SR71 Blackbird Introduction By A Pilot

SR71 Blackbird Introduction By A Pilot 

It is cold up here. At least minus 60 degrees Centigrade most of the time. There is not a
lot of weather. Clouds almost never get within 10,000 feet of this altitude. You can see
almost forever ... even make out the curvature of the earth. The sky is very, very dark blue.
Ultramarine. You can see the stars at any time of the day. Not much air up here either.
Humans can't survive up here without pressurization. Their blood would boil instantly,
and their skin would flake off like a just-right pie crust. Not that we see many humans up
here. Oh, we get the occasional astronaut or cosmonaut coming or going. And the teem-
ing masses down there do keep sending up weather balloons, trying to figure out what the
jet stream has In store for them.
There are some people who do come through fairly regularly. They are members of the 9th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing, which is part of the United States Air
Force. They are home-based at Beale Air Force Base in California, but I have heard that
they operate world-wide from what they euphemistically term their 'Forward Operating
Locations'. About half of them mosey along nice and slow, taking time to get a good look
at the scenery. These sedate gents fly what they call the U-2, or more familiarly, 'The
Dragon Lady'.
The other half of this group hardly gives you a chance to see them
coming before they are gone. They fly the SR-71, and it moves through here at better than
the muzzle velocity of a 30.06 bullet. Whole lot faster than those transient astros too! I
hear there are only a few of them ... probably not more than a couple of dozen pairs. Did I
mention that? They come in pairs, a Pilot and a Reconnaissance Systems Operator. Man,
do they come through! If that SR-71 wasn't so big, you might never see them. You'd know
they had been through though. There is that thunderclap of a triple-sonic boom, followed
by a blast of heat radiating from black skin that reaches temperatures of 1100 degrees
Fahrenheit. At night, the tailpipes glowing white hot can be seen for a long ways off. The
rest of the airplane ranges from about 450 to 550 degrees. Friction does that. You can't
move through the air ... even as little air as there is up here ... at better than Mach three for
extended periods without causing lots of friction.

Yessir, that SR-71 is some airplane! Oh, I know there are others that have flown faster.
We used to see the X-15 come through here on it's way to lots higher and goin' lots faster.
And there are those astronauts with their spacecrafts ... why, they even got one now that
sort of looks like an airplane! Course, whenever we have seen it, it is either acting like a
regular spacecraft, riding a rocket, or impersonating a rock.
But that SR-71 is pure airplane. Fastest airplane in the world. It doesn't just go fast in
spurts either. It takes off under it's own power, gets up here, settles into Mach three plus,
and keeps on keepin' on at that rate! We haven't seen another airplane that could do that.
The secret of that extended Mach three performance is in the engines. Those J-58's get
downright economical to operate once you get them going fast enough to turn into ram-
jets! Up here, the engine only produces about 17% of the thrust, with the inlet producing
58% and the exhaust producing the rest. Put that economy together with 80,000 pounds
of fuel in a 60,000 pound airframe and you get some pretty amazing ranges.
Sure sounds like something out of Buck Rogers in the 21st Century, doesn't it? Well,
the amazin' thing is, the SR and it's cousins been doin' this for at least twenty years!
Makes you wonder if maybe there was some kind of a time warp back there in the late
fifties-early sixties, when those 150 or so hand-picked engineers in Kelly Johnson's Skunk
Works at Lockheed turned out this airplane. Maybe there was. Lockheed's manufacturing
numbers for the SR-71 series start with 2001.