Exclusive: U.S. Air Force to halt Northrop unmanned plane

Reuters ^ | January 24, 2012 | By Andrea Shalal-Esa

[lentulusgracchus]

SR71 required JP-7 which required special tankers able to have tanks of JP-7 and their own supply of JP-4 back then.

Guy I talked to once told me about JP-7. It was bad news. Stuff was day-glo green and highly caustic and poisonous. Very stringent handling required.

[tanknetter]

Guy I talked to once told me about JP-7. It was bad news. Stuff was day-glo green and highly caustic and poisonous. Very stringent handling required.

Guy wasn't talking about JP-7 but rather triethylborane (or "Teb"). JP-7 has a very high ignition temp, Teb was used as a catalyst/igniter to get it burning.

[tanknetter]

To rephrase, the U-2 was eventually re-designated TR-1 and then back to U-2 as I recall.

Sort of. When the U-2R (much larger plane than the earlier A-D versions from the late 1950s) was put back into production in the early 1980s for use as a tactical recce platform the new-builds were designated TR-1s while the older ones (from the 1960s) retained their "U-2" designation.

In the early 1990s the TR-1 fleet were given the U-2 designation to get the fleet using common nomenclature.

[A.A. Cunningham]

but it was built in an era where money was no object because there was no alternative,

Back when entitlement spending didn't account for ~70% of the budget.

[tanknetter]

It came down during Clinton’s administration but Cheney gave the order in 1990. The order was given back then and took awhile to execute.

The program was resurrected in the mid-1990s by Congressional fiat (apparently Bobby Bird, D-KKK, was ticked that the USAF had lied to him about a forthcoming replacement platform when they shut the program down) and two airframes (967 and 971) were brought back into service. Upgrades included fitting of the real-time digital data link. However, Clinton killed the resurrected program using the line-item veto (during the short time prior to SCOTUS overturning it).

In reality, the villain of the first SR-71 termination was USAF CoS General Larry Welch. Allegedly due to having been rejected from the SR-71 program earlier in his career.

[tanknetter]

Are those numbers different than the three birds that went to NASA? One was the rare stepped-cockpit trainer as I understand.

NASA operated a number of SRs over the years, and even the YF-12 prototypes. The two reactivated SRs (967 and 971) were not NASA birds - they were the SRs that were held in "flyable reserve" (although it took a bit to get them flyable again) for the USAF after the program was first shut down.

NASA did have the surviving "B" trainer (956/NASA 831) operational to support the SRs it had in inventory. One of those SRs was 980 ... I believe it was being used in that cancelled ram/scramjet trial where the ram/scramjet was mounted on the rear fuselage.

There were four stepped-cockpit Blackbird trainers. First was the two-seat A-12 called the "Titanium Goose". Then the two SR-71Bs. When one of the "B"s was destroyed in a crash the USAF took the rear fuselage from the crashed YF-12, reworked the forward fuselage from an engineering test rig into a stepped-cockpit layout and mated the two together to produce the SR-71C. It had a VERY low number of total flight hours (less than 600, iirc) and was pretty quickly retired because the Frankenplane configuration didn't work so well and it flew horribly.

[ken5050]

The Blackbird was originally designated as the RS-71. When LBJ was first announcing the plane, he called it the SR-71 ( he didn’t use a teleprompter, obviously) and presto, it was immediately changed to SR-71.

[ken5050]

LOL..it sounds “cooler” ..because we’re used to it...I recall reading somewheres that many actually liked the original “RS” designation..it was shorthand for Rocket Ship...

[DesScorp]

This is what happens when your President ceases being an American and starts being a “citizen of the world”.

This is what happens when a defense contractor horribly overcharges for the product.