You can sit in the cockpit of the one at the Boeing Museum of Flight.

Isn't this the display featuring an Oldsmobile 455 ground APU?

One of my best memories working for DOD black programs was the tour of AF Plant 42. It was just before the SR-71 aircraft were transferred from DOD to NASA. Part of the tour for our small group was to sit in the cockpit of one of the SR-71s in the hangar. It’s amazing that the space was so cramped and tight for such a large aircraft. Only time I saw one fly was one of the final flights low pass over the Burbank airport.

Long ago had an SR71 enter my military airspace/W291 warning area offshore San Diego.
Heading west he made a wide right turn heading north to Santa Barbara.
I can't remember his speed but his target skipped an inch each radar sweep and he had flown the length of So Cal in a minute or two.

The SR71 crew had coordinated the flight with me via phone a couple days before.
I had to ask the SR71 crew do you have room for a rider?
The caller didn't get it the first time so I had to ask twice.

Think about the time and place in history when this magnificent flying machine was developed.

Slide rules and drafting tables, immature engine technologies and materials science and they made it work.

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That's actually an A-12 that was at one time improperly painted to look like one of NASAs YF-12s that they flew in the late 60s. No A-12 was ever used by NASA and the paint has since been changed to the correct A-12 markings. Here is the history of that 'article' as the A-12s were known as:

www.habu.org - 06930 - Blackbird Photo Archive

That website is an outstanding resource for information on every 'Blackbird' airframe built.

A link to the POH - Not sure if this is accurate or not:

https://www.sr-71.org/blackbird/manual/

Yeah, that’s legit. It boggles my mind how detailed the manuals are for anything with jet engines. Even the civilian stuff gets complicated quick.

Lots of books written about the Lockheed Skunk Works, all of them are worth a read.

My favorite era of aviation. I would like to have been born a generation earlier and been knee-deep in all of that.

And the SR-71 Blackbird 9000 Series watch isn't too shabby.....

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When I got laid off from Teledyne Ryan Aeronautical I went up to the museum just to help them ready the plane for display, that was a fun couple of months, then the wife said back to work back to work

I don't recall seeing that. I was there about 10 years ago. Great museum!

I've got to believe the creators of Star Wars took inspiration from the SR-71.


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Magnificent aircraft. I had the opportunity to tour the Dryden research facility at Edwards AFB in the 90’s and they had one in a hangar that was still in service. One of the things that I remember to this day were the drain pans that were underneath it to contain the leaking fuel. We were told that the fuel tanks (titanium?) were designed so that they would seal only at altitude. As a youngish machinist/engineer with a decent grasp of manufacturing tolerances, this made sense at the time. Another thing they mentioned was that the aircraft took off from California with a minimal amount of fuel and refueled somewhere over Colorado (IIRC) 20-30 minutes later.

I suppose we have aircraft that can do mach 12 at this point?

https://heeltread.com/products/blackbird-socks

And now you can wear them, too. Nice little blurb/write-up on this magnificant plane.

:cool:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypersonic_flight

"The thermosphere is a layer of Earth's atmosphere that is directly above the mesosphere and below the exosphere. It extends from about 90 km (56 miles) to between 500 and 1,000 km (311 to 621 miles) above our planet."

how it works

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son of blackbird
SR-72

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From the video of the OP.

"Crammed with forward thinking on design on this, no high-powered computers, rooms of people with slide rules and calculators", "the factor that makes the skunk works different than other airplane design organizations is they assume it can be done and then figure out how to do it."

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