SR-71 Cockpit Checkout

okay here we have the the front cockpit for the pilot seat of the sr-71 at the very top I'll point to it here and this is the attitude indicator pretty much like a standard attitude indicator any airplane right beneath it is your HSI for all your navigation and beneath that I'll have to move the stick beside this is our map projector it runs on a continuous sixteen millimeter the old sixteen millimeter of stuff we used to have a long time ago four slides and it's our map projector the whole route of flight is contained within here the entire time and that's what the pilot uses more than anything up here we have a airspeed indicator which becomes useless once you go supersonic and particularly up to Mach two and three and beyond and we use this as our measure of merit and we get up supersonic this is called our TDI triple display indicator because it displays in the top we have the knots and keys nuts equivalent airspeed then we have here is our altitude it's right now it's reading 61 160 1100 feet and below that it's reading mach 1.8 so this is our TDI is what we use supersonically as far our measure of Merit in terms of speed altitude and Mach number and right here we have the fuel flow gauges majored in fuel flow in thousands of pounds per hour so right now these are reading about you know five thousand this is reading about fifteen thousand pounds in normal crews each one of these fuel flow gauges reading about twenty one thousand pounds per hour and you also have a digital readout up above as well as the analog here we have the oil pressure on the psi for both left and right engine here we have hydraulic pressure for the utility system called L&R this is a hydraulic surface pressure called a and B so you have double redundancy in both utility and in the aircraft hydraulic system further off to the right here if you bring the wrap the light look before we have the fuel gauge right now it's reading a total of twenty one thousand one hundred pounds but you see the gauge that goes up eighty thousand pounds of gas beneath that is our CG as we burn fuel these are the six main tanks in the airplane number one two three four five and six going aft is a fuel burns in the right sequence the CG will slowly move further aft than half than aft and once it reaches the max limit of 25% that as far as we want to go for the day anything beyond that then the airplane will get very unstable of beyond 25% down here we have a fuel tank pressure because we use nitrogen over here's our liquid nitrogen leaders this is three tanks there's two tanks here and here's the gauge for the third tank that they added later on so nitrogen pressure is used as a head pressure and all the six fuselage tanks to provide a positive psi of about 3 to 4 psi all the time on on the fuel tanks the nitrogen is used to inert the fuel tanks the fuel itself internal of the airplane will reach about 350 to 375 degrees Fahrenheit that's the fuel internally so to keep it inverted so that volatility the possible an explosion with that the fumes and everything we inert the tanks with nitrogen to preclude them if you want to move the CG forward of the CG is too far aft and we want to move it forward we tank fuel out of this tank number six and move it forward up to tank one and this is the transfer switch you just move the switch up it says former transfer now fuel will now be pumped out of this aft anq and move forward and you'll see the cg needle go down you turn it off if you've seen the CG too far forward you want to go after optimum cruise performance all the way back to about twenty-five twenty-six you turn on the manual F transfer so you have to hold it down it'll take fuel from tank one and move it - tank six to increase the center gravity - the app this switch though along like this one's just spring-loaded because a forward CG is not an unstable condition it just the airplane won't be as efficient but an aft CG can get you in a lot of trouble so this one they designed it that you have to hold that down it's spring-loaded I have to hold that and watch the whole time as soon as I let go of it it stops transferring so this one they made so you couldn't forget it whereas this one you could forget and go forward it doesn't really matter that much this one you have to hold ah let's see I'm gonna switch over to this panel over here this whole sub panel over here I called the environmental panel it takes care of collected temperatures these are base outside the airplane here's the gear handle to bring the gear up anti-skid braking runway whether it's wet or dry Auto temperature facie temperature cockpit temperature there's your suit heat temperature your landing light down here over to the left here more if you get some more light in there those are the throttles my hands around bottles right now I'll bring the throttle forward that starts the engines the first notch then when you go to full military power for takeoff you bring the throttle all f2 it stops that's full military power then when you want to go into afterburner you have to raise the throttle up and then forward all the way to the firewall and now that's full afterburner we cruise in full afterburner with books bottles and the pilot flies the whole time and just feels that there's a little Ridge here so he doesn't come back out of afterburner you can feel a little bit of tension there so you don't drop back into the non afterburning region so you fly the airplane the whole time moving them in and out flying the afterburners to keep the airspeed the same throughout the mission when you're ready to come down for the descent we stay in afterburner the entire time we're cruising at Mach 3 or greater then we get ready for the descent you're bringing a throttle back out 100% military and then slowly bring them back and then start a decent on down at given schedule we have to maintain a schedule in rpm and egt on the way down ah let's see what else these are our little temp counters you can see right here tab stands for tetraethyl boring tetraethyl boring is a liquid chemical that we use for the ignition system tetraethyl boring is a liquid chemical when exposed to the atmosphere right now it goes kaboom it explodes automatically it is also inert it with nitrogen on a tank mounted on the engine the fuel the kelie built for this airplane jp-7 has such a high flash point that it's impossible to ignite it with regular jet engine igniter plugs like we use on airlines or in the military the spark is not hot enough to light off the jp-7 so Kelly put his engineers to work and he said come up with a way of igniting the fuel off and they came over the liquid chemical it all it's one and a quarter pints of tube and I'll bring the throttle back the cutoff when I move this throttle forward if the right rpm is a crew chief signals up and the RPMs are rotating the engine I bring the throttle forward and that puts a Smasher to matter this tab squirt it into the turbine section and it goes kaboom and that in turn lights off the jp-7 if you can see right down here there's a little counter it's called a temp Conner this would be set on 16 before start which is 16 right now and every time you take the throttle in advance it it clicks off down to 15 now if I take the throttle and move it up into afterburner it'll click down one more and now reads 15 so anytime you use a shot of the tab you get each one of these tab collars for each engine counts off you get 16 shots per engine now let's see up here I'll go up to the top here these little mirrors we use these a lot of people think we like to comb our hair in flight but they're actually used for looking at yourself on the pressure suit because once you get into pressure suit to see where the feeding ports are all the connection is everything this is all you have to be able to look around and see where everything's at are these two mirrors up here I go up a little bit higher we have our whisky compass which every airplane has to have and you'll see a little bit higher it says lock-on that's our periscope the periscope is now down out of the wind stream but soon as I push this up it's a little bit safe right now to push that up the periscope is now exposed it pops up into the air stream about that far and I can turn left and right and with prisms I can see left and right outside we use it for several things number one if you had an engine fire let's say in-flight I can pop the periscope up and see the severity of either the left or the right engine if I thought I might be contra lean at 70 or 80 thousand feet I could check in a periscope to ensure that I wasn't controlling you can also use it for fuel dumping but determination obviously when you turn the fuel dump on it pumps that at 4000 pounds per minute and you'll see it on the gauge go down and when you turn it off you can confirm it also by looking at the periscope to make sure it's off as well that's the basic use of the periscope and then you can bring it back down it's out of the wind stream off to the left go to the right side here these are called we call them bat wings but they fall down these are sunshades they move around anywhere the sun's coming in it is so brilliant at seventy five eighty thousand feet that as you go into the turn as the Sun comes across the cockpit in a turn it wipes all the instruments out to the point where you can barely read them they're very very difficult to read as the Sun moves across the front cockpit so we use these bat wings to chase the sign around so it won't come in the cockpit you see like I say they open up close them and then stow them away off to the side this little device something that was added on about 1977-78 we started to fly more and more night missions in the sr-71 up until then the airplane is basically a day VFR airplane you had to have good of weather at the target area to get the imagery because it's what I call wet film photography well eventually we got a radar nose that took pictures with radar day or night in the weather it did not matter because it's a radar image doesn't make any difference so we were flying a lot more at night and we were starting to get a little bit nervous about flying the airplane at night the clouds there's no closet night the the sky the stars they blend in with the like the East China Sea and the fishing vessels down there you cannot tell the difference between the sky and what's up right so we asked Lockheed to come up with an invention that would help us maintain orientation in the cockpit they came up with this PVD it's got a peripheral vision device it's a laser it has a cannon plug that goes back here onto very precise pitch roll and yaw sensors feeds an information into this laser and it puts out a beam up here that then shoots up into the cockpit and draws a line across the cockpit any others laser beam then projects a line across the cockpit a very brilliant line you can move it up or down as necessary you can know its position I always kept my line coming about right through here all the way and what it does is the airplane rolls this line will roll with you if you pick up the line pitches up and pitches down if it reaches limits of bank or pitch that line flashes at you alerting you that you're reaching the limit and what it does at night flying it gives you another orientation to the horizon it's not meant to be flown like an attitude indicator anything like it's just a orientation like in a daytime we look outside and get oriented of the horizon in this you get oriented to the PVD red line up there and it was a real lifesaver in some cases some guys were getting Bank angles up around 60 degrees a bank at Mach 3 and it just the that's not good come very very close to losing the airplane these are just what we call the gooseneck light it's a lamp or you can turn it on there's your intensity then you can shine this down you can aim it on your checklist which is usually on your knee on your pressure suit leave and they mount your checklist for reading there's one of those on each side of the airplane there's another one over here you can shine it wherever you like and again we got another batch chain on this side to change chase the Sun around it's necessary while we're flying of all the eighty-six pilots that flew the airplane operationally on the reconnaissance missions flew and this simulator all 86 obviously we had other people fly the airplane Senators Congressmen generals newspaper reporters that had to get the permission from the Pentagon anyone who could get the permission from the Pentagon we took up in a B model trainer flight and gave them a flight as well so if you exclude all those and I excluded test pilots and everyone else the operational pilots comes out 286 pilots and 86 navigators as you can see in the back seat the artist so he's got a little bit more room but one thing that's missing up here in the back seat is no flight controls and that emphasizes the reason why we want to have a good physical before every flight in the airplane and make sure the person's ready to go and there's no problems for instance if if I were if we were flying along and I had a heart attack in the front seat or keeled over for some reason he has no flight controls in the back unit the best dawn my RSO can hope for that we were on autopilot and if we're on autopilot he can then flat with the Astro tracker he can navigate it he can tell ok take this airplane to Okinawa get me back to Mildenhall or let's go out over the ocean or let's go somewhere get out of the bad guys so he can still steer the air if I'm on autopilot and then the best he can do is probably the best for him would be wait for the engines to this flame out run out of gas slow down below and walk whatever we were at at the time and just slow down and then he'd get out of the safe ejection now put the reversal on I'm in the front let's say he has a heart attack in the backseat I've got flight control Enki flying it but guess what I can't tell this airplane weirdo he's got the only navigation set right here in the world my I have all the displays of where we're at and where we're at how far out we are and all that I have all the instrumentation to tell me but as far as telling this airplane where to go there's nothing up here now I can still fly it obviously I could still fly it with the yoke but I could be over an aberrancy up in Murmansk and you know how you gonna get home you fly just headings or what so there's a dual responsibility here for both of us to stay in good shape and I've always told myself if dawn ever had a heart attack I just started using the whiskey compass and some of the other stuff for just head floor I think the best safest area is because I cannot control the airplane right now this is the Astro tracker that works off the Stars this is the whole set it tells the airplane where to go you can change it to whatever you want you go there features in here this folds down I showed you the map projector up on the front cot but the little map projector I had but four by four this is his map projection down here is the actual projector that's his focus knob and he can fold this down and he gets a much bigger display of the route of flight and everything on and I do because he has to be he has to have the information not only of what I have plus he has to have all the information over the sensors and where they're gonna work and where they're looking and stuff like that so his map protector is much bigger this screen right here is called the RCD it's a radar correlator display any time we're taking images with the radar nose this radar correlator display will show you exactly what you're seeing with what's being picked up on that radar sixty seconds later it takes 60 seconds to process it with lasers inside the internal to the airplane it processes those those images and presents them up here on this RC D display for him to see 60 seconds later this is the view site the view site looks directly beneath the airplane that's got magnification powers you can use it looking directly beneath the airplane for for fixes for navigational fixes and for looking anything on the ground so you site our CD matte projector he's got repeater instruments of the TDI that I have up in the front he's got an RMI card he's got a small attitude indicator he's got the fuel gauge just like I do he's got a few warning lights over here he's got three lights over here yes and if we lose communication with each other because normally we talk over the Interphone but if we lose communication with each other and I have a serious emergency I've got a switch up in the front clock that I throw it up and this light will illuminate pakka this orange light will illuminate saying hey I've got a problem I don't know what's gonna be the outcome but be prepared go through your pre bailout checklist if I have to bail out and I don't have time again I can't talk to him I have another switch which I have to break a safety wire because this one's a this one's a real go if I break the safety wire and throw it up he gets this light right here this is eject I'm telling him verbally to eject with us with the white because I have no more communication with him and this is one we don't play games with when that one goes off you go out of the airplane you have to go first you want to go first another pylon go second and that order if I go first and then he goes he could run into my Shh my seat and anything and we could have a collateral damage so we don't want that he goes first then I go second this switch if he didn't listen to me with this switch this one says pilot just ejected you're a little late so that's what that one is right there and I have the same light up in my cockpit so when I see him ejecting pagina light says RSO ejected that's how we communicate with with no verbal communication during extreme urgency and again lot more room in here and just as rudder there's no rudder pedals there's just a foot foot holes if you would nice windows so you've got a window up to the left right they got velcro eggs stuck if he's too bright for me you can just pull the window shades up on both sides he's got mirrors like I had up in the front he's got the same gooseneck lights like I had and that's about it much more roomier up in the back of this up and front

Channel: ErikJohnston

Views: 1,862,514

Rating: 4.9302783 out of 5

Keywords: SR-71, SR, Cockpit, Mach, Blackbird, Spyplane, Habu, Kadena, Air, Force, Supersonic, PIlot, RSO, Recon, Airplane

Id: tj9UwKQKE3A

Length: 19min 58sec (1198 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 24 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

This aircraft was the Unitied State's most secret and advanced technology in the 60s. So secret, it basically gave area 51 it's top secret status. Most of the development and the first test flights of the sr71 occurred at Groom Lake, near Area - 51 and all instances were extremely top secret. People became curious and that is why area 51 is still regarded as the most top secret and mysterious base.. because of this jet. Seeing this video kind of makes you think what we'll be watching casually in another 50 years.

Edit - Oh, and the reason why it was so famous secret was because of the communists of course (:

[u/ABuckWheat]

The man giving the tour is actually my grandfather! I've been a lurker on reddit but would be willing to do an AMA for him!

[u/Phormicidae]

What a great video. I work in aviation so I spend a lot of time in modern cockpits (or at least, simulated ones most of the time) but this really is amazing.

[u/grecy]

Awesome. Imagine what they've got today

[u/almighty_ruler]

After he explained the astro tracker and ejection procedure I realize this was more of a manned sub-orbital rocket, I'd love to see what could be made now if it still made sense to build a similar aircraft.

[u/BartenderJay]

Good video. All time favorite plane. Still have a picture of the plane that I got autographed by the pilot from an air show when I was a kid.

[u/oxgon]

I had a hard on for this plan since I was a kid there was a movie where a robot kid steals it. I remember one time driving and hearing this loud sound, I thought a tractor trailer was coming at me I look around see nothing, but spot a SR-71 going by, I got chills.

[u/thedevguy]

Did I understand that correctly? He said, "every time you advance the throttle, it uses a shot of the TEB" but there are only 15 shots (after you use one to start the engine)

He must have meant, "every time you advance the throttle into afterburner" right? Still, you can only in and out of afterburner 15 times I guess. They'd probably hit that limit if they had to fly around the world, refueling along the way.

[u/Antiquus]

50 year old technology. I don't say that to disparage it, I say it with wonder.