Posted on 09/13/2022 9:58:35 AM PDT by whyilovetexas111
Like the moon landing.
Designed with slide rules
Drawn on vellum with pencil
Fabricated by high school graduates with manually controlled machine tools
Cost. Fuel was a special blend; man hours for maintenance, and mission prep, tanker scheduling… was equated to a NASA launch.
I hear they are working on an all-electric one. Just need the battery capabilities to advance. :-)
Last real flight in 1990, LA to Washington DC in one hour, four minutes. And 20 seconds.
The Cosmosphere at Hutchinson, KS has one. You can actually touch it.
In my opinion these are two well known stories reference SR-71 blackbird's, that you just have to hear. Warning do not have any food or drink in your mouth.
Major Brian Shul, USAF (Ret.) SR-71 Blackbird 'Speed Check' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AyHH9G9et0
The SR-71 "Buzzing the tower" story you probably never heard before. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTJYNq4GQAE
Better than the first movie Maverick! "Buzzing the tower."
There’s one at the USAF Museum, Wright-Patterson AFB, Dayton, OH. That place is a bucket-list airplane show.
At the Eglin museum, they have an F-4, and it was the first one I ever saw up close. It is amazing how that thing could fly with those stubby wings.
4000 missiles fired! Wow, what they don’t tell you is far more interesting than the stuff they release.
The standard line was I could tell you, but then I would have to kill you, lol.
And NO chromium plated tools!
I’ve always thought the Starfighter and B57 looked awesome.
“They’ve also got one at the Air & Space museum in Huntsville, AL”
Technically that one is an A-12
The J-58 engines are mind bending. To think they were designed in the 50’s.....
Read recently they were being studied for newer applications.
Operated like a ramjet it high Mach and needed to be throttled back to avoid airframe over heating.
Maybe at some point. But one crew discovered the engines flame out at Mach 3.4, after trying to "see what it could do." Interesting story from a former Pratt & Whitney engineer on this incident at the link.
Short version: the shock cones in the nose of each engine control the shock wave and air inlet by moving forward and aft. When the crew "punched it", the shock cones moved inward so far to control the shock wave, that they cut off the inlet air. Crew was able to restart both engines after a fun drop of 50,000 feet; the king of all pucker rides.
That's a really good museum - and I just love Huntsville, too.
There certainly was some badass draftsman back in the day. I even did some compound trig on the drafting board a few times. A Smoley Parallel Tables of Logs and Squares and an Engineering handbook were our bibles.
My first drawing (grating for a platform) ever was a Mona Lisa, but my lettering looked like some retarded kid did it left handed. I did get much better at it though, lol.
At the Pima Air & Space Museum in Tucson, you can get right up to a Blackbird, even touch the skin of the plane. Fascinating design--I wonder how it would've stood up to computer-aided design programs of today? What shape would we choose today, if we were using modern design tools?
I would guess because most of the SR-71’s duties can be performed by newer stealth aircraft. U-2s relied more on very high altitude flying rather than speed, so there is probably still a niche for that.
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