down from the wing of his red P-51 Mustang. He wore a medium-gray, custom-tailored suit over a blue oxford-cloth shirt and wool challis tie; on his head was a brown fedora. He was a unique mix of class, intelligence, culture and a fighter-pilot spirit.

Bob's trip was driven by the urgency of the impending war in Vietnam and a need for carrier-based covert rescue. His Skyhook system was follow-up to the All-American Aviation (AAA) retrieval system used in WW II to snatch items from remote sites. An airplane using the AAA system flew very low and slowly and trailed a grappling hook to grab a load line strung between two poles. The AAA system's major disadvantage was that the hookup was behind the airplane, so the pilot's aim point was uncertain. Bob's Skyhook design put the aim point straight ahead.