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 Louis Wellington Schalk, Jr., the first pilot to fly the Blackbird reconnaissance spy plane, died of complications related to leukemia and pneumonia on 16 August in Virginia. He was 76. Schalk piloted the first flight of the Lockheed A-12, first of the Blackbird family of Mach 3-plus aircraft, at Groom Lake, Nevada, on 26 April 1962. He reached a top speed of 2,287 mph and altitudes that exceeded 90,000 feet. As the chief test pilot for Lockheed Advanced Development Company, he helped Lockheed engineers develop the high-speed, high-altitude aircraft. He made the first thirteen flights in the A-12, the prototype for later versions of the Blackbird, including the SR-71. After graduating from the United States Air Force Test Pilot School in 1954, Schalk was assigned to fighter operations at Edwards AFB where his teachers included Chuck Yeager and Pete Everest. He was a USAF test pilot from 1954 to 1957. After completing the Phase II tests on the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter, Schalk left the Air Force to join Lockheed Aircraft as a test pilot. He joined the Lockheed Advanced Development Company Skunk Works in 1959.
Schalk evaluated the structural integrity of the Lockheed Electra, America’s first turboprop commercial airliner, in more than 100 hours of flight tests. He also tested the performance and stability of the North American F-86H Sabre and the stability and systems on the McDonnell F-101A Voodoo. Schalk flew over 5,000 hours in seventy different aircraft, including the Lockheed Electra, A-11, F-104, F-86, YF-12, F-100, F-101, F-102, RAF Hunter, and Javelin Aircraft. He was honored with the Society of Experimental Test Pilots’ Iven C. Kincheloe Award in 1964, was named an Eagle by the Flight Test Historical Foundation in 1996, and was selected for the Aerospace Walk of Honor in Lancaster, California.
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