Wow!! How much more roar does the SR-71 make with full afterburner than compared to say one of the standard AF or Navy jets?
“Wow!! How much more roar does the SR-71 make with full afterburner than compared to say one of the standard AF or Navy jets?”
Very loud... However, you would be suprised. Not as much as you might think. I was very fortunate to witness a test runup of an SR-71 engine. Unlike an F-16 they require a start cart. Which is an external APU (Auxiliary Power Unit). The start cart for the SR-71 is basically a Buick V8 401.
They start the start cart and it rumbles to life. Then when everything is ready they floor the start cart. It is fairly loud itself. Just running like crazy its all you can hear. But after about 2 minutes you start to hear something else. Its like a deep whine. It gets louder and louder. Then after a bit you can no longer hear the start cart the whine is so loud. Then they inject TEB into the kerosene running through the engine. There is a very loud POP and then the whine dissapears and you hear a really deep bass roar. Then the engine kind of settles down in to an operating mode and its not as loud as during the start. AWESOME to watch though. I would have LOVED to have been a Sled driver. My favorite airplane. Here is a little known fact. The temperatures inside of the SR71’s engines are so hot they would melt any metal engine components. The inside of the combustion chambers where the explosion takes place are lined in ceramic. That is the only thing they could use to contain the heat in the engine.
Just a sound observation:
B2 - crazy quiet. You almost cant hear it. It is almost like a UFO.
P51 and F4U - Awesome sounding engines
F16 and F15 - Louder still
F4 Phantom - getting pretty loud
SR71 - loud
B52 yep now your loud!
F111 - Ouch
B1-B - HOLY MOTHER what happened to my ears! Feels like a freaking earth quake.
I can't imaging the afterburner roar. I saw one as a teenager coming in to land. It was as loud as a B-52. I grew up in the landing path to a SAC base; I know what a B-52 sounds like.
Purty frickin’ LOUD! Don’t know the decibel count but it was chest pounding good. Nothing like the former space shuttle lifing off and being 3 miles from the pad though. Now that was some real chest pounding good stuff.
A lot! I don’t know if the SR-71 used water injection or not. We used to refuel those babies with our KC-135Q tanker aircraft.
At Beale AFB they would hit the afterburners on take off, lift off, go straight up till we could no longer see them.
They were quite an aircraft!
HOW DO YOU MOVE A SUPER-SECRET AIRCRAFT FROM LOS ANGELES to AREA 51 near LAS VEGAS NM! Scroll down to declassified photos here!
http://www.roadrunnersinternationale.com/transporting_the_a-12.html