A look at the SR-71

well now we're going to get a chance to actually walk around the plane with buzz carpet who actually flew it now this nose cone comes off doesn't it it's actually three noses there's a training nose it looks like the nose you see there the radar nose has a similar external view and if the optical camera was in we called it the country's camera because it took a picture 72 miles wide there was a big glass window that came along the whole from either side of the nose that the camera fit into now four bolts held this on only four bolts held the nose on because the air pressure as you're flying along is keeping the nose very firmly in place and the four bolts is all they required which it made it easier on the ground for them to swap out noses if the mission was changed now tell me about the camera that would be onboard here there was a little bit of film in there right the camera in the nose which took that picture 72 miles wide the film itself was five inches wide 2 miles long so when you landed and the photo maintenance people took it down they had quite a job because they had to take the nose and the film back to the photo lab cut it in the 500-foot legs put on cotton surgical gloves go the whole length of the film to make sure there's no cuts or tears and then put it in for processing so it wasn't a very fast process to get the pictures back to somebody on the ground actually look that's correct and that's part of the reason this airplane was retired because it took a while hours sometimes measured in days to get the information that had been requested to the people who it who had requested it now there are some little blisters that you see little bumps along the airplane in different spots tell me about those the little blusters on the nose of the aircraft look forward and they're looking for air-to-air and surface-to-air radars the blisters on the bottom and some other hidden antennas if they launched a missile at us they would then come in and start a jamming process which basically denied the missile that had been fired at us any update information so typically the missile went stupid we had a couple hundred missiles fired at us I personally never had one the closest missile to the airplane was about a mile and a half in trail behind it and was that because the plane was that much faster than the missiles are because of the jamming as well a combination you're at 85,000 feet you're hard to see on radar you're traveling at 20 almost 2,200 miles an hour very difficult target the intercept now I notice you've got a pin on your lapel can you tell me about that when you had your first Mach three flight they met you and they gave you one of these pins that Lockheed had created when you'd flown 300 hours you got a second pin when you flew 600 hours you had another pin that had 600 hours on it there were about 19 people that made it to 900 hours I never got that high and we had I think three people that had over a thousand hours but that was pretty unusual now the cockpit on this when you see the inside of it it doesn't really look like a modern-day cockpit does it it wasn't kid it's it was basically a late 50s like an f4 cockpit or fighters at that time when Kelly Johnson accepted the challenge from President Eisenhower he had so many technical challenges to fly an airplane at these speeds and deal with the heat that he said I'm not going to mess with a cockpit if it works so it's a standard old round dial with a lot of additional switches engages the deal with supersonic flight the windows on here actually the whole plane got a little bit warm as you were flying right that's correct because flying at 2,100 miles an hour the skin temperature the average temperature was over 600 degrees you couldn't use aluminum so the airplane is 93 percent titanium one of the interesting facts is all the titanium came from Russia they never knew who they sold it to to build 32 of these airplanes as you look up in the cockpit the small triangular windows there are about six hundred twenty degrees my side windows are about 580 and it's about an inch and a half quartz glass much like your oven glass at home and that's what was protect the protect the crew members the navigators windows were more in the range of about 480 degrees but they're hot you can't hold your hand against the window for more than five or ten seconds at most even in your spacesuit before it's just too hot to touch Wow now when this plane took off almost immediately had to have a refueling scheduled right it did that because of the 12 airplanes we lost for them either the primary cause or a significant secondary was tire failure so we reduced instead of taking off with 80,000 pounds of fuel we took off with 40,000 pounds of fuel it reduced the wear and tear on the tires and the second thing right after liftoff had we lost an engine there wasn't enough air flow across the airplane to keep it right it would roll over on itself and crash much like the Concorde did at Charles de Gaulle so to get through that dead zone quicker we took off with half a fuel load so how many times would you have to refuel on a normal mission normal mission was one during a half hour xme two and a half to four and a half hours and that'd be one or two refuelings my longest was 10 hours and 20 minutes and that was 5 refuelings when these airplanes during the arab-israeli war flew from the East Coast into the Middle East and back for the president it was anywhere from five to six refuelings every two hours you had to come down and either refuel at 25,000 feet or you had come in to land now there's a little Star Wars connection here can you tell me about that when I when I give tours I talked to the kids oh we have an r2d2 on this platform from the British we were able to get a very sophisticated system now this is in the 60s that you would upload all the information about the mission tell the airplane exactly where it wasn't on the face of the earth we would start the engines when we taxied out of the hangar there's a sensor on the back of the airplane a glass eye that looks through the blue sky and locks on the stars we guaranteed the president anywhere in the world traveling at 2200 miles an hour within 300 feet this is long before GPS we were not dependent on ground information to verify our position and it's basically in the same spot that r2d2 wrote in their spaceship that's exactly right well we've moved a lot closer to the plane and as you get closer you can see there are some pretty significant gaps here can you tell us about those because of the heating on the airplane an average temperature over 600 degrees overhead here this is the most significant gap the airplane grows three to four inches in length and this particular gap here can expand anywhere from one to two inches to account for the heating that the titanium metal goes through as the airplane goes into cruise there's a couple other expansion joints on the airplane but this is the most significant one and the airplane grows one to two inches in width also because of the heating inside the engine because heated the core the engine to 2,000 degrees and the afterburner to 3,200 degrees the engine actually grows six inches in length and a couple inches in width to accommodate this tremendous heating that it sustains for an hour and a half at a time how hot would the outside of the plane get the out of the outside the airplane the coolest part was about 450 degrees the hottest part of the exterior of the airplane was over 1,200 degrees and this plane wasn't designed with the the software and everything that we have today was it it was not and some of you may or may not have seen these before this is a last major airplane built in United States using a slide rule both the aircraft and the engine and years later they went back to look using a computer model and they found out from the computer model they would have designed the airplane exactly the same way it's pretty amazing what you could do with an on battery powered slide rule exactly right that's amazing now we move back in front of the engine can you tell us about the engines on this plane this was the most difficult job that Kelly Johnson had and been rich designed the inlet because no engine even today can absorb supersonic air so at some point you have to adjust the airflow and the purpose of the spike here is that this is a subsonic position when you hit 1.6 Mach the spike 1.6 Mach is about a thousand miles an hour the spike will start moving aft it will double the size of the opening and in the back of the spike area it'll narrow and so the air is automatically pressed before it hits the first compressor blade and the amazing thing about this engine it's really three parts it's the it's the inlet in the front that starting at 1.6 Mach will start translating back and double the size of the opening and in the back it'll slow the air down because no jet engine even today can absorb supersonic air in the center you have a durp a turbo jet engine and at the higher speeds it becomes a turbo ram engine because it's going to bypass a lot of the air around the engine back into the afterburner which is the third critical part this is the only inlet engine afterburner combination in the world that the faster we went the less fuel we burned because it became more like a ramjet at 2,100 miles an hour 80 some percent of the of the thrust came from the RAM thrust per se now this plane would make a pretty impressive sonic boom we called it the sound of freedom and two points off this airplane a shock would come off in by 45 seconds behind the airplane much like the Space Shuttle it has the same configuration can you imagine it sometimes we were tasked by the State Department to overfly heads of state the three nights before we invaded Panama an sr-71 visited Panama to fly over his house to kind of remind him it's time to leave the forces are on the way one of the most interesting stories a week that we just found out about in March of this year the Smithsonian released a video that talked about the secret spies of Hanoi and it turns out three sr-71s were tasked to overfly Hanoi out of Japan and cross almost simultaneously we thought it was just a message to the POWs though helps on the way we support you as it turns out this was a message that been approved by President Nixon to Admiral Stockdale that said when you hear the sound of thunder there are Navy rescue teams off the coast if you feel you can escaped from the prison and make it down the river there will be navy frogmen SEALs to meet you and to take you home and was the first we ever knew about it was when the March film was released that's incredible that it not only didn't serve the the spy missions but also as a signaling mission as a signaling mission that's cool can you tell us about unstart sand sympathetic on starts because this airplane at the high speeds basically was a ramjet it was absolutely critical that the shockwaves stay inside the inlet to reduce the drag and to produce the thrust we required if you had a disturbance because of air or temperature and the shock came out what you have was one inlet engine combination was producing 20% thrust the other was producing a hundred percent thrust momentarily and the airplane would start a violent slice and could pitch up on you it could be so violent and one of the flights during an emergency my Sun Visor on my spacesuit was broken when the cockpit hit me I mean the airplane was violent so what they developed was when one inlet would unstart the other inlet was sympathetically on start so both spikes would come forward and hopefully you'd keep symmetrical thrust it didn't always work but that was what had been installed in the airplane to make flying this airplane a lot easier during my time flying the airplane over five plus years I had over a hundred on starts it was not a particularly it was it was a very dramatic event then you were head your full attention to keep the airplane flying straight ahead incredible you can see that we've moved underneath the Blackbird and we're looking at the tires but these aren't just ordinary tires are they they are not the 22 ply and they're filled with nitrogen the 415 pounds per square inch and the reason you don't use air is as you get up in the flight and the tires would heat up even though they're in a protective cell per se the oxygen and the air would go into the rubber so when you came back all six of your main tires which were critical would all be flat we lost 12 of the sr7 and accidents four of them were because of tire failure was a major either the primary cause or a major contributor and these are brand new tires you see here there's no tread on them they have little dimples and tires like this would be good for about 15 landings and then you'd have to replace them now how fast were you going when you took off when you took off you lift it off doing about 240 miles an hour so these tires were approaching their stress limit at that point when you landed you touchdown typically doing about 175 to 180 miles an hour you flew this plane that we're underneath didn't you I did I had over ten missions in this airplane I have over 65 hours it was one of my favorite airplanes because it always flew very well well thank you so much for joining us here with the sr-71 blackbird marty has been my pleasure and I hope that the students find this airplane as fascinating as I found it during the time I flew it

Channel: Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum

Views: 2,122,402

Rating: 4.899435 out of 5

Keywords: SR-71 Blackbird, National Air and Space Museum, STEM in 30, Air Force, USAF, Habu, NASM, STEM, Blackbird, SR-71, Super Sonic, CIA, Oxcart, A-12, Skunk Works, Lockheed

Id: F4KD5u-xkik

Length: 14min 23sec (863 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 21 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/Brewski26]

Was it successful? (did anyone escape and get rescued?)

[u/BlindfoldedNinja]

"We call it the countries camera."

On TV maybe. $20 says it's real name is the 'Cunt Cam'.

[u/Bioleague]

But when the POW's were interviewed, they had no idea what the sonic booms ment. Also there was no attempt to escape.

I feel as if the title is alittle misleading. It suggests there was an escape, and that the prisoners understood the signals

[u/redroguetech]

Nixon was so smart to come up with that plan, but what really made him a great American hero is that he flew all three of the planes himself.

[u/hruodland_dnaldourh]

Well to be fair nixon was the reason they were still there and not out in 68.

[u/danger_one]

Everyone knows the speed check story by now. Here's a preview and link to a longer story:

Among professional aviators, there's a well-worn saying: Flying is simply hours of boredom punctuated by moments of stark terror. And yet, I don't recall too many periods of boredom during my 30-year career with Lockheed, most of which was spent as a test pilot.

By far, the most memorable flight occurred on Jan. 25, 1966. Jim Zwayer, a Lockheed flight test reconnaissance and navigation systems specialist, and I were evaluating those systems on an SR-71 Blackbird test from Edwards AFB, Calif. We also were investigating procedures designed to reduce trim drag and improve high-Mach cruise performance. The latter involved flying with the center-of-gravity (CG) located further aft than normal, which reduced the Blackbird's longitudinal stability.

We took off from Edwards at 11:20 a.m. and completed the mission's first leg without incident. After refueling from a KC-135 tanker, we turned eastbound, accelerated to a Mach 3.2-cruise speed and climbed to 78,000 ft., our initial cruise-climb altitude.

Several minutes into cruise, the right engine inlet's automatic control system malfunctioned, requiring a switch to manual control. The SR-71's inlet configuration was automatically adjusted during supersonic flight to decelerate air flow in the duct, slowing it to subsonic speed before reaching the engine's face. This was accomplished by the inlet's center-body spike translating aft, and by modulating the inlet's forward bypass doors. Normally, these actions were scheduled automatically as a function of Mach number, positioning the normal shock wave (where air flow becomes subsonic) inside the inlet to ensure optimum engine performance.

Without proper scheduling, disturbances inside the inlet could result in the shock wave being expelled forward--a phenomenon known as an "inlet unstart." That causes an instantaneous loss of engine thrust, explosive banging noises and violent yawing of the aircraft--like being in a train wreck. Unstarts were not uncommon at that time in the SR-71's development, but a properly functioning system would recapture the shock wave and restore normal operation.

On the planned test profile, we entered a programmed 35-deg. bank turn to the right. An immediate unstart occurred on the right engine, forcing the aircraft to roll further right and start to pitch up. I jammed the control stick as far left and forward as it would go. No response. I instantly knew we were in for a wild ride.

I attempted to tell Jim what was happening and to stay with the airplane until we reached a lower speed and altitude. I didn't think the chances of surviving an ejection at Mach 3.18 and 78,800 ft. were very good. However, g-forces built up so rapidly that my words came out garbled and unintelligible, as confirmed later by the cockpit voice recorder.

The cumulative effects of system malfunctions, reduced longitudinal stability, increased angle-of-attack in the turn, supersonic speed, high altitude and other factors imposed forces on the airframe that exceeded flight control authority and the Stability Augmentation System's ability to restore control.

Everything seemed to unfold in slow motion. I learned later the time from event onset to catastrophic departure from controlled flight was only 2-3 sec. Still trying to communicate with Jim, I blacked out, succumbing to extremely high g-forces. The SR-71 then literally disintegrated around us. From that point, I was just along for the ride.

Read the full story here.

[u/[deleted]]

inc Sled Driver copypasta

[u/bootlover59]

How fast were the planes going?