Area 51 Palmdale facility. A search for a suitable testing site for the U-2 was conducted under the same extreme security as the rest of the project. He notified Lockheed, who sent an inspection team out to Groom Lake. According to Lockheed's U-2 designer Kelly Johnson: The lakebed made an ideal strip from which they could test aircraft, and the Emigrant Valley's mountain ranges and the NTS perimeter, about north of Las Vegas, protected the test site from visitors. The CIA asked the AEC to acquire the land, designated "Area 51" on the map, and add it to the Nevada Test Site.
North American P-51 Mustang variants for the P-51 came from tests carried out at facilities such as the USAAF's "Flight Test Engineering Branch", based at Wright Field near Dayton, Ohio and, for the RAF, the Aeroplane & Armament Experimental Establishment (A&AEE), based at Boscombe Down. North American Aviation carried out their own performance tests, as did the only other manufacturer of the P-51, the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation (CAC) of Australia. North American P-51 Mustang variants Over twenty variants of the North American P-51 Mustang fighter were produced from 1940, when it first flew, to after the Second World War, some of which were employed also