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Speed can do many things for an aircraft. It can allow an airplane to get to its target quickly and complete its bombing run. Speed can help outmaneuver enemy fighters and shoot them down. It enables survivability to outfox air defense systems. Spy planes such as the SR-71 Blackbird could really boogey. The Blackbird had MACH 3 speed that allowed the bird to outrun surface-to-air missiles. That’s 36.55 miles per minute or 3,216.4 feet per second. In fact, when the SR-71 streaked by, SAMs could barely lock on to target, and if they did the Blackbird was already out of...

How Lockheed’s Skunk Works Got into the Stealth Fighter Business How Lockheed’s Skunk Works Got into the Stealth Fighter Business How do you hide an airplane behind a bird? Very skillfully. Lt. Col. William B. O'Connor (ret.) flew the F-117 Nighthawk during the Bosnia Conflict, and in Stealth Fighter, he explains the history, operation, and soul America's most advanced stealth jet. While the United States had never embraced a defensive mindset and had only fielded one strategic SAM system to that point, the Nike-Hercules dating from the 1950s, and one real medium-range tactical system, the HAWK (homing all the way...

The name of the super-secret project was Suntan. It was to be the ultimate reconnaissance airplane, flying so high and so fast—it was to cruise above 100,000 feet at Mach 2—that detection would be unlikely and interception impossible. But it also would have been a giant winged thermos bottle, with a fuel tank full of liquid hydrogen at –400 degrees Fahrenheit and its outer skin baking at 350 degrees or more. A proposed hydrogen liquefaction plant dedicated to producing fuel for several of the airplanes would have sucked up 10 percent of the natural gas supply of Los Angeles in...

The flying days of the SR-71 Blackbird in the Antelope Valley are truly over, as one of the last vestiges of the aircraft's flight tenure in the Valley has departed. The only SR-71 simulator, housed at NASA Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base, has been shipped to an aviation museum in Dallas. The simulator came to NASA when the flight test facility took control of three SR-71s when the aircraft were first retired from military service in 1989. Dryden used the aircraft for high-speed flight research, and NASA pilots trained on the simulator. The one-of-a-kind system was...

1962: Russia frees US spy plane pilot American spy plane pilot Captain Francis "Gary" Powers has been freed from prison in the Soviet Union in exchange for a Russian spy jailed in the US. Gary Powers was sentenced to 10 years in a Soviet prison after his U-2 plane was shot down over Russia in May 1960. But on Saturday Captain Powers, 32, walked into West Berlin across a bridge separating the city's east and western sectors. At the same time Russian spy Colonel Rudolph Abel crossed in the opposite direction. Colonel Abel had served five years of a 30-year...

Sixty years ago, Clarence "Kelly" Johnson pirated an elite group of engineers and mechanics from Lockheed. He forged the team into a separate organization, called Skunk Works, with a mission to develop America's first production jet fighter, the Air Force P-80 Shooting Star. The team developed this quickly, quietly and on time - in 143 days. The origin of the Skunk Works name can be traced back to 1943 - 40 years after the Wright brothers' first flight at Kitty Hawk, N.C. Since developing the Shooting Star, Skunk Works has given shape to many firsts in flight. F-104 Starfighter --...