here we sincerely appreciate it if for not for you folks who love thus airplane hopefully as much as we do we'll try to convince you to love it if it's not your favorite airplane anyway the greatest challenge is airplane or this country has ever done is build this airplane Kelly Johnson did amazing achievement my name is Tom Danielson I flew the sr-71 and the u2 so and you can read these as much as I can however we are proud to be here at the museum for six through the 8th of this year anyway that's one of the VAR famous pictures with a sunburst slide by the intake the Blackbird started off as the twelve which is a single-seat airplane it was actually higher flying airplane it only flew for a year because I think the powers that be realized one person could not do everything and do justice to it so sr-71 a derivative of the twelve of six feet longer very successful Mach 3 plus reconnaissance aircraft and operated for about 25 years pilot and RSO reconnaissance systems officer the yf-12 was similar to the sr-71 air-to-air interceptor they realized you could not sit alert with it and there was no real viable threat but pilots and our radar intercept officer could not sit in a space suit for 24 hours at a time and plus it takes about 24 hours to preflight the airplane so therefore it realistically could not be sitting alert with it d-21 finally there's an example here at the Museum was a unmanned drone initially launched from a am 21 aircraft which the only surviving example is up in Seattle right now but they realized after they lost one airplane that that was probably not a good idea the e21 mission was to overflight what's called denied territory and come back and drop its camera capsule and midair c-130 was gonna catch it so a lot of things could go wrong with that initially 1974 the airplane was first displayed at Farnborough airshow and they set speed records going to incoming from 1974 we'll talk a little bit more about speed records in a little bit the airplane was extremely hot it standard a Mach 380 plus thousand feet you can read that as well as I can the 750 degrees was the average temperature it got up to 1,200 degrees back at the engine exhaust and the front cockpit the inside glass was 628 degrees so if we wanted it the pilots wanted heat tube food we just held it three seconds on each side it was hot so we could eat that cool bye it was dude as by color it's actually a special coating radar-absorbent coating the shape of the airplane was such that there's no 90-degree angles to it it's as big as a dc9 airliner and it looks about a Cessna 150 on radar it was original stealth airplane before stealth was even known everything the cockpit cockpits the equipment bays all cooled by air conditioning and and fuel fuel heat exchangers so you'd know when you started getting low on fuel without even looking at the fuel gauge you could tell because the copy has started getting hot because it was being cooled as was effectively anymore and pilots and RSOs you know full pressure suit breathing 100% oxygen so they can Dean nitrogen eight and not suffer compression sickness the band's again it's just an example way at the back in the orange color is 1200 degrees plus and the cockpits are around 600 plus degrees the front cockpit is antiquated it's a bunch of round dials which is there's no TV screens at all looks very complicated but you're you know what to look at when to look at it so the airplane is flown with the control stick and most of the time when you're flying supersonic is through the autopilot system so it helps a little bit except it's still not terribly simple so those are the main things we look at here's the fuel Romanian gauge and and fuel boost pumps there's about seven tanks on the airplane so you got to monitor that for center of gravity there airplane will always want to go to a supersonic center of gravity which doesn't work when you're flying low altitude trying to land so we had some special deals there the back seat was RSO we'll talk a little bit more about that possibly but you know there's no flight controls no flight instruments in the back when we get to the sensitive areas called the back cedar has the primary job seventy-five percent of his duties or 25 percent pilots 75 percent back cedar so we navigated with an astro tracker it's called attract stars even in the daytime so about two minutes after you go in a taxi out of the barn it starts tracking stars guaranteed 300 feet within faster than a rifle bullet so and this was before the days of GPS so it was amazing system it worked very well one of the sensors we kid was an optical bar camera than the nose of the airplane possibly and it basically tracked the route of flight of the airplane other thing was the a SAR is one which is actually a great system and very high resolution very long range looking side to side and it generates actually a picture through 40,000 feet of clouds so what cameras wouldn't work the radar system does a one-foot resolution which is pretty good how did the range of that we're talking about a big technical objective camera ends in in the side Bay's shine Bay's at the airplane we all pretty much always flow with attack cameras and it was a point it automatically pointed targets and take pictures this example is is the Seattle King dome from 80,000 feet and you cannot read license plates however you can certainly see what kind of cars they are your panel of experts edge yielding right here world record-holder Doug SOI fer the reconnaissance systems officers we cannot fly the airplane by ourselves Mike Mike hall maintenance and I believe you worked cameras there by Mike electronic warfare sorry about that Harvey Smith maintenance photo okay well an aspect of maintenance and Floyd Jones crew chief so really big time maintenance Steve justice Lockheed skunkworks historian and engineer yes yes great a yielding in his younger days on the right side that was before his record-setting final flight doug hofer also on the right side also in his younger days very handsome guy Mike hall also equally handsome but cameras and sensors in and what else should you do electronic warfare that's right that's what you told me and I'm sorry Harvey and Floyd don't have pictures of you guys but and Steve senior engineer and historian of the skunk works everybody knows for the skunk works means right we'll talk about that a little bit and finally the absolute genius of the whole thing the reason the sr-71 worked as well as it did and all the other airplanes he worked on including the u2 f-104 the PA /f ad the p38 in World War 2 was because of the sky Kelly Johnson his concourse team developed a bill TSR and many other airplanes and we'll get to the questions after we show a short video we have about a 16 hour six minute video on Kelly Johnson and you'll hopefully learn a lot more about this absolute genius of a designer thank you [Music] dear Kelly you and I have never met I'm not a former sr-71 pilot or RSO I wasn't a member of your design team at the Lockheed skunkworks or on the assembly line that built the Blackbird nor was I a member of the Air Force at Beale mildenhall or Kadena who kept the block birds flying I'm not even an airplane buff in the classic sense I'm just a person that had the privilege of being around your sr-71 blackbird and it was an experience I will remember intensely for the rest of my life [Music] there's just something about your blackbird Kelly the words don't adequately describe anyone who has been near a blackbird that felt its presence knows what I'm talking about it's a feeling in your gut and instantly you want to be part of it part of what I call the Blackbird family today Kelly you are being honored for your design work on the sr-71 and justly so to me the sr-71 is not only a greatest aircraft design it is perhaps the greatest aircraft ever built I've heard it said that you considered the Blackbird the most fascinating challenge of your career was a design that was so advanced that everything that touched it had to be new new manufacturing processes new tools new materials a whole new approach you built an operational stealth aircraft a decade before most of the world had even heard the term was a design so far ahead of its time that it retired before time to catch up with it in times of crisis the Blackbird provided six presidents with a unique and critical view of the world the Blackbird served this country for just over a quarter of a century in that entire time it stood in a class of one to me the Blackbird is much more than a technical marvel it's an airplane that gets inside you an aircraft that causes the adrenaline to flow just by looking at Kelly your blackboard is the stuff of dreams [Music] it's the model plane sitting in a young child's room proof that everything is possible but the sky isn't the limit and it's the poster hanging on the office wall of a middle-aged engineer testimony that yes even in the real world miracles do occur the sr-71 embodies all that excites people about aerospace its crew seems part pilot part astronaut the Blackbird itself appears part airplane part spacecraft the typical blackbird fan is a cross-section of America it's your grandfather your niece your son it's the wide-eyed young kid that buys an aircraft book at the National Air and Space Museum it's the family to travel hundreds of miles to an airshow just to see a blackbird in person it's the people on the airforce base that stopped what they were doing to watch an SR take off [Music] every time no matter how many times they'd seen it before and it's the pilot who last flew the Blackbird 20 years ago who has the look in his eye that says I flew the best aircraft ever made the look that can barely contain the desire to get in an SR just one more time and light the burgers [Music] we're at 972 made its final record-setting flight to Dulles Airport i watch the television of mixed emotions this was the Blackbirds final flight an aircraft it was the very definition of speed and power would fly away but my sadness was tempered by the knowledge that this plane would now truly belong to the nation coming to rest in a Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum now millions would be able to do what I had done a near a blackbird a part of the family Kelly in the years to come whenever I want to experience who our planes Majesty I will remember the time I spent with her Blackbird the smell of jp-7 fuel the feel of it on the soles of my shoes the sound of an air starter wind up the tab ignite and I'll put on the film that we shot during those incredible weeks in 1987 a logic feeling be part of it again because in movies Kelly the black bird will fly forever congratulations Kelly and Thank You Devin assistant cameraman Blackbird movie [Music] Oh folks I hope you enjoyed that little short video and now I'd like to introduce you to our panel edge yielding would like to talk first about stories of the sr-71 his favorite stories and Edie is the pilot of the last sr-71 that was flown to year two days ago it was a 30th anniversary of that flight he set for world's records on that flight so anyway he's also the finest gentleman I've ever met thanks head thank you Tom [Applause] why I middle team from Florence Alabama were raised in Florence went to school at Auburn in the Air Force flew the RF for four five years almost six years and then the f-4 fighter for three years then a dream came true I got to fly the sr-71 for six years got 785 hours in the aircraft after the after the sr-71 I flew out of Andrews for five years and then Airlines for 13 years Northwest Airlines and then retired as a delta pilot but absolutely loved flying every airplane I've ever flown but my favorite would have to be the sr-71 blackbird I first learned about it when I was age 15 Kelly President Johnson announced its existence I was 15 I thought me and I'd like to fly that airplane someday but his a dream come true for six years and was just in the right place at the right time to fly that final flight by the way before that final flight I was able to fly 93 overseas we reconnaissance missions we took a lot of pride in all our missions we felt like we're doing something really important for our country gathering reconnaissance in hostile areas of the world keeping a watch on countries that might start hostilities so we all took a lot of pride in those missions but we were really sad when it was time to retire the aircraft after after its 25 years of service so it's it's a retirement was announced in December of 1989 and then the Smithsonian said we want one for display and they sent a letter to the Secretary of the Air Force and said please have your pilot set a official coast-to-coast speed record when you bring the airplane to the Smithsonian and that will call the public's attention to what a great great airplane it was for our country for 25 years of the Cold War and j.t Vida and I were just in the right place at the right time to fly that flight from California to the Smithsonian and fly that record flight and we just felt really fortunate very very fortunate to fly that flight any of the crew members had the skill to fly the flight so I think of it not isn't my record he's definitely the Blackbirds record they keep saying I'm a record holder but it's the Blackbird that has the record and I was just lucky enough to be the pilot that day JT Vita was in the back seat RSO great great reconnaissance systems officer he was an outstanding really outstanding at his job very popular with all the crews he had more time in the Blackbird than any other crew member in history and thirteen hundred and ninety two point seven hours in the in the airplane sadly he got cancer and passed away two and a half years after our record flight we sure missing it was just a really really a great great guy so I was really honored to fly that flight with TT Vita so I'll tell you just a little bit about that flight we took off from Palmdale California on March the six of 1990 which is exactly thirty years ago two days ago we flew 200 miles out over the Pacific and every field we let the afterburners and got a 200 mile running start toward the west coast we as we cross the west coast the NAA the national aeronautical association that's the agency that officially monitors of official speed records so they started the time as we cross the west coast and they got the time as we crossed the East Coast so we across the East Coast we're accelerating toward the Sun we had taken off before sunrise accelerating toward the Sun so the sun's coming up very rapidly I'll never forget what a beautiful sight it was crossing the west coast in the Twilight I could see all the millions of lights of Los Angeles down below 300 over 300 miles to my left I could see the lights of San Francisco to my right I could see the lights of San Diego and then the blackness darkness of Mexico beyond that but he was still bright enough that I could see the white ocean breakers all along the California coastline I'll never forget that beautiful sight then we're flying toward the Sun so the sun's coming up rapidly a few minutes later we're passing right by the Grand Canyon I could see the Grand Canyon National Park on my left side a few minutes later were passing the majestic mountains of Southwest Colorado and the past about 60 miles south of Pikes Peak which from the top of Pikes Peak katherine bates was inspired to write that wonderful song america the beautiful one of my absolute favorite songs and then a few minutes later were just right over that fruity playing that she sang about in that song hundreds of miles of prime american farmland it's a special flight so i'm having some special thoughts i'm thinking gosh just 150 years prior our brave pioneers were making their way across that same country taking months across country that were crossing in just a matter of minutes i thought about what a great country we have made great by the hard work and sacrifices and prayers of our forefathers thought about all those thousands of farmers down there raising food that feeds most of our country the eastern part of the United States was under cast so I didn't see many features in the eastern part of the country during our - supersonic - we're cruising at Mach 3.3 top speed of the airplane almost twenty two hundred miles an hour faster than a speeding bullet so JT and I just made sure we enjoyed our last few minutes of flying that marvelous airplane enjoyed one last view of God's earth from 80,000 feet the select curvature of the earth the blackness overhead because we're above 97% of the air molecules bright Vander blue on the horizon thought about how fortunate we were to serve alongside hundreds of highly dedicated men and women who served the airplane through the years then when we cross the East Coast the Blackbird had just set a speed record coast-to-coast speed record flown that coast-to-coast faster than any airplane has before or since it was 67 minutes and 54 seconds we feel was pretty tight so we started a tight left hand turned back toward Dulles we had planned it so that we would have just enough fuel to land with the minimum fuel at Dulles but they wanted me to make a few passes for the crowd there so they set up a tanker so once I'm subsonic and going toward Dulles Airport we tapped the tanker and took just a little bit more fuel so if you'd like a couple of passes for the crowd there we did we did make those passes did the afterburner they took a picture of us low altitude by the crowd and that picture was on the front page of the Washington Post the very next morning March the 7th 1990 then there was a short ceremony as we passed the airplane over to the Smithsonian and then there was a nice reception that night for for the air cruise and in other Lockheed people that supported the airplane so it was really nice so JT and I were just really fortunate for that experience two days later though we had to climb on board on the United Airline 767 for a nonstop flight from Dulles back to California to our base nonstop flight in a 767 it was a nice flight and all and the service was good but because she took five hours to get back to California but it was a day to remember so blessed for that opportunity thank you now that's gonna be a tough act to follow I'll tell you that I'm Doug soy fur I got to fly the plane for five years and four years at the Pentagon well one after the flying I went to a year-long school Maxwell Air Force Base and at that time they closed the program while I was at school so they didn't know what to do with me so they sent me to the Pentagon to get into space world and I was in the space world for the rest of my career the Pentagon and then fortunate enough I didn't know what at that time I got to go to Herbert field Air Force Special Operations Command to bring this space capability and I feel very fortunate to be in the best to communities of the United States Air Force Recon and therefore Special Operations Command pretty amazing anyway I got two short stories for you but before that everyone you know Tom and Eddie mentioned RSO reconnaissance systems officer you know everyone knows what the pilots do it he's the famous guy he you know everyone wants his autograph but what about us in the backseat what does an RSO do an RSO is a rated navigator in the United States Air Force he does so his parmi job his navigation he's a co-pilot he runs all the checklist he was the comms guy we ran all the radios and basically did what the mission was he ran all the sensors all the cameras so he was a mixture of and a flight engineer working you know the CG and everything so here's the mixture of doing many things okay I got two short stories for you so Mike Mike was my front seat Mike in this program you team up with a guy day one of training and you said Mike and I were basically married to each other for five years it was that close a crew coordination so Mike and I are in our first TTY to England RAF Mildenhall so we go in and fly we only had a couple flights there so we're basically a new crew we go in for a normal flight I think was a six hour flight and the difference from the other few flights we saw they had Air Force global weather from Offutt Air Force Base on the radio on the telephone and we thought that was strange why are they briefing us from Offutt Air Force Base instead of the local weather officer from mildenhall that usually briefed us so we listened to the briefing and it was a long briefing but didn't think anything of it got our Intel we even did everything got dressed went out to the cockpit flew a cold one no maintenance problems six-hour mission we came back to mildenhall totally normal landed in the s all world when you land from an operational mission your taxi off the runway right into we call it the barn right into the hangar so they can close the doors and download the census so no satellites could see so we taxi off and they hold us set our callsign hold where you are so Mike and I being new guys damn we did something wrong the door opens from the barn about 300 feet in front of us and out comes a guy dressed in a full kemp suit he walks slowly to the plane and walks around the plane with a Geiger counter and now Mike and I say I guess our careers over we didn't know what we did but something is wrong I mean we really did not know what we did anyway after he cleared it we taxied they cleared us taxi we got out of the cockpit walk down the stairs and at that time the deck commander was lieutenant colonel Cunningham said you never heard of this place but a few hours before we took off Chernobyl exploded so they didn't know if we were going to go through any radioactive clouds but the thing Mike and I now you can laugh about but when you think about it they had Mike and I go fly without a second thought but before anyone on the ground any of this maintenance guys and would get close to the plane they checked it out so I was one story another story real quick cuz Eddie and I about us Mike and I would TTY to Kadena Okinawa Japan and this is I think 87 I think July 87 and a special mission came up very special mission directed from the president for us to take some pictures of Iran so the mission plan is were really busy checking it out and at first they were going to have the flight come from England sure to fly it and everything but a couple days before the flight France refused to let us over fly them so they change the mission to fly from Okinawa great for Mike and I in the meantime we are still a pretty new crew they decide to send Ed and his backseater cortazzo held over to fly the mission get a more experienced truck tip pilot and instructor or or so it's that big a mission so they flew over getting ready for flight of missions the deck commander Colonel Allison decided he doesn't care what feel said Doug and Mike were there they've been flying cadena missions they're going to fly the mission so these guys were not happy anyway they sent 25 tankers kc-135s and Casey tens over pre deployed them to Kadena and to Diego Garcia I mean it was that important to mission we had 25 tankers with spares so Mike and I get the mission we go out to our primarily plane does two planes at Kadena we get in it's broken I can't remember what was wrong so instead of launching the air spare who are preflighting the plane next door Colonel Allison says for Mike and I just move over to the spare again they were annoyed they lost it twice now so we got into the spare took off they fixed the other plane Eddie and Kurt took off behind us after about 20 minutes or whatever it was I checked out all the systems and I called them to say you can go home and you could tell in their voice they're very disappointed so we then flew the longest flight in the last 15 years of the program we flew in at 11 and a half hours we flew from Japan / Thailand under India the funny part of the story is it's under cast the entire time during that part of the flight and as important as this flight was they decided to use an Obi see an optical bar camera which could not see through clouds instead of the radar the resolution is better so if we can use the OBC that's what they wanted us to do so we come in for our last refueling right outside the Straits of Hormuz hooked up with the kc-10 and just as we went through the Straits of Hormuz it was like someone just spread his arms that was perfectly clear and I remember mentioning Mike some captain at Offutt Air Force Base is a very lucky man he yes if it was under cast that was an extensive mission an SR and 25 tankers but we came back after 11 and a half hours they had a I'll tell you we that suit is comfortable for four to six hours 12 hours in the suit they had to pull us out as they mentioned my name is Michael and one of the maintenance guys but avionics maintenance was my specialty I like to tease these guys that I qualified to fly the aircraft but my IQ was way too high so they they wanted to keep keep us on the ground to fix this airplane every time it came back but one of the on my intro here the most important thing I want to say is I was very lucky I married my high school sweetheart right out of high school and joined the airforce immediately I picked electronic warfare career field but didn't know anything about it just sounded like a very interesting equipment you could work on my first duty assignment was with the youtubes the other aircraft that Kelly Johnson high-altitude reconnaissance worked on it for a few years and then they decided to move the whole program from Tucson Arizona up to BL Air Force Base where the sr-71 s were at in June of 1976 I got to walk out to the flight line the first time and see my first sr-71 aircraft which was very important I was blown away like a lot of people are the first I may see this aircraft I had to go home that night and tell my wife that I'm sorry dear but you're gonna have to share me with another beautiful lady or as long as I can possibly work this aircraft and oh well no the SR was the one I fell in love with when I went out after working the YouTube saw the SR and so she realized that and every time about TD white would come up I would be the first one to have my hand up didn't matter where you were going how long you were going to be gone a lot of times we didn't know but I'd kiss her goodbye kiss my daughter goodbye and say I'll see ya when I see ya from that time on I was able to work both the u2 aircraft til 1979 where I accepted a assignment over to Okinawa where first operational detachment was that it was a great operation I kept volunteer was a three-year tour but I stayed eight years because of the mission itself we flew operational missions every week whereas a bill a lot of more trade missions in 1987 I moved back to Beale worked the u2 in the SR till 1990 when they shut the program down u2 for four more years and then in 1994 Congress mandated the reactivation of two aircraft and I was very fortunate at that time to be selected to help with the reactivation and my best times with the aircraft of course the eight years in Okinawa and then the total of six years with the reactivation quick story I'd like to share with you is in the mid-80s while I was in Okinawa or we had a defensive system that protected the aircraft from surface-to-air missile systems it had gone through an upgrade and I had a new receiver put on onboard with that with that system we didn't have any old systems there at Okinawa so somebody volunteer to go back and get training of course my hand went up I I'll go back to bill and get training on this new system so I I went back for three weeks luckily that was where they were doing the Grenada overflights and I was out on the flight line every day learning how to preflight the system what characteristics characteristics to look at and make sure it was a good to go got back to Kadena the aircraft came over for its mission all the way from Beal past Alaska down a lot of ah stock and then we we crab recovered it had to pull the system output at another aircraft and pre-flight it send it back what was so like Eadie said a lot of job satisfaction came from knowing what was happening in your job every day we got information back that in those two passes of that system coming over and going back that the intelligence community had acquired more information from this new surface air missile site than they had ever recorded in the past missions of either Navy or other programs that had been trying to seek this information so there was always a a great sense of Java comps accomplishment with this this program [Applause] well this first time I've ever done something like this I'm Harvey Smith worked Photoshop and worked on the tech camber and they'll be see that they showed pictures off earlier I graduated from tech school and I went to Shaw Air Force Base working on the rf-4c cameras for 16 months and then I went to Okinawa and worked on a airplane the r4c airplane for three and a half years where I spent two and a half of it in Korea at TD wife then I came to bill in 77 and they originally signed me to the OBC and tech shop which the OBC is the SR camber and I mean iris sorry and the iris is a same basic camber just package different that goes into u2 so I was there for four years and then I went to I learned attack just before a guy stationed over at that one and for three years that the tech is camera tech camera is the only thing I ever worked on if it flew up until about a year and a half I did it I installed the film I did the pre flights BPOs everything help put it in the airplane until my daughter was born and then I took vacation but I stayed there for three years went back to Bill and finally retired in 92 then I went to work for a hewlett-packard doing regulatory tests like mike says if there was a TD why I came up you know my hand was up then I would ask them well where are we going and what are we going to take because I just love going TDY now sometimes I regretted that when I got there you know when you living in a tent and it's like 30 below I mean not 30 below but 30 degrees and there's a ditch underneath your cot that goes through and it's like a wind tunnel you you thinking well I could have been home in bed if I had to volunteered for this well well an interesting story I had just got back from that one to Bill and I walked into the talk to the shop chief and he told me he says well I need you on swing shift can you start to work tomorrow but I had just got back so you know I wanted them process but he says well I really need you so the next day I showed up on swings well the next day I come in there's a higher headquarters mission schedule where we have a prime and a backup and I asked him what what what's been done and they says well the cameras are already but there was a airplane flying with a ballast and the nose and the nose that we need for the primary plane so as soon as that it comes down they're going to pull it into the barn and then they're going to just pull it straight in which they don't usually do a bill and then download the the ballast and then take the nose off and put it on the other airplane well they pull the nose off you got to walk all the way around all the barns and all the way back with this thing on a spider dolly that's got five wills on it and that they want to go everywhere so it takes every one of the swing shifters to make sure it doesn't fall off so we get that done we put the cameras in but there was a chief master sergeant or senior master sergeant that was a branch chief at night and he says well you guys are not going to get this done before today hurry up get out on a flight line wait for that airplane and I told him I said well by nine o'clock we'll be back in a shock board well at nine o'clock but we also had an iris that we had to download so at nine o'clock we was driving down the ramp back to the shop with the iris and the trailer and we had everything done and all we had to do is watch heat for the rest of the night for the OBC and one thing they don't in the slides a little bit about those cameras the OBC it takes a five inch by six feet long picture that's a hundred and forty degree scan and the head on it rotates one way and the film goes the other direction and they get six feet of film across the slit and 1.71 seconds that's about it so things [Applause] as my name is beeping Floyd Jones and I when I joined the airforce Beal was my first assignment and it was it was new they wouldn't let us see the airplane for the first three months and then when we finally did get on the airplane I was totally amazed what we were doing the I worked mainly on the flight line and any inspection branch most of my career I spent 22 years on the SR I retired in 1986 and went to work for Lockheed to spend another 20 years working for Lockheed on the SRA into YouTube and I totally enjoyed the airplane and when they retired it it kind of broke everybody's heart especially you have to go from a good airplane dsr go to work on YouTube so but it was it was fun to work on and then when he brought the airplane back it went back on the sr until they finally closed it for the last time and dearly missed you working on the airplane even though it was you would cuss it out every time when he worked on it because it would hurt you you would try and take care of it it would still hurt you it would cut you numerous cuts and braces on it was just it was it was Harper terrible to work on but it was very enjoyable when the airplane took off you knew you accomplished something and for my little funny story it happened earlier to my career we were installing before bypassed doors on the SR and at that time it was still new we didn't have all the tech data how to take him out put him in so the policy was to people would work on one Inlet and to people who work on the other Inlet and you would stay on the job until it was completed you take two bypass doors out scrutiny inspect them and at that time it had rubber seals of them is silicone rubber seal the seal would get very brittle in flight so we had to replace all the seals and mark he'd made the seals fit the doors perfectly they had give us a 20-foot rolls seal with no holds in it you had to cut the seals perp nor by each section which took about three days to make the seals work and then when you do it the auto seals together then you'd put the doors back in the airplane and once you started to put in doors in you didn't stop it till you completed a job and Lockheed used a dry powder lubricant to put the seals in and one night the last one I put him in I got home late from work my wife was curious you know why you so late I suppose it worked and it was she kind of didn't believe me reason being it I smelled too good the dry powder lubricant used was apple blossom talcum powder and young kids being young kids we put a little bit on the door and quite a bit on us so the next day when I came home from work I bought brought her a box of apple blossom talked about her and she to this day still has it it's mine [Applause] being an engineer I didn't get to fly or work on the airplane but got it to hang around with a lot of the people that did design it being historian I got access to a lot of the documents written by Kelly Johnson and others on what it took to create the airplane but this is in the context of the fact that I've loved airplanes since I was his age my mom save drawings from when I was five years old of pictures of airplanes that I had in college the the first posters of the Blackbird showed up and I had one hanging on my wall and I said I'm gonna work there someday and I got to do that for thirty three of my 39 years in the industry when I hired into the skunk works in 1984 the the 117 was black you didn't talk about it but I was I was I was working on multiple programs well there were all stealth programs and you you know had tons of questions about the u2 tones the questions about the Blackbird and I understood the stealth technology that we were putting on the aircraft but then I got to understand what was on the Blackbird and the radar the the Blackbird had radar absorbing structure radar absorbing material stealthy antennas coatings it was shaped for radar cross-section and it blew my mind that in 1958 1959 a couple years after I was born these engineers were making this kind of pioneering breakthrough and as I would look at the signatures of the Blackbird I it was stunning to me but I will tell you as much as the the the design of it and and what it took to create it was stunning I want to share with you a set of experiences and put some things in context for you okay so I got to go up to Palmdale to watch a launch first thing we did when we got there we toured the airplanes that are in Depot being maintained got to stand on him walk around I'm see them torn apart and that was interesting but then we stepped out onto the flight line area and there was a bird getting ready to do a run up we walk underneath the bird fuel is dribbling out of it it was like small thin streams of the Jaypee the jet fuel coming out of it and yet all you've all heard the story you know that the fuel is not very flammable and so PHA a crew chief off to the side took a cup of the fuel lit a match toss it in it to prove that it wouldn't go off so I'm standing under this airplane fuels dribbling out of it from a few different points we move to the side because they're gonna do an engine run I say you know I want to stand outside and watch this and and and most of the maintainer 'aa go you're an idiot but they gave me earplugs and what are called Mickey Mouse ears the ear protection devices and I stood by the left wing tip to watch an engine run okay one of the things I was cautioned about was to keep my jaw open slightly just do that so I did that I'm standing there they start the engines up they go into full burner there's 20 to 30 feet of flame coming out I could feel my ribs moving around inside of me you know we're basically this giant bag of water and so you felt everything jiggling you felt the ground vibrating and I thought you know hmm you know I was kind of holding my jaw open from aw okay just like and I closed my jaw down and my teeth started chattering from the vibration so I tried clenching my jaws tight as I could to see if I could stop that from happening and I couldn't so I want you to think about the amount of noise that it takes to create that kind of vibration and it's pointed away from you okay it's not even that it's pointed at you when it's making this noise that is how much power that airplane had we went inside the pilots were in pre breathing the oxygen they were laying in barcaloungers they look like kings sitting their head on the orange suits the space suits and one of the pilots the the PSD people the physiological Support Division people were swarming all around them checking the suits for leaks they were getting ready to pressurize them and when the suits are pressurized you move into kind of this being shaped like this all right so one of the pilots when it's when it's it's it's pressurized up goes you know come here and fill the suit and it felt like squeezing a basketball I'm it was it was the suit was so taut and hard from the pressurization and I want you to think for a minute about what it must be like to move your arms down to the stick and throttle to try to reach switches if something has gone wrong inside the airplane it loses pressurization and the seat that the suit pressurizes it's a it's a workout believe me so the pilots again like Kings get up out of their barcaloungers get out to the airplane we watch everybody strapped in this was another airplane sitting on the ramp there it was going up for a test flight and we watched the engines start up and and it's it's really exciting they close the lids taxi out and we get to cop in the car to follow the airplane out to last chance it's a little place at the end of the runway where they pull all the safety pins out and everything and you know we're taxing right underneath or we're driving right underneath the wing of the airplane as it taxis out gets down to last chance pull the pins out of it and then we're gonna do what's called a fog sweep down the runway a foreign object debris sweep so looking for nuts and bolts and other things that may be on the runway except it was a little difficult for me to understand how we could see anything because we were doing a hundred miles per hour down the runway they just pull out in this car and nail it and go racing down the runway as fast as they can we get about two-thirds of the way down the runway pull off to the side of the runway and we hop we hope they start getting out of the car the Air Force guys start getting out of the car and so we get out of the car and it's like you know dude we're we're on the runway and I mean chill ok it's ok so alright fine the this was in Palmdale the Sun was setting down at the end of the runway where the Blackbird was it taxis out onto the runway so now the Sun is very low here the sky too mighdal behind me is dark the Blackbird sits there for a few seconds and then goes to full afterburner so the exhaust plume of all that that jet fuel being burned billows out behind the aircraft the Sun is light is shining through that billowing exhaust and it looks like gold foil you ever seen gold foil like I'm around Christmas presents or something but all crinkled up and so you see that thin black silhouette coming towards you with this gold shimmering behind it the pilot rotates the aircraft we see the flames of the engines bouncing off the runway as it heads towards us the guy the pilot brings it up levels off slightly starts bringing the gear up and comes over us so low that he could have flown through the hangar back there where the the Blackbird is parked and then pulls it up into the darkening sky and you see those two giant plumes of flame coming out the back side I could have died right then and been a very very happy man all right so now the airplanes headed up to altitude so I didn't get to experience this but I want to put into context what what these guys created and flew so every every operational mission was for a reason as you heard they would launch two blackbirds 25 tankers you know a president would ask for information and you made sure that it happened sometimes they would fly so close to a border that one navigation mistake could be extremely dangerous for and cause an international incident and that's the last thing that you really want to do is cause an international incident with somebody that does not like you you saw that the Astro tracker could track their position to within 300 feet and that's great how close would you fly to a border sometimes a few miles you'd head at you'd head at a border and turn how far one half mile from a border the aircraft flew one and a mile every second and a half okay so a tiny mistake in navigation could be a really bad thing and and this is what their missions were like and I want to think okay so now then the the the navigation of the aircraft is that critical the maintenance of the systems and keeping the engines running is so critical on the airplane because it's the equivalent of driving your car as fast as you can all the time I want you to think about that just at full speed all the time now you've got to operate the radio and all the controls on the inside while driving as fast as you possibly can if something goes wrong it is 16 miles down to the safety of the surface of the earth okay you have to drive in your car about 14 or 15 minutes on the freeway to go that far I want you to think about that the next time you're on the freeway okay the temperature outside turn your oven up to five hundred and fifty degrees that's as hot as it goes that's as cool as it was for the Blackbird open your oven door up and feel what that's like okay it is incomprehensible what these men did and what the airplane did and personally I am thankful that they did it because they provided multiple presidents with information to stop a lot of bad things from happening so you guys always have my eternal gratitude [Applause] hope with the questions open different questions and I don't have a good mic but anyway a mic will come over to you and by the way please speak fairly close to the mic because some of us don't hear too well okay oh wait first of all I say something about his comments about CN NS art takeoff one was at Hill Air Force Base for their Air Show and luckily enough I got to stand out by the runway and take pictures of the s are taken off incredible but what I want to know is all the cameras and stuff you know that they had to have some sort of glass to look through how did they keep the cameras cool cuz back in the days of film everybody knows film is pretty sensitive to heat so how did they keep this stuff cool okay the the OBC the van at a constant temperature of 105 degrees so once we installed it in the airplane we would put a heater cart on the nose and through one of the Wendell's and we would heat it at a hundred five degrees 18 hours prior to flight it needed to be at a hundred and five for 12 of those hours then once it it's a the canopies are closed and he puts it in the standby then we take the heater card off and we put the window in and the internal heaters on the camera or start working then well once it starts flying the windle's heat up to 200 degrees and you have to you have two of them shaped like this and it's right in the nose well as the head rotates around on the by the windle's that heats it up and as it goes across a top to have the canopy sealed domp which is negative 30 degrees that's coming down on top of it through a shroud and it cools it down well we have a temp sensor the the front of the lens is about this big and there's a temp sensor that looks like well Wow how exactly not going to show up in a picture but you know it's probably about a half-inch wide and it's in the center of the the first element of the lens and that's where the they monitor the temperature during the flight the temperature will only vary about plus or minus a half a degree and it needs to stay there because the metal and the glass contracts and expands at different rates and if it gets further out than that then it will be out of focus now on the tech camera they it only had internal heaters and required heat or power and air being put on the airplane six hours prior to takeoff and we had thermal monitors which was basically capacitors that it took six hours for him to charge up and once they charged up we knew that we'd had six hours of heat and it kept the the heaters and the camera kept the camera at the proper temperature well to answer your question also is that all the sensors because the airplane gets so hot of flying and the defensive systems are air-conditioned along with the cockpits so so the skin of the airplane gets hundreds of degrees you know and temperature but the inside of the airplane is air-conditioned so so those sensors don't get nearly as hot as the skin of the airplane does is that about right yes yes anything else any other questions stand by stormy can you go ahead astronomy's asking a question he flew the sr-71 as well the main tires are pretty much whitewall tires actually they're white all around is for heat reflection it's also air conditioned to a certain extent the the nose gear you notice is not aluminum coated which is what the white comes from that's because it's up in the near the cockpit of where air conditioning is is available to pilot in there or so so anyway the also the tires are pressurized with nitrogen so they they don't expand to contract nearly as well so anything else stormy those tires are silver and they're BF Goodrich silver talents that's the reason there's silver [Laughter] in stay my I don't think we ever went that slow but the radar controllers typically knew when we were flying and and they knew our flight profiles and everything else so they you know we typically didn't talk to him too much although on a training sortie we did so operational story is that didn't talk too much until we got down to a certain altitude then we started talking to rap cons so anyway you had a question quite often quite often you see the enemy fighters far far below within their countries you could see them in a holding pattern one time when I was flying in the Barents Sea area just north of on the along the northern border of Russia we had a lot of missions along the northern border of Russia keeping a close watch on the submarine ports there and the nuclear-tipped missiles being loaded on those submarines and keeping up with where those that was the the SR was one way to keep up with whether Soviet submarines were but so we often flew up along the the aberrancy area we had one mission where we would fly along the border and then we flied north and then turn around and fly directly toward the Russian border and then just in the nick of time we turned to the right and two parallel their coast line again and they they would they were used to that mission so one time I saw as I was flying directly toward the Soviet order I saw maybe 150 miles ahead of me I saw a country aisle coming straight toward me well far far below and so as I started my turn I knew that he would know about where I was going to turn so I turned in and I kept as I turned I kept to watch toward the back and I saw him far below zoom his airplane but then he completely ran out of airspeed and just just dropped away that was it was I was told later it was a big 31 Tom and Duane a crew they're not here but probably the closest encounter to you 1987 I think June they were flying a Baltic mission which is right in the Sweden and then around the eastern Soviet Union I forget what the emergency was do you remember whatever the emergency they had they had to come down so they came down to 15,000 feet and the Swedish Air Force noticed that a plane had descended from altitude to 15,000 so they sent out to the Fagin's vegans the Jets that they flew and they came on the wing one on each side of the sr-71 so they were taking them back towards Germany all of a Sun 2 MiG's showed up and people say they saw the Swedish guys and and they left but people think that if the Swedish jets were not there they would have taken a shot at the sr-71 the rest of that story is so that's 87 30 some odd years later Tom's lobbyist up in Virginia and a big member of the Air Force Association so he had a lot of good contacts he started doing research he never knew the names never met the four pilots that came up so did Arisa and they finally found them so last November Tom went over to Stockholm with a Air Force I think one-star general and presented the four pilots with the United States Air Force Air Medal thanking them for what they did to add something to that I remember one time I was flying a German mission I was going north along the on the FRG side the Federal Republic of Germany side and it was under cast and lookout and I say hey there's a contrail coming up from the East German side and it turned out to be rolled out about a two o'clock position we pushed it up a little bit we had it several hundred miles to go before we turned back toward mildenhall to recover and by the time we did the turn that airplane went from 2 o'clock position to 4 o'clock position it was probably at about 30 miles or so from us so we found out from intelligence later that that was a May 25 and in the process of turning away after there after the drag race if you will it had lost an engine and when it landed with one engine out they had to change both engines so the May 25 which was designed to counteract the sr-71 was good for Mach 3 one time and the sr-71 the more times it flew at Mach 3 plus the stronger it got so that airplane the sitting back there is stronger than when it was first built because the titanium gets annealed every time it gets hot and then cools so that's a stronger airplane now than was deliberate of the Air Force yeah anything else go ahead the most powerful airplane ever built and the most wonderful machine ever made answer your question yes yeah we're all little boys at heart so I know when my daughter my number two daughter was in elementary school she's like 43 now sorry about that but she was amazed when she was talking to her class that she thought everybody flew sr-71s because her daddy did but we were at the right place at the right time and emphasized we were just the tip of the iceberg there are thousands and thousands of people actively supporting us there's no way the crew members could fly an airplane without hundreds if not thousands of people actively supporting the airplane vibration and the power of it no you're in a spacesuit and you don't even hear heart well I guess you do in a background you hear the engines but you know the only thing you feel on takeoff is an acceleration you get pushed back in the seat a little bit you hear a distant sound but it's not nearly as loud as as it is when you're outside on the first question about the excitement I mean we all probably were in our 30s we were well trained we prepared for any mission so we didn't worry about or didn't think about it you know we're excited to go and never thought of it but now when I look back when Mike and I were over Marantz you know up there if we had to eject over the barren sea up there I think they told us the temperature was minus 24 degrees that no we would survive for 24 seconds once we hit the water so now as an older man I think what the hell we doing the thing is for we were young were bulletproof yep go ahead can you tell us about the source of the titanium go ahead Steve yeah it is what you read one of the great great great stories in the skunkworks was you know they needed to build this thing out of titanium that was the only metal that was strong enough light enough that could handle the temperatures but but make an airplane the problem was at that time the bulk of the titanium that was available in the world came from the Soviet Union so Lockheed and the CIA set up a series of front companies to go buy titanium and so this this very front company would buy from the Soviet Union then that company would sell it to another company and then sell to another company and ultimately it would end up in Lockheed's shops to build the airplane there all the titanium suppliers were out there trying to figure out you know who's buying all the titanium and where is it going but they never could trace it and you know but it's not like we were stealing and everything we bought it and we were gonna return it to them you know just in the form of an airplane that over flew them yes sir well every mission we every field so took a lot of practice to get good at it and once we got very proficient at refueling we took a lot of pride in being able to refuel without disconnecting from the tanker we would pull up to the tanker they had there were director lights underneath the tanker they said go forward or back or up or down so we were flying formation on the tanker and using those lights as a guide the boomer and the tanker would extend the probe and plug into the to the airplane and so refueling was routine on every mission and wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait a minute I'll take that we took off out of Kadena in Japan one day and we went up north North Pacific to the toward the Kamchatka Peninsula we were we were on the boom refueling and my backseater said hey what's that I said where of course I'm concentrating on the tanker and refueling he says over that there left I glanced over and there's a couple of MiG's coming up there and we are very vulnerable when were that low and that slow behind the tanker fortunately they just were looking they weren't really didn't have any bad intent I think they weren't willing to take the political heat for doing anything and of course once we got topped off with fuel we did our acceleration and they weren't going to touch his thin so but to answer your question on rare occasions all right before we go I want to I want to dress this thing of tanking just being a routine everything day like you go down to the 7-eleven and buy a coke okay so the the the the made up is done in for an operational mission in radio silence okay and so I want you to think about the navigation accuracy that it takes to wind up in the right spot behind a kc-135 that is going at its max speed okay the the tanker is is trying to get upright against its maximum Mach number because the Blackbird is slowing down to about as slow as it can go and now the Blackbird is coming in it's fairly light but its angle of attack its nose up attitude is pretty high which is a good thing because when you're sitting in the cockpit those two front windows look like little postcards that you're looking through you have almost no peripheral vision through your helmet at all so your visibility is incredibly constrained you're looking through a soda straw to see outside so you have these nav lights that come up and are these position lights that bring you up into position the guy hooked in to you and then he starts pumping gas into you and you're hanging on the boom for 15 or 20 minutes for a full load about 20 minutes about 20 minutes for a full load I want you to think about how long 20 minutes is okay so they're pumping gas into you the airplanes getting heavier and heavier you're near your men's speed and now you start to drag behind the the the airplane is starting to move back a little bit so now you're pretty much up at max power because the airplane is very dragging nose up your throttles are very high because you're very draggy you need to go into afterburner in order to stay on the boom so you'll pop one of the one of the engines into afterburner to make up for that thrust to move back up except listen afterburner on one side of the airplane which means the airplane is trying to y'all on you okay and so you're sitting there you know popping in and out of burner working the rudders and the flight controls because this is not the easiest airplane in the world to fly to stay on that boom in a relatively small envelope for 20 minutes while they put gas into you so you can continue your mission that is what routine meant to them I'd like that I'd like however a lot being said about every hour and 15 minutes hour 20 minutes you we had to refuel took about 30 30% maybe 40% of our fuel just to accelerate and climb we the tankers were always there to refuel us now granted you know what do you what Steve's talking about going in afterburner we typically I've got a 5,000 feet or 5,000 pounds to go we'd say hey and we talking abou min her phone a Boomer left burners coming in it was very you really had to do that especially at night but because it was very very obvious you go to a minimum afterburner on the left engine you go one thousand one thousand two thousand three it takes about three seconds to light and you want to pull the right throttle back because once once the afterburner lights in the evenin minimum burner is going to accelerate so you have to modulate your power with their gone after burning engine and of course you're flying kind of sideways standing on the rudder to get your last you don't want to drop off the boom yeah and have to get back on before you get to end Air Refueling so yeah his route was routine we did it all the time so we got I think pretty good at it but the important thing is we were on the womb the back cedar was managing the number of pumps from the tanker because you could not put a huge volume in as the airplane got pretty close to full tanks otherwise it'll blow you off and you did not want that so anyway it became I'll say routine even though the nothing's routine at night in turbulence nothing is routine so but you have to do it anything else yes sir high speed low out to do passes we would occasionally do something like that either it during an air show you had to be real careful with the airplane IDI did that on his record run back in Washington Dulles yeah but there was one flyby for the Lockheed people where where you you need to tell that story because you got a little slow and a little low that was somebody else oh I know nothing the airplane by the way was extremely honest as long as you gave it the opportunity to be honest you might be I don't know which story that you're thinking of is it was did it happen over in England no was that no no weren't you the one that flew the the flyby and Burbank or the for Kelly oh yeah that was a yeah you got a little slow there right because yeah no no we we gave them three good flybys exactly as planned how might have been a little closer to him than they wanted me to to be but so this I wasn't there but my buddies were and it was overcast that day the black bird came around for three passes and on the last one he was very low almost over the crowd a friend of mine named Vicki was digging her nails into a buddy of mine whose name was Chuck out of fear that the bird was going to come down on top of them but but Edie grabs burner as he came by and I will tell you one of the the stories that you don't hear very much about Kelly Johnson was deep into Alzheimer's at the time and really didn't know too much of anything and been rich his successor who was running the skunk works arranged to have Kelly driven out in a limousine for this celebration which was the the black birds are going to be retired and this was a thank-you flyby for everybody down in Burbank if the skunk works and so Kelly was in a limousine with blacked-out windows and stuff and been rolled the windows down a little bit he was hoping that the roar of the jet engines would spark a memory for Kelly and as Ben tells a story the the airplane comes roaring by and he looks over at Kelly and he can see a tear come down Kelly's cheek so that was really a huge honor to get to they asked when the airplane was announced to be retired be enriched permission for us to make passes for the Lockheed employees down at Burbank the airplane had never been seen in flight down at Burbank before so we went down flew down at the end of one of our training mission or test missions flew three passes and I looked there were several thousand Lockheed employees all along that runway it was just a huge honor to fly the airplane for those folks who don't who had devoted so much of their lives to supporting the airplane when we're done here one of the guys had printed out I don't know why hundreds of pictures of talking about air shows and passes Mike and I were flying the 1986 mildenhall f8 and we had 13 fireballs come out and slung story what happened but I have a whole bunch of pictures left anyone wants one just come up and I'll give it to you at the end i think mike has one more comment right you know this was a amazing aircraft but of course that meat and potatoes was to gather information on the ground what our enemies are doing to help our allies and our own government to make hopefully realistic decisions I did some calculations to give you an idea of the capabilities of some of our systems that we had the sensors onboard the technical camera that Harvey mentioned earlier it was a very high-resolution camera and it could reach out 23 miles from either side of the aircraft so just that you got an aircraft line 15 plus miles up it could reach out 23 miles and take a very high-resolution picture for your locals here and that would be just south of the middle town so if you take that distance from here to Middletown that's how far we could reach and get a very high-resolution ground picture the next ring from the aircraft would be the optical bar camera it could reach out 41 miles from the aircraft and take a high-resolution picture well that's about just south of the 275 bypass from here at the Dayton Museum the next one is the ace R is the radar system that could take a ground radar image of the ground well I could go out 115 miles well that's just north of Lexington Kentucky and get a high-resolution radar image of the ground we also my shop also took care of a signal intelligence system so as they're shooting signals up to try to track the radar or try to launch a missile at the aircraft we had a system on board that would record all those ground radars and their characteristics and was recorded on two different recorders that we had the EMR could go horizon to horizon depending on the a strength of the transmitting signal and that would be 375 miles at 80,000 feet so that takes you out to Washington DC if you're talking on your cell phone Washington DC we could pick that up if we if our system went down that the far in the RF range we didn't scan that the RF range that low because it's a very you you would want a long recording of an audio recording but it was for the radar surface-to-air missiles long-range track radar and other threats to the aircraft so not only the aircraft was amazing all the sensors that this air aircraft would carry the engineering to keep the pictures in focus and the capability to scan a whole wide range of frequencies it was just a pleasure to work on and like I said before a lot of job satisfaction and folks I know this is taking quite a while thank you very much for being here we'd be more than happy to answer any questions you might have one on one we got a couple sr-71 guys in the audience we know that so anyway thank you very much for showing up we sincerely appreciate it thank you for loving this airplane hopefully as much as we do it means a lot to us and that's that's why we come to something like this anyway thanks very much [Applause] you
