Funny SR-71 story

[SpecialEd]

https://www.popularmechanics.com/mil...ws&date=050218

[vinnywright]

nice one

VINNY

[woodsmoke]

lol
thanks
woodsmoke

[GreyGeek]

Awesome!

[oshunluvr]

That story has been floating around for at least 30 years. The fastest I ever clocked an SR-71 at was almost 3600 knots. Technically, their speed was "classified."

My personal speed stories:

The drive to Las Vegas from Los Angeles is along I-15. Due to restricted airspace and other reasons, the common air route was the same - along I-15 - through Dagget/Barstow California. One day as I was working the low altitude sector on that route, a Cessna pilot near Dagget asked me his ground speed (aircraft fly through the air so they know their air speed, but only know their speed over the ground if they have the equipment, do the math, or ask an Air Traffic Controller with RADAR to tell them). I responded "about 130 knots." He replied "Well, that's what I thought, but a Porsche just passed me on the highway down there like I wasn't moving!" Must have been a Twin-Turbo!

Conversely, once when I was working in the Midwest, I had a Cessna 152 that I kept losing RADAR contact with, but he was still there, in radio contact, and well high enough for RADAR coverage. I asked my supervisor about it who informed me that our particular RADARs couldn't track anything less than 30 knots (I was still rather "green" in those days so didn't know all the RADAR limitations). Turned out the airplane was flying into a strong enough headwind that he was moving forward at less than 30 knots! So an hour later I went on a break and the Cessna was still basically in the same location. I informed the person relieving me of the situation and went to lunch. 30 minutes later I returned and took the same RADAR position only to see the same guy now 20-30 miles further EAST of where he had been a half-hour earlier but he had been flying WEST bound! He actually lost ground while I was on break! He had at least a 90 knot headwind that apparently was gusting to over 120! This made me concerned, so I asked the pilot his fuel remaining. It was about 8 hours. He was trying to fly from Bloomington IN to St. Louis MO - about 200 miles by plane and normally less than 2 hrs for this aircraft and only three and a half by car. However, it appeared he was never going to make it. I suggested either turning back and try another day or try changing altitude to find a more favorable wind. He decided to try a lower altitude where he found a ground speed of a 60 knots and made it to the St. Louis area before dark.

Ahh, the good ole' days...

[oshunluvr]

For you aviators out there like GreyGeek is, I am Air Traffic Controller and worked the "East-Low" area of Kansas City Center from 1982 to 1987, covering the ground up to Flight Level 230 (23,000 feet at an altimeter setting of 29.92). My airspace was divided into six sectors that roughly covered a 200 mile radius of St. Louis Lambert Field. I later transferred to Los Angeles Center (the source of the I-15 story above), then Los Angeles TRACON and finally Los Angeles Tower (LAX).

[SpecialEd]

That story has been floating around for at least 30 years. The fastest I ever clocked an SR-71 at was almost 3600 knots. Technically, their speed was "classified.">>>>>>>

From a pilot friend of mine at another forum:

The story teller is Brian Shul. What many folks don't know about Brian is that he was burned horribly in a T-28 crash in Southeast Asia and was not expected to live. When it finally looked like he would survive he underwent months of painful therapy and skin grafts, and was never expected to fly again.

Not only did he survive, but fought back to flight status and ultimately was chosen to fly the SR-71. He wrote a book about the experience, "Sled Driver".

I got to spend a day with Brian back in the seventies when he came through Reese AFB in Lubbock, TX to give a safety briefing about his experiences. He was (is) the epitome of the fighter pilot "can do" spirit.

One of my favorite poems, "Because I Fly", was written by Brian. The last line is near and dear to pilots everywhere: "Because I fly, I envy no man on earth."

http://www.war-stories.com/poems/poe...-shul-1977.htm

[GreyGeek]

Flying is special. As I've often said, "I'd rather fly that eat and I'm hungry all the time!" It give the greatest sense of 3 dimensional freedom I've ever experiences, plus some of the most harrowing.

I saw a video clip of an SR-71 flight panel and the altimeter was climbing above 89,800 feet, IIRC. Oshunluver's speed of 4,144 mph (5.44 Mach) makes the SR-71 impressive. My guess is that it will go over 95,000ft and do over 4,500 mph (5.92 Mach). I recall reading somewhere that the skin of an SR-71 gets so hot that it almost glows red (900F) and the pilot and cockpit is cooled by having fuel circulate through his space suit and around the cockpit before it is passed on to the engine. There are small tubes running underneath the skin of the aircraft through which fuel circulates to cool the skin and heat the fuel before it is burned in the engine.

[woodsmoke]

T
. 30 minutes later I returned and took the same RADAR position only to see the same guy now 20-30 miles further EAST of where he had been a half-hour earlier but he had been flying WEST bound! He decided to try a lower altitude where he found a ground speed of a 60 knots and made it to the St. Louis area before dark.
Ahh, the good ole' days...

OMG...did I just have a flashback!! no...not THAT kind of flashback!

when I was in the 9th grade we were required to do a science fair, just local, a thing to make the school look like it was "with it". A girl won it by her dad, who was a HUGE financial donator to the football team, purchasing her the visible human and she put lables IN THE BOX and rang strings to the organs.

I made a handmade poster, using literally a quill pen and black ink, of the dials, gauges, etc/ of an airplane, back then, and how a wing worked, Bernoulli and a bunch of other stuff and...I used a WOOD BURNER to make a profile airplane with a stick and foot pedals and strings to the control surfaces and got...nothing...typical midwest sports centric school.

However, the school, surprisingly, had a copy of the airman's handbook, hardbound and I used it as a reference and...learned...OMG...

NOW I know why relative motion and vectoral forces, etc came so easy to me when I was in physics in college, no physics in high school but that I always did bad in Algebra.

I acutally worked through the problems in the book on calculating air speed, ground speed, what relative direction to fly in a crosswind...all that...

huh...I had completely forgotten about it...

THANK YOU!!

woodthanksoshuluversmoke

[oshunluvr]

Flying is special. As I've often said, "I'd rather fly that eat and I'm hungry all the time!" It give the greatest sense of 3 dimensional freedom I've ever experiences, plus some of the most harrowing.

I saw a video clip of an SR-71 flight panel and the altimeter was climbing above 89,800 feet, IIRC. Oshunluver's speed of 4,144 mph (5.44 Mach) makes the SR-71 impressive. My guess is that it will go over 95,000ft and do over 4,500 mph (5.92 Mach). I recall reading somewhere that the skin of an SR-71 gets so hot that it almost glows red (900F) and the pilot and cockpit is cooled by having fuel circulate through his space suit and around the cockpit before it is passed on to the engine. There are small tubes running underneath the skin of the aircraft through which fuel circulates to cool the skin and heat the fuel before it is burned in the engine.

And at those speeds, it literally might take more than the length or width of an entire state to turn a corner!

Altitudes were amazing also: In those days, we had coded altitudes because the actual operating altitude of those aircraft and the TR-1s (U2s) was also classified. If we needed to separate two aircraft above the limit of "Positive Controlled Airspace" (60,000 feet), something I had to do only 3 times in 25 years, we would ask them altitude (their altitude reporting "Mode C" was turned off when reaching 60000 feet MSL) and they would reply with a letter and a number, like "Alpha plus 7". Then I would look at my codes and determine what Alpha stood for (each letter in the code represented 10,000 feet above the previous code) and add 7,000 to it to get the actual altitude.

I don't really know how high or fast most of them were going because we weren't supposed to ask unless it was required for our job. I will say it was weird to issue traffic that was 100's of miles away because they were hauling a$$. I was told they could exceed Mach 7. Although our RADAR systems could determine their speed, a query always returned "SC" for "Speed Classified". However, our system had a generic speed/time function where you could "slew" (think "mouse-click") on an aircraft, then slew again on a spot ahead of the aircraft. It would calculate the time necessary to cover the selected distance at the selected target's current speed and report the current ground speed of the target. A loop-hole in the software!

The TR-1s were just as impressive. They were slow moving but flew super high and could climb at incredible rates. I had one depart West bound from an Air Force base once and issued, at the pilot's request, a turn back to the VOR (co-located on the airfield with the runway he just departed) to enter restricted airspace on an unrestricted climb to "VFR On-Top above 60,000". His 270° turn stayed within a mile of the airport and he crossed the runway North bound above FL270. He climbed more than 25,000 feet within the space over just your neighborhood. The only thing that could match that climb rate was an F-15 with the after burners lit. I believe the TR-1s could go above 120,000 feet.

More interesting tidbits about the SR-71; it leaked fuel on the ground. It's velocity when in flight caused so much heat expansion that the entire airplane had to be loosely fitted so it wouldn't break apart in flight. It would take off with minimum fuel then refuel in flight. Also, it had a type of engines with no moving parts (called a RamJet I think) that it would light with moving air. It would take off, climb to 27,000 feet or so, then request "Dipsie Doodles". That meant the pilot would descend straight down about 10,000 feet to create enough heat from air moving through the Ramjets to ignite the fuel. Then it would blast straight up to whatever altitude it was going to operate at.

What is really the most amazing thing about these two aircraft was they were designed in the 60s and still in use well into the 90s. Makes you wonder what we have today that we don't know about, doesn't it?

[GreyGeek]

Designed in the 60’s with slide-rules and clunky computers. It was so advanced one might think that they got help from “alien” sources. [emoji16]

The U2’s had long skinny wings, but the shape of the SR-72 made its entire hull a wing as well. Although stealthy and nearly invisible to radar, so I’ve read, it had such a heat signature it was detectable from hundreds of miles away. That heat signature was used as a target by over a thousand Mach 5 AA missiles, but none hit it because they injected “panther piss” into the exhaust plume to create a reflective “tail” thousands of feet long, confusing the missile’s optics.

What has my curiosity peaked these days is the SR-72, I.e., the Aurora. It’s exhaust shape is “donuts on a rope”, caused by what might be pulsed hypersonic ram jets. I’ve seen what are supposedly pictures of it for the last 10 years. The SR-71 wasn’t expensive to operate so retiring it, even though that was the excuse given, was a political move, unless there was a better aircraft waiting in the wings. Perhaps AA tech reached a point that it was/is too dangerous to fly over Russia or China. However, If there isn’t a better aircraft in operation now then, IMO, retiring the SR-71 was treasonous.

[oshunluvr]

Honestly, the SR-71 missions were replaced by satellites. The data we collected is easier to obtain and more secretly done using outer-space vehicles.

The TR-1s went into service by NASA for upper atmosphere testing for quite a while. I'm no longer involved in that part of the FAA, but I assume they've been finally retired by now also.

[GreyGeek]

Funny SR-71 story

Satellites have the problem of getting them over the target at the right time of day and at the right angle for the best shot, even if they can read the name on a golfball from orbit. . The SR-71 could reach the heart of Russia in 30 minutes, less if the target is closer to the border, at the right time and photographic angle, and count the dimples on the golf ball.