The test subject was a pig. It was chosen because its nervous system is close enough to a human's for the results to mean something, and because nobody was quite willing to find out the other way first.
The pig was harnessed to a nylon line, a helium balloon lifted the line five hundred feet into the air, and an aircraft flew into it at 125 miles an hour. The pig was snatched off the ground, spun violently, and winched aboard in one piece. Disoriented but unhurt, it recovered its composure and attacked the crew.
This is not a tall tale. It is in the CIA's own in-house journal, and the system it was testing went on to pull two men off a Soviet ice station in the Arctic.
Informazioni rapide
| Sistema | The Fulton surface-to-air recovery system, STARS — universally known as Skyhook |
| Inventore | Robert Edison Fulton Jr. (1909–2004), who as a young man rode a motorcycle 40,000 miles through 32 countries |
| Development | Began 1950 with weather balloons and small weights; funded by the Office of Naval Research; system finalised 1958 |
| Ground kit | A harness, 500 ft of braided nylon rated at 4,000 lb, a helium bottle and a dirigible-shaped balloon |
| On the aircraft | Two 30 ft tubular steel horns spread at 70 degrees, plus deflector cables running nose to wingtips to protect the propellers |
| First human pickup | 12 August 1958 — Staff Sergeant Levi W. Woods, USMC, recovered by a Navy P2V Neptune |
| First operational use | Operation Coldfeet, June 1962: two men recovered from abandoned Soviet drift station NP 8 at 83°N by a CIA-operated B-17 |
| Service life | Fitted to C-130 variants and the C-123 from 1965. AFSOC stopped maintaining the capability in September 1996 |
| On screen | Thunderball (1965), The Green Berets (1968) and The Dark Knight (2008) |
How you pick a man off the ground at 125 mph
The obvious objection is that it should kill you. It does not, and the reason is geometry.
The line does not snap taut horizontally. It is vertical, held up by the balloon, and the aircraft catches it in a V-shaped yoke on the nose. The person on the ground is lifted almost straight up before being accelerated forward, which spreads the load over a couple of seconds rather than delivering it all at once.
Fulton's testers reported it produced less shock than a parachute opening. The initial contact was described as feeling like a kick in the pants; you then rise about a hundred feet, streamline out behind the aircraft, and get winched in. Start to finish, roughly six minutes.
The hardest engineering problem was not the line or the balloon. Fulton considered the sky anchor — the locking device that grabs the line and holds it against the aircraft — the most demanding part of the entire development.
Coldfeet
In 1961 the Americans found an abandoned Soviet Arctic drift station and realised there was intelligence sitting on the ice — equipment, documents, acoustic gear used for submarine detection. The problem was straightforward: you can parachute people in, but there is no runway, no ship, and nothing to get them out again.
Skyhook was the answer. A CIA proprietary airline, Intermountain Aviation, fitted a B-17 with Fulton gear at Marana, Arizona.
On 28 May 1962, Major James Smith of the US Air Force — a paratrooper and Russian linguist — and Lieutenant Leonard LeSchack of the Naval Reserve, an Antarctic geophysicist, jumped onto Soviet station NP 8 at 83 degrees north. They had 72 hours.
Getting them back took three attempts. The first failed. A second search on 1 June found nothing. Conditions were grey ice under grey cloud with no discernible horizon and a 30-knot surface wind, at the very edge of what Skyhook could handle.
The following morning they got it done. The cargo went first — 150 pounds of film, documents and samples — then LeSchack, then Smith. The best pickup took six and a half minutes.
Three systems that keep getting confused
Skyhook has accumulated a folklore that mixes in operations it had nothing to do with, so it is worth separating them.
Before Fulton there was the All American glider-snatch system: two poles, a transfer line and a grapple, no balloon at all. It made the first human pickup in September 1943.
The disastrous 1952 CIA mission over Manchuria — in which a C-47 was shot down, two pilots killed and two officers captured and held for two decades — used that earlier system, not Fulton's. Skyhook did not exist yet. Popular accounts merge the two constantly.
Fulton's STARS proper dates from 1958, and the Coldfeet recovery is its unambiguous operational success.
It was not risk-free. Wikipedia records one fatality, in April 1982 at CFB Lahr in Germany, attributed to a failed bushing in the yoke pivot — though that passage carries no citation and should be treated with care.
Why it went away
Not because it stopped working. Because helicopters got better.
By the 1990s, long-range special operations helicopters with aerial refuelling could go and physically land where a Skyhook aircraft would once have had to make a high-speed pass at a balloon. The helicopter option is slower and more vulnerable, but it does not require the person on the ground to assemble a balloon, inflate it with helium, put on a harness and then sit still while an aircraft flies at them.
AFSOC retired the capability in September 1996. What remains is one of the strangest problems anyone ever solved in aviation, and the only recovery method in history that was tested on a pig and worked well enough to be used against the Soviet Union.
Archival film of a Skyhook extraction being demonstrated, on the official US Army special operations history channel.
The Fulton system in service on the MC-130 Hercules.
Archival footage of Skyhook pickups, including the balloon rigging and the moment of contact.
Sources: William M. Leary, “Robert Fulton’s Skyhook and Operation Coldfeet”, Studies in Intelligence Vol. 38 No. 5, CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence; CIA Museum; Wikipedia.
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