dennis2146 Loc: Eastern Idaho

My uncle sent this to me and I thought it was just great. It certainly filled me with pride for America. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.


http://www.facebook.com/AviationDirectSA/videos/1881214438808857/

Dennis

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

I just LOVE this aircraft. I've been lucky enough to see a couple of them. If I'm not mistaken, they still hold some all time speed records. Can the Skunk Works build outrageous aircraft or what?😎 Thanks for posting.

dennis2146 Loc: Eastern Idaho

My pleasure.

Dennis

erinjay64

The SR-71 is a great plane. It has been mothballed, and is not generally serving now...though it is sometimes called back to service for special missions. I was in USAF, and stationed on Okinawa in the 1970s, and we had several SR-71 planes. We called them the "Habu." In the mornings they flew out to pass over various targets-Viet Nam, China, Russia, etc-and at night they came back with lots of good intel. My best friend worked in the Photo wing, and processed images shot by the Habus. I was a medic, and performed hearing tests on the pilots, and health & safety inspections of the hangars, and such. I got close up to the planes, and was always interested in the SR-71s.

kerry12 Loc: Harrisburg, Pa.

Read an article not to long ago that they are working on a SR 72, top speed over 4000 mph.

robertjerl Loc: Corona, California

Back in 1990 when the SR-71 made it's last official Air Force flight and set the coast to coast speed record. I was in my driveway in Azusa, CA getting in my car to drive to the school where I taught in East Los Angeles. The sun wasn't up yet but up where the SR-71 was it was daylight and the sky was blue. As I was getting in my car I glanced up and to the west there was a contrail up very high and growing at a fantastic rate from west to east. I had never seen a high contrail grow that fast. I wondered if Vandenberg had launched a missile. But it was too far south. On my way to East LA the radio news announced the SR-71's last official military flight and speed record run. Now I knew what I had seen. The SR-71 had taken off from Palmdale, cruised out over the Channel Islands where it hooked up to a tanker and took on a max load of fuel and started climbing eastbound, just before they passed over the beach (feet dry) the pilot put the pedal to the metal and the SR-71's record speed run was on. I was lucky enough to have looked up at just the right time. 1 hour 7 minutes and some seconds later the plane crossed the Atlantic beach line (feet wet) and they throttled back and circled back to land at Washington DC with, I believe, 4 new records for the SR-71. I had just about made the 21 miles Azusa to East LA and my school in the same time.

dennis2146 Loc: Eastern Idaho

Thanks for the interesting information. Of course now we will have to kill you.

KIDDING

Dennis

dennis2146 Loc: Eastern Idaho

Interesting.

Dennis

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Good story Robert - thanks.

buckbrush Loc: Texas then Southwest Oregon

The SR-71 was and always will be a totally fascinating aircraft to me.

Back in mid-1963, while going to school during the day, I worked nights at an Aerospace tooling house in Inglewood, California. We had very large, electrically heated presses, that were used to ‘hot-size’ (read temper or stress relieve ) Titanium parts. We received the parts from a ‘no-name-company’ that used a semi truck to deliver the material to us, always in the early AM.
The semi was followed everywhere by a car with two people in it that waited in the street while we loaded and unloaded the parts and tooling.
The parts, I learned later, were the internal frames for the SR-71 fuselage. Lockheed would not tell us what material they were made of, we asked because of the high temperatures we had to heat them to, and all they would say was ‘this batch is white and run it at 1500 degrees and this batch is black and run them at 1550 degrees. Really hot.

I asked about the company name because one night the semi had a tow bar on the truck and it must have been 40 feet long. I was going to school for aviation engineering so everything having to do with aircraft or space was fascinating to me. Southern California was a wonderful hot bed of aerospace companies during that time.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

I've seen that in print, and after the SR-71, some guys orbiting the earth asked for their speed.

fourlocks Loc: Londonderry, NH

That same anecdote is written in a book titled, "Sled Driver" considered to be the best about flying the SR-71. I doubt it's in print and I obtained it from my library who ordered it from the inter-library system. The book describes how, at cruising speed (Mach 3) they had to keep throttling back to stay at the proper mission speed because the plane was so efficient at that speed. They also describe being able to see Russian Migs roller coastering below them in an effort to get high enough to fire an air-to-air missile but not once did a missile even come close to getting high enough or fast enough to get near the plane. Small wonder the Russians were scared shitless at our capabilities when we could fly a manned aircraft higher and faster than their best jet-assisted missile. The other astonishing thing it that this is '60's technology. No glass cockpit, no digital readouts, no computers. A WWII fighter pilot would feel completely at ease in that cockpit.

sr71 Loc: In Col. Juan Seguin Land

You mean mothballed to museums all around the U.S. (I believe their is one on display in the U.K.) there are no more flying ones Sad..


Quote [fourlocks Joined: Jul 2, 2016 Posts: 155 Loc: Londonderry, NH

That same anecdote is written in a book titled, "Sled Driver" considered to be the best about flying the SR-71. I doubt it's in print and I obtained it from my library who ordered it from the inter-library system. The book describes how, at cruising speed (Mach 3) they had to keep throttling back to stay at the proper mission speed because the plane was so efficient at that speed. They also describe being able to see Russian Migs roller coastering below them in an effort to get high enough to fire an air-to-air missile but not once did a missile even come close to getting high enough or fast enough to get near the plane. Small wonder the Russians were scared shitless at our capabilities when we could fly a manned aircraft higher and faster than their best jet-assisted missile. The other astonishing thing it that this is '60's technology. No glass cockpit, no digital readouts, no computers. A WWII fighter pilot would feel completely at ease in that cockpit.


You mean at ease with the instruments this acft had to be flown all the time... and it took months of learning on how to....

fourlocks Loc: Londonderry, NH

"You mean at ease with the instruments this acft had to be flown all the time... and it took months of learning on how to...."

Agreed; it was certainly no easy thing learning to fly the plane and even the pilot's flight preparations, akin to preparing for a space flight, would have seemed incredible to a WWII pilot. I went to the Hartford CT air museum where we were allowed to climb into a P-47 cockpit and then into an F-100 cockpit. I was somewhat surprised to see that almost all the flight instruments were exactly the same in both and these were the same as used in the SR-71, for the most part. Analog all the way.

bwilliams

The speech this pilot made at a charity event is great his story and the way he tells it is fascinating. Google sled driver and watch the you tube video is about an hour long but worth every minute.