Kelly Johnson talks about his greatest creation the SR-71, Uncut interview.

please take Kelly the first question is shortly after the new bill - you - you knew eventually was going to be shot down and that was the seed that created starting to think about we knew that in overflying Russia for four years that they were making important advances and radar and missiles and so in 1958 two years before Gary Powers was shot down we decided we'd try to make a follow-on airplane which became finally the sr-71 to fly higher and four times as fast so that's the connection between the grandfather type and the sr-71 now these sr-71 there's one huge flying fuel tank carries great deal of fuel carries a pilot an a radar operator and there in the two areas ahead of the fuel tanks in the chines we have various pieces of equipment Tammuz radars radios things of that nature and we come here to this splendid power plant built by Pratt & Whitney the only one of its kind in the world it's a Pratt 50 j58 Kerbal ramjet the thing that's unique about it is that it operates as an ordinary turbojet engine until it gets up to around 60 we come here to the nacelle that holds the pratt whitney j58 engine the only one of its kind in the world it is designed on a principle that it works as an ordinary turbojet engine up until about 1600 miles an hour then at that speed it shifts its actual cycle and becomes a ramjet where the afterburner is that providing practically all of the thrust from the engine the exhaust system of the of the airplane is very involved 35% of the thrust pushing the airplane comes from that tail ejector that was a very difficult design job because the temperature of the air that comes out of the engine is running around 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit and that's enough to melt any of the metals we use where it's not for the fact we mix the outer perimeter of the jet with air which we draw in through those open vents that you see these tail flaps adjust so that the engine tends to run at a constant speed regardless of airspeed altitude of course here we have the the tail section and you see that those flyable rudders are one-piece elements that are automatically controlled in case of an engine blow out so they crank in the proper amount of rudder to take care of an engine out on one side they operates very very fast it took the pilots a long time to know which engine would blow when we were doing the early testing because it was such a fast operation they they couldn't tell they knew they had a blow up but they didn't know whether it's right or left engine until we got on the ground and read out the tape the controls of course are largely here on the trailing edge of the wing and we have on the wing itself which is a basic Delta plan form a conical camber which is a twist that gives us better crosswind landing characteristics and less drag when we go supersonic it's washed out as you see when you get to the tip we have chines on the nacelle as well as on the fuselage the chines are these sections that stick out here and the shape or such that it minimizes the radar return you notice that the leading part of the fuselage also has essentially a small delta wing we have here the inlet to the engine and this is what we call a spike that element is move for an aft automatically so that we position the shock wave so that it hits on the leading edge of the cowl and we get the maximum amount of what we call Rams from the air at the high speeds that spike has to have an operating force at times over 30,000 pounds so you can see that how much load develops on the spike it is a made of high-temperature plastic and the very tip of course is titanium okay action it's been said on occasion that the sr-71 and the black birds in general are slide-rule airplanes I guess that's certainly true because in 1958 we didn't have the kind of computers that we have today but the slide rule has been a very effective tool for me for many many years in fact they call my 12 inch slide rule of Michigan's computer that's been a very useful thing to have I think it'd be a long long time before we have an airplane that has higher performance than the sr-71 because the need for it is not there in terms of fact that we can have satellites circling the earth in 90 minutes and we do not have to go any faster than what we go with this one right here to be very very expensive to go Mach 4 or faster so we may be seeing here the highest speed military airplane that there will be around for a long time perfect [Music]

Channel: The Film Gate

Views: 85,441

Rating: 4.9706745 out of 5

Keywords: Aircraft, Planes, Kelly Johnson, SR-71, Uncut interview., Lockheed, U-2, Blackbird, interview

Id: n8kBiy6RkOs

Length: 8min 36sec (516 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 04 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/friendinpa007]

Save. Just finished his book.

[u/MidwestFTW]

Just incredible, what a genius he was. Thank you so much for posting this!