Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird | New York to London in 1h 54 mins | The untouchable reconnaissance plane

the sr-71 blackbird the world's fastest stealth spy plane it flew faster than a rifle bullet three times the speed of sound it looks like it's part spaceship hard airplane and when you see it in the air it's a piece of artwork even now 50 years later it's still the fastest and highest man has ever flown without rocket propulsion [Music] the blackbird is the iconic aircraft of high-speed supersonic crews it was a multi-million dollar gamble that stretched 60s aviation technology to the limits incredibly forward-thinking design on this no high-powered you know computers just rooms of people with slide rules and calculators the thing that's special about the blackbird was it was all miracles blackbird pilots risked their lives to fly at the edge of the possible it was just breathtaking when we realized what we were going to be doing these basically became sentinels if you will for the free world its greatest legacy helping maintain peace when the world was on the brink of nuclear war [Music] january 1966 two ace test pilots prepare for a critical experimental flight the plane they're about to fly is an ultra-fast covert military jet and it's just been modified to maximize performance in the cockpit is a pilot with 4 000 flying hours under his belt bill weaver you took off about 11 11 something in the morning we headed out on the program route everything was okay routine it's a crazy altitude in the back seat is reconnaissance expert jim zwayer 3.2 weaver banks into a turn and without warning one of his engines stalls it's a very startling event you could never prepare yourself for them it was once described by one of the pilots is like being a train wreck at over 3000 miles an hour the unbalanced plane is impossible to control it pitches into a catastrophically steep climb i had to stick full left corner of the cockpit and no response to the airplane at all i knew that we were just going to be along for the ride when that happened inside two seconds the plane starts to break up the airplane just basically disintegrated around us the quest to build the world's fastest spy plane is on the edge of disaster [Music] [Applause] the story of the sr-71 blackbird begins nine years earlier at the height of the cold war in 1957 the soviet union develops intercontinental ballistic missiles that russia already has intercontinental missiles in mass production the threat of a direct nuclear strike on u.s cities makes gathering intelligence on the soviets nuclear arsenal a top priority well in any conflict knowledge is power and we had to find out what the soviet union was doing particularly with a missile program we had a vital need to understand the capabilities of the soviet military machine but the soviet union was so vast that we could not gain this by using conventional aircraft america needs specialist spy planes to fly reconnaissance missions deep into soviet territory without being detected by radar and shot down by enemy jets [Music] in late 1957 the cia asks defense contractor lockheed to come up with a new undetectable spy in the sky [Music] they would call it project archangel led by aviation genius kelly johnson kelly johnson undoubtedly is the leonardo da vinci of aviation design the difference in him and other airplane designers is he had a vision of the future and the art of the possible [Music] i had a great relationship with him i trusted him he was almost a father figure to me johnson had worked for lockheed since 1933. he'd put together a small maverick design team just outside los angeles nicknamed the skunk works johnson's team had designed several military planes including a supersonic jet fighter the iconic lockheed f-104 starfighter by the late 50s skunk works was at the top of its game [Music] the factor that makes the skunk works different than other airplane design organizations is that they assume it can be done and then figure out how to do it [Music] back in 1955 kelly johnson had created america's first plane specifically designed for spying the u2 was a single-engine jet plane that could fly at altitudes of 20 000 meters which according to u.s intelligence was 1500 meters above the reach of soviet radar the idea behind the u2 was to fly so high that the very sophisticated russian radars would not be able to detect it in 1956 the u2 flew its first operational mission over soviet territory [Music] it returned safely with valuable intelligence [Music] but the on-board device the plane carried to detect radar waves delivered some bad news soviet radar had tracked its every move from our estimates if the u2 were to fly above a certain altitude it could not be detected the problem is we were wrong the soviet radars were better than we thought they were the only comfort was that the soviets had no means of downing the u2 at this altitude yet the skunk works team knew it was only a matter of time before russian missile technology would catch up with disastrous consequences they would have to deliver the new undetectable spy in the sky and fast [Music] fifty years after it was built the sr-71 blackbird still holds the record as the world's fastest manned plane using air breathing engines the amazing thing about the blackbird is that it instills emotion in anyone not just airplane enthusiasts it looks like it's part spaceship part airplane and when you see it in the air it's a piece of artwork even more extraordinary it pioneered the idea of stealth technology with a design that was almost impossible for enemy radar to detect [Applause] but reaching this pinnacle of aviation technology wasn't easy [Music] in the spring of 1958 skunk work starts work on project archangel the cia's top secret plan to replace the vulnerable u2 spy plane [Music] kelly johnson knows the new design will have to fly much higher than its predecessor to evade advancing soviet radar systems and also much faster to get out of trouble even if detected as the missile threat evolved speed now became very very important and so if you have a fast-moving target that may be also turning or maneuvering itself it poses a very difficult challenge to an intercepting missile but the cia wants more the order for a new super spy plane had come from president eisenhower himself and he wants it to be invisible to radar achieving radar invisibility seemed near impossible [Music] when radio waves from a radar transmitter strike a plane circular fuselage they scatter in many directions producing an obvious and distinctive radar signature reducing this signature will require nothing less than a radical rethink of aviation design yet in 1958 the idea of such stealth technology is in its infancy and delivering it alongside high altitude and high speed will test skunk works abilities to the limits the skunk works team began looking at designs to meet these requirements of higher than eighty thousand feet faster than two thousand miles per hour as well as being reduced in radar cross section [Music] over 11 months skunk works engineers draft ten designs each prefaced with the letter a for archangel [Music] some aim for a reduced radar signature others to achieve speed or height none manage all three the front runner is the [Music] capable a10 flying far higher than the u2 and at over three times the speed of sound mach 3.2 [Music] but performance comes at a price its shape will make it highly visible to radar [Music] in march 1959 things become critical at a meeting with the cia's head of black operations kelly johnson argues that the a10 is the best design despite its radar visibility designed to fly so high and so fast that even if detected the soviets will have no time to react there was always a debate from the time of the u2 onwards about which was the best way to defend a high altitude reconnaissance aircraft the cia knows the president isn't about to settle for speed over stealth [Music] it looks like the end of the road for project archangel on the brink of losing the contract skunk works throw themselves at the radar visibility problem one last time [Music] the m lab was trying to come up with the answer for that yeah we spent a lot of time and money trying to develop stealth the challenge to modify the plane's profile without compromising performance [Music] two months later one of the engineers makes a breakthrough he takes the existing design and adds elements from other project archangel designs that reduce radar signature the result is a radical new streamlined look [Music] the new design has a flatter underbelly and sleeker lines when radio waves encounter this plane instead of bouncing back to enemy radar receivers they should deflect harmlessly away along the flattened fuselage the result an incredible 90 reduction in the radar cross section the radar cross section was something like 10 meters you know that's a big eagle or it's a very small airplane now the new spy plane faces the ultimate test will it convince the cia [Music] kelly johnson tells the agency the new plane will fly eight kilometers higher than the u2 at three times the speed of sound and all the while presenting the radar profile of a large bird [Music] on february 11 1960 the cia approves a 96 million dollar contract for skunk works to build a dozen spy planes now called the [Music] a12 there is no time to waste because just three months into the project disaster strikes [Applause] on may 1 1960 a u2 spy plane is shot down by a missile in soviet airspace [Music] the pilot francis gary powers survives he is put on trial in moscow and paraded in front of the media together with his once top secret spy plane it's an ominous sign of how fast soviet technology is developing because power's plane had been downed by a state-of-the-art radar-guided surface-to-air missile the davina sa-2 [Music] we knew the u-2 was was going to be very limited from that point on in terms of random over flying in anywhere in the country so in that sense the technology of the other countries were catching up to us more than ever the united states needs a spy plane that can't be shot down skunk works feels the pressure building a plane with the futuristic qualities they'd promised the cia is a monumental challenge [Music] the downing of a u2 spy plane by the soviets in 1960 increases the pressure on skunk works to deliver its futuristic replacement the new plane is supposed to cruise at a record-breaking mach 3 but flying at three times the speed of sound throws up some fundamental problems first a conventional aluminium airframe is out of the question because at over kilometers an hour the friction created by airflow alone will heat the airframe to over 300 degrees celsius skunkworks knows aluminium loses its strength at 150 degrees which for a mach 3 airplane is barely breaking a sweat [Music] there were places on the blackbird that were 600 700 degrees fahrenheit your oven at home goes to 550 degrees fahrenheit and so you had to look for materials that could survive those kinds of temperatures and that's not all to reach high altitudes an airframe has to be light but to fly supersonic it must also be robust there is only one material that meets all the demands titanium [Music] but the leading producer of the rare metal is the soviet union the trick of how do you acquire the titanium and the volume necessary while not giving away the fact that you were building something like the blackbird was a security challenge the titanium is bought through dummy companies so that the soviets don't realize their customer is the cia but working with it is uncharted territory so how do you machine it how do you form it how do you assemble it a lot of that had to be created on the fly titanium is so hard that it damages standard machining equipment forcing skunk works to develop new manufacturing processes 300 degree temperatures pose another problem metal expands when hot to ensure the plane's panels fit together tightly when flying supersonic they need to fit loosely while on the ground [Music] no big deal except when it comes to the fuel tanks there's no internal bladder tanks there's no internal metal tanks the skin of the airplane is the tank as a result it was a leaky airplane you would see this aircraft sitting on the ground with a puddle of fuel under it traditional aviation fuel is highly volatile and liable to explode at the high temperatures generated in flight so skunk works ask shell to develop a brand new fuel an exotic mix of hydrocarbons and lubricants with exceptionally low volatility which they call jp7 i see the crew chiefs throw cigarette butts and matches it extinguishes it won't catch on fire this is just one of many ingenious solutions that johnson's team devises to overcome a string of engineering challenges kelly wanted the simplest answer you could have one of his rules was one miracle per program the thing that's special about the blackbird was it was all miracles [Music] by the spring of 1962 people in arizona begin to see strange craft streaking through the skies near the top secret area 51 it's the latest version of the skunk works a12 spy plane the sightings fuel talk of ufos and so you start seeing bar talk develop you start seeing people reporting what's going on in some cases they're met by people in suits who take them away and tell them don't talk about what you saw two years later skunk works believe they've made an even better version of the plane a two-seater and in 1964 the government decides to scotch the rumors of ufos and unveil it the new spy plane destined for the u.s air force will be called reconnaissance strike 71 but the speech by president johnson doesn't go as planned [Applause] i would like to announce the successful development of a major new strategic manned aircraft system this system employs the new sr-71 aircraft and provides a long range when president johnson announced it he got the designation backwards it should have been rs-71 but he said sr-71 and this sounds better and the name stuck the joints chiefs of staff the air force decide it's easier to rename the aircraft than to correct the president's error and of course no one wished to contradict the president so from that point on sr-71 it was now the entire world knows the sr-71 has put america back in the aerial spying game it's time to put the sr-71 through its paces december 22nd 1964. a blackbird completes its final flight checks at lockheed's plant 42 in palmdale california it is the first official test flight of the sr-71 test pilot bob gilliland has the dangerous privilege of being first in the cockpit [Music] he has been hand-picked by kelly johnson himself one glancing you could say it was high and fast and big and long there were a whole lot of guys around the world that would like to been in my position but i wasn't the one that got kelly wanted to do it with and so that's a hell of a high honor for me and maybe perhaps my highest honor of all every test flight has what are called open items unresolved technical issues but on this day gilliland knew there were 383 of them initially kelly johnson and gilliland agree not to push the plane too hard kelly had said is considered a successful flight if we just take off leave the landing gear down fly around and come back in and land but then he says to me how do you feel about uh going supersonic on the first flight so i said i have great confidence in our escape system here so it's okay with me guillermo's test flight breaks the sound barrier reaching speeds of sixteen hundred kilometers an hour cruising at 000 meters over three kilometers higher than a commercial jetliner [Music] but extreme performance demands extreme concentration the tiniest error can spell disaster the pilots referred to the black bird as being a three-second airplane every three seconds you had to look at the instruments and make sure everything was working the way it was supposed to i got on down there for landing and kelly says he has your fuel state i said excellent so he says well how about a flyby so we did a flyby [Music] the first flight is a great success the blackbird program is airborne but the flight tests are about to face setback and tragedy [Applause] in january 1966 a crucial test flight for the blackbird sr-71 spy plane is about to run into trouble on board our pilot bill weaver and reconnaissance specialist jim zwayer 24 000 meters up after losing control at mach 3 the plane starts to disintegrate [Music] at edwards air force base weaver and zwaya's blackbird disappears from the tracking radar both crew members are presumed dead [Music] fellow test pilot bob gilliland is on the base when he hears the news i found that it was bill weaver and his locker was near mine and there were two cigars [Music] gilliland takes one of his friends cigars to smoke in his memory i said well he may be dead and if he is i'll give him another i'll get him a whole box of cigars but bill weaver isn't dead he had been free-falling from the very edge of space i thought i was having a terrible dream nightmare and then i realized i wasn't dreaming so i must be dead and then i realized that i'm not dead and somehow i'm out of the airplane i could feel myself falling i could hear the rushing of air weaver doesn't know if his parachute is still attached until it springs open now his thoughts turned to his flying mate jim zwayer jim was wearing his parachute looked like it was about a quarter mile away that was really relief i didn't think either one of us was going to survive to think that both of us had was tremendous really weaver lands in new mexico 1200 kilometers from the base on the ground he learns the sad news his friend jim has not survived after all [Music] his neck broken he had died the instant the plane disintegrated [Music] find out that he had died he was really devastating and a wonderful guy believes one of the best an investigation found that optimizing the plane's performance had made it less stable that led to a loss of control which put the airframe under catastrophic strain at the base a call comes through to the accident investigation chief he says yes i will take a collect call from mr bill weaver and uh and then i heard that and i knew he would survive so i was real thrilled at that may i told him i was going to get the castro's best cigars i could find i don't know but naturally i would do anything for him he said he was going to give me expensive replacements and i haven't gotten them yet that was 1966. by 1967 skunk works fine solutions to all the blackbirds design problems the planes go fully operational from beale air force base california [Music] now america just needs the men to fly them a new group of elite pilots is assembled to join the ninth strategic reconnaissance wing they are the best of the best none of us had ever seen the airplane and you can't imagine what that felt like to see that airplane come in it was just breathtaking when we realized what we're going to be doing [Music] [Applause] [Music] the blackbird doesn't so much break records as shatter them it can fly at three times the speed of sound faster than a rifle bullet it's kind of a good feeling to know that anytime you're flying you're going higher and faster than any other person in the world its engines are the most powerful of the time producing 160 000 horsepower and swallowing 3 000 cubic meters of air every second equivalent to 2 million people inhaling at once you've got so much power it's smooth it's quiet it's just delightful it can fly an astonishing 25 kilometers above the earth applying a navigation system that used the stars to work out its position i mean it's the world's uh biggest planetarium show you see the curvature of the earth you can see almost 350 miles in any direction unbelievable what you see at 80 000 feet or higher just fantastic ironically the blackbird will never see active service over the soviet union the role for which it was designed but within a year it will be called to operate in the heat of battle [Music] march 1968 vietnam a daunting theater of war for the blackbird's first combat mission its objective to find an enemy vietcong site deep in the jungle a supply area used to mount the siege of u.s marines at khaesan the blackbird delivers its high resolution ground mapping radar reveals the secret site enabling b-52 bombers to attack ending the siege [Applause] the blackbird goes on to give the intelligence community critical photographic and ground mapping data from all over the world then you come back and the intelligence community is just on it like ants on sugar okay what has changed have they brought in some new defensive system or what are we seeing here that's different from the last time we flew an area the ess-71 then went on to become the nation's premier reconnaissance system for keeping track of international crises whether it was the 1973 arab israeli law watching the soviet fleet and its movements we had sr-71s deployed to the far east operating out of kadena these basically became sentinels for the free world tremendous contributions of technical intelligence but the blackbird is no longer invisible 1968 it is tracked by enemy radar for the first time and as surface-to-air missiles grow ever more effective blackbird crews will soon face a direct attack august 26 1981 north korea the communist regime of kim il-sung is flexing its military muscles fearing an invasion of the democratic south the west desperately needs intelligence we had to understand what is happening with the north korean order of battle what is their intention where are their forces what are they up to what are they doing and there was only one system that could finish that information and it was the sr-71 17 years after its first flight the blackbird is still the world's best spy plane now it'll fly secret missions to locate the north koreans anti-aircraft missiles rosenberg is tasked with flying over the dmz a demilitarized zone between north and south but one known to be within reach of enemy missiles most of the missions were through the dmz where we would make anywhere from uh three to as many as four passes uh east to west west to east etc the plane carries equipment to warn of enemy radar activity rosenberg and his reconnaissance specialist ed mckim complete two passes without the monitor lighting up this aircraft though even on a training flight let alone an operational flight you never really relax you're always you're always uh watching everything [Applause] monitor picks up an enemy radar lock signal oh wait a minute i got a trace here buddy it's what sr-71 crews call getting painted we were on our last pass and ed was an old pro by now so when the site locked on and he was in a relatively calm voice and he said oh they're looking at us they're painting painted us that's no problem they do that all the time they've been spotted the north koreans haven't fired on a spy plane yet but they do sometimes fake a signal to make the crew think they're under missile attack and as we're progressing he says he said they've simulated a missile launch accustomed to fake launch signals the crew aren't concerned they only need to worry if the missile responds which means it is in the air and on its way okay and i started taking a peek over the nose of the airplane and then in a higher voice and a little higher pitch i hear ed said oh my god the missile answered this a radar-guided surface-to-air missile is racing through the air at 2500 kilometers an hour [Music] about that time is when i actually had picked the missile up i would guess that it was in the neighborhood of 40 to 50 000 feet already and the next few seconds i could tell it was rapidly climbing [Music] august 1981 and in the midst of renewed hostilities north korea has fired a soviet-made guided missile at a blackbird spy plane aircrew maury rosenberg and ed mckim have less than one minute to impact the window to shoot the missile and the missile to get to us is less than about 50 seconds all pilot rosenberg can do is try to outmaneuver the missile and it said let's turn off track and i said okay so we started to turn towards the left obviously we didn't want to go right into north korea but he doesn't have the agility of a fighter jet [Music] once i had a good visual and i could see it and as we started to turn i could see the missile didn't change course the blackbird is saved by its speed the enemy just don't have time to recalculate the target coordinates and redirect the missile i saw the missile go by on the right side and explode it's hard to judge distance at altitude because there's no reference so i'm guessing that the missile was probably within a mile a mile and a half of the aircraft at mach 3 that's equivalent to just two seconds from impact i actually felt pretty relieved when we got on the ground that nothing and nothing else happened just as kelly johnson had predicted even when it is detected the blackbird proves just too fast to catch the soviets even developed the mig-25 jet fighter to bring it down but not a single sr-71 is ever lost to enemy fire an unmatched record there was really no weapon system that we knew of that could touch the blackbird nine years later and the blackbird is still the world's fastest spy plane but now a new technology is taking over its role satellites are considered to be the future of intelligence gathering [Music] in march 1990 the blackbird program is shut down on its final flight before retirement the blackbird creates a speed record that is still unbroken it flies from los angeles to washington dc in just one hour four minutes and 20 seconds it's a poignant moment for everyone in the program and for some difficult to comprehend there were many of us myself included that believed that the retirement of the blackbird was premature just months after the program was cancelled saddam hussein invaded kuwait and the system that we really needed on hand immediately to find out what was going on was the blackbird today the blackbird stealth technologies live on the b2 stealth bomber and lockheed stealth ground attack f117a nighthawk use the same kind of radar diffusing black paint as that pioneered on the sr-71 five decades after it was built the sr-71 blackbird is still one of the world's most iconic planes it has even appeared in hollywood movies like transformers and x-men to this day it's the fastest and highest flying manned airplane that's not rocket powered the blackbird was revolutionary because it was the first aircraft designed for sustained flight at 000 miles per hour it was the first stealth airplane ever designed everything about the blackbird was special because of what the engineers asked it to do [Music] it has come to epitomize the perseverance ingenuity and patriotism of the men and women who built it and of those who flew it in the service of six presidents it's a airplane that could make a statement you know you can't get us we're here we're watching you the blackbird proved what we can do when we rise to conquer an impossible challenge i think one of the lessons of the sr-71 is you give men and women a task and give them the authority and the resources it's amazing what you can create but perhaps the blackbird's greatest legacy is as the aircraft that helped maintain peace when the world was on the brink of nuclear war this is the fastest airplane ever built it helped win the cold war and that ought to be a pretty good little achievement [Music] you

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Id: xLoSLK7jmrc

Length: 46min 6sec (2766 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 19 2022