SR-71 Mystiques

[Music] welcome to Peninsula seniors out and about we're at the Western Museum of Flight in Torrance let's go see what cindy has for us today welcome everyone to the Western Museum of Flight I'm Cindy maka the director and now to the heart of the matter I am privileged to introduce our celebrity speakers lieutenant colonels Rosenberg and McKim who have generously donated their time and talents for us today and who are going to clarify for us some of the mysteries and unpublished details of life aboard what is arguably the most exotic aircraft ever built colonel rosenberg of McKim the podium is yours [Applause] Thank You Cindy we'd like to thank everybody for coming out we appreciate it especially in this chilly cold weather today thank you for joining us and I was it was pointed out to me that this is the first time we have a balcony audience back there in the order glad you are there so and I would like to proceed with a little different type of presentation than some of you may have seen before I'm sure we have a lot of enthusiasts aviation enthusiasts and specifically other enthusiasts and veterans are here and we appreciate your coming out thank you and also as she mentioned some other people that have worked in the industry thank you for showing up really appreciate that also if you've seen any of these YouTube videos or attended any of these other presentations the presenter usually jumps right into specific things about the airplane and so forth we wanted to do something a little different we're just going to present the recruitment and how you get in the program and what the program entail and then we'll open it up for questions at the end and we can answer all your questions about any of those specific things that you've seen before or a lot more information with regard to the aircraft's capabilities and performance so this is basically what we talked about in the beginning that what we're going to talk about with regard to facts and interests about the aircraft itself as Maureen said usually these presentations we can show you a lot of pictures and give you a lot of numbers we thought we'd give you a little bit more of the human side of how we got in the program and what it took to get in the program at the time it was a very selective program to be chosen for they only took maybe one pilot and one RSO a year into the program so it was a rather selective program run by a Strategic Air Command who owned the aircraft at the time and that was most of our origins we came out through the Strategic Air Command so we're gonna tell you a little bit about that process and answer any questions you may happen all we'll show you some nice background pictures here too as ed mentioned the selection process was highly selective of who they got it was an all-volunteer crew force individuals that had an interest in the program to begin with would go through a process where they would contact someone at the Air Force Base and then receive instructions on the process with regard to submitting their paperwork and so forth the initial phone talk in my case I got in the program in 1973 fall of 1973 and Edie came in a little later what was your date when I came into the program yeah February yeah I was fall of 81 79 was the interview yeah and I joined in 80 right so the the process changed a little bit so you'll get two perspectives here Oh what I was gonna say was the first individual I happen to talk to at Beale Air Force Base was a colonel Ken Collins unbeknownst to me there were actually two colonel Ken Collins in the sr-71 program so I had a long conversation he was interested and he told me to call him back and when I did call back and ask for Colonel Ken Collins I got the other Colonel Kent wish we got things straightened out they were interested I sent my paperwork off to VL Air Force Base how about how did you start mine started that at the unit level usually you learned more about the program some from some of the other crew members who might have been in your squadron that preceded you as a navigator I took kind of the standard route in Strategic Air Command to get to this assignment I first flew b-52s out of March where we spent most of the time TDY while we were in Vietnam and then I went to FB 111's at Plattsburgh which seemed to be an interesting criteria that they wanted us to have to be able to fly in this airplane because it was basically a single person pilot single person navigator you were not in the same cockpit and you were back-to-back and you you couldn't talk to the other person except on Interphone and recited unique you needed a little bit more what we called fast mover time the way you've thought about navigation more so than the b-52 but that was a general route for us navigators was through the teen in Sacre b---fifty twos f b1 11s and then to the sr program so for the pilots is very similar as I had described it and they were really interested in fighter pilots that had single-seat time or even an f4 s were at one point the f4 initially in the Air Force had a pilot in the front and the pilot in the back and as the Vietnam War heated up they realized they needed more pilots and they started putting navigators in the back so when I volunteered it happened that there was a f4 navigator that volunteered also not someone I knew or had been in the unit or had ever met in fy10 Collins the first one I talked to thought this would be a good match we got a front seat pilot and the back seat pilot that talked the same language from the f4 and so they had me out for an interview it was a five day or a week long interview we came in on a Monday and went to a two-day physical out at Travis Air Force Base at the hospital they're a highly extensive physical and then the third day back at BL Air Force Base you got a tour of the facilities and you had a flight in a t-38 which was basically just maneuvering type of flight doing acrobatics and the next day which would have been a Thursday you had the second ride in the Sr and the excuse me in the t-38 and it was in the backseat under a hood flying instruments and then that afternoon you would meet with a lot of the crew members in the squadron and on Friday your last day they let you sleep in till about 10:00 or 11:00 o'clock in the morning and you met the Wing Commander or the vice commander depending on who was doing the interviewing for me I was fortunate from the standpoint that I got to interview with Colonel Jerry O'Malley who went on attained four stars anybody that happened to know him he was probably the next chief of staff of the Air Force and unfortunately was in a tragic accident with his wife in a t39 yeah transport type airplane in a crash in Ohio and they were they both passed away but during the interview process just as a sort of a interesting somewhat humorous type thing maybe at the very end he was going through my personnel records and he said I see you were stationed in Japan and you're officer efficiency report isn't endorsed by a colonel Irby Jarvis was his name and he said did you know Colonel Jarvis and I said well yes sir he's it was the Wing Commander and he said I see you were an instructor in the f-4e at the time did he did you ever fly with him and I said well yes sir I did fly with Colonel Jarvis he said Mori what kind of pilot wasn't and I felt really on the spot and I was trying to be diplomatic and I I said well Colonel I said I'm sure the Wing Commander has a lot more things to do or on his mind than just flying the airplane and like yourselves he snickered and he said Irby Jarvis was a student of mine in pilot training I almost washed him out he wasn't very good it sounds like he hasn't changed much [Laughter] or check one of the other processes as Maureen was describing there about trying to get selected for the program there was a the official side which was a curriculum that they put the pilots and the navigators through to check out your flying skills hopefully you were already an accomplished aviator by the time you got selected to come to the program and they were gonna teach you basic flying and navigation so after that it was your ability to learn systems and function at Mach 3 which is about 33 miles a minute which is pretty challenging well we just have a saying that you'd never been lost to you've been lost at Mach 3 and it's pretty humbling I have to tell you one of the other processes during that interview process was what we called the bar check and it was usually the last event and the applicants really didn't understand that it might have been the most important part because after a week of flying and simulator time you got to go to the bar and meet the rest of the guys in the squadron who you may not have interfaced with yet but that opportunity was a socialization to see if the rest of us thought we'd get along with you because my first year I was I had two hundred and eighty five days TDY so you weren't home a lot you lived ttyl either at Mildenhall or at Kadena so if guys let down their guard a little bit in the bar and maybe imbibed a little too much and got to talking too much that was part of the selection criteria whether they knew it or not and it was also a very telltale part of who they were as a person so it was an important part of the interview so the grab training and the simulator we started off with about a month I believe it was of system's knowledge with crew chief or ani maybe even a Lockheed tech rep and they would just go through all the systems in the aircraft and it was from our standpoint not only differences from other things we're used to but it was somewhat technical to a degree from the standpoint the mechanics that worked on this airplane like the crew members that flew it just were so in love with the airplane once they became a part of it that their knowledge was vast with regard to the specifics that they did and the enthusiasm they had for the systems that they took care of once you finish that in-depth process then you went through ground training in the simulator and part of the simulator was you trained with another crew that would tell you from the standpoint of the pilot or the navigator you know here's what you have in the airplane this is what you can control this is what you can do and here's the checklists and they would go through the checklist which it'll talk about a little bit it's highly extensive and the backseater became the worker bee so to speak because part of the training was learning to communicate with each other and when the pilots fly in the airplane and if there's a problem or an emergency he has to describe it to the navigator who's going to go into the checklist to make sure that they cover all the items that are in the checklist with the slide there that you can see the cockpit the simulator the bottom left there is the front seat and the one on the right is the back seat for the navigator it had some motion but it wasn't as sophisticated as the simulators that we have at this time with visibility full pictures quite a bit of actual motion and so forth this is an interesting concept this was obviously a very early age simulator it was made by the Link company out of the to New York at that time and it's more I mentioned the crew members here were physically separated we didn't set one behind each other in fact the the IP for instructing the pilot set on the motion base directly behind the pilot in the cockpit so he could look around the ejection seat and actually see what the pilot was doing us back Cedars were relegated over here it was kind of a slide in coffin kind of thing and he couldn't really look in there but one of the one of the things that I had to learn and had to adapt to as forming firming as a good crew was you had to handle most of the pacing of what was going on with the airplane whether you were under emergency procedures or normal procedures and as all of you other fellow aviators know out there the one thing that's tantamount about flying the airplane is staying ahead of the airplane either in the way you're thinking or what's coming up or what you're gonna be doing so we had a checklist that was about that thick of course being a good Strategic Air Command aviators you had to have a lot of procedures so it was a very in-depth checklist and usually the Navigator would read the checklist and the procedure and the pilot would echo back the response and then you would go through something like that for either normal procedures like takeoff and climb out or if we were having emergency procedures the other thing that was challenging for a lot of people and you guys may have realized it as well going to the simulator took the right attitude and what I mean by that was first off it was not going to work right they gave you a lot of malfunctions and they give you malfunctions on malfunctions to see if you could sort things out in a certain priority and that was very challenging because you would do something and then they'd reset it and you could kind of start over to enhance the learning procedures so later on Maury and I were evaluator of pilots and navigators and one of the worst things you could do to a guy in a simulator if you were giving him a check ride was not giving any malfunctions they start making stuff up you know they're going what am I missing what have I what have I overlooked you know so just letting you fly the airplane as a simulator like a real airplane was always a kind of a privilege but as I said the simulator never seemed to work it was you were always dealing with malfunctions which was part of the learning curve what Eadie's alluded to is it was extremely intense and could be very exhaustive actually at the end of a simulator period we would usually have about an hour or more of going over what we were gonna do in the simulator and talking about the checklist and some of the procedures and then once we got in the simulator we would start as he said getting some of those malfunctions and then depending on the progress malfunction on top of malfunction and when you came out of there it was almost as if you had flown an airplane on a hot day you were sweaty and tired so it's kind of like that scene in Apollo 13 where they said you know let's do it over again that that was the way it was then this device was such a critical part of your training that you had to do well in this device to to proceed in the training program and so he had to approach it with a very serious attitude about what you were trying to learn in there so now we're going to talk about the first flight for the pilot and then for the RSO with regard to the first flight you had gotten through to somewhat critical phases the first phase being the interview process the physical and the interview process the second phase progressing to a point in the simulator we still weren't going to with simulator rides even after the first flight in the aircraft and you'd gotten through that part with regard to showing your capabilities and now you're ready for your first ride for some individuals it was somewhat anti-climatic from for the pilot and the fact that you did not go supersonic but you were just getting used to being in a pressure suit actually flying the aircraft taking off landing shooting some touch-and-go landings you flew out to a tanker and then you did air refueling and surprisingly this was a phase where they would get some of the latter washouts in the program for some pilots that had not done much air refueling or just just for some reason the air refueling in this aircraft was just different than other aircraft I had flew f-4s and we did air refueling and you could visually just like fly formation in a fighter you didn't have to really concentrate or worry about anything other than just keeping your position in a visual picture like like this I'm just gonna stay right here well the visual picture wasn't the same because the cockpit is in the front seat their canopy is not open above your head it's a solid so you can't be looking up at the other airplane to fly formation you're either looking out at the sides which is not that good especially when the weather is bad or there's turbulence so it forced you to look through the front screen at these lights underneath the refuelling aircraft on the belly of the aircraft that were like a stoplight in a sense there were red yellow and green so you wanted to be in the green all the time and this was a this was a phase where we would also refuel learn to refuel single engine with an afterburner with or without an afterburner where you'd pull one throttle to idle and try to refuel because you might be in that situation and it was more difficult than a lot of the guys realized so that that surprisingly to a lot of people was a washout face for pilots since we brought it up I'll have to he didn't know I'm gonna tell this story but I'll tell it on him anyway while we were crude together they were bringing the kc-10 into the inventory up to that time all the air refueling had been done by the kc-135s so we were selected to do part of the operational test the final part of the refueling with the kc-10 so we flew a t-38 down to march and we met with the the crew who was gonna fly the next day against us to pass gas and the one thing that the part of the instruction from the boomer who is now he's forward he's not in the pod like the old days he's forward in the aircraft and he's doing this by a monitor so he's telling that he told Maury he said now one of the things you'll probably hear from me as you get in to pre-contact was that you're too far aft because it's a big airplane Morrison yeah okay so you said I'm not going to do that so the next day we went out to fly we've got the made the rendezvous with the tanker and I remember one of the first things as we closed on the tanker or he said damn that's a big airplane it was compared to what we were used to so we pulled up into what he thought was pre-contact and we set there and set there he finally came on the Interphone and said forward 5 anyway it was just the visual picture for him that was so different than the size of that airplane under a kc-135 versus a kc-10 so the pilot would get 5 rides in the trainer the first one as I mentioned was subsonic and then the next four you flew supersonic and the very first flight you only went up to mach 2.8 it doesn't sound like much difference between 2.8 and 3.0 but there's actually a big difference in the aircraft performance and how it and everything from a maintenance standpoint as I recall above to eight was hot time word Jean goat right so that meant different checks and services that the crew chiefs had to do for the maintenance side of the airplane so there's there was quite a difference in that two tenths of a Mach number the so anyhow so the first flight for me as I mentioned was subsonic and anti-climatic and then we progressed through the next four flights before I got to fly with the RSO the first time I was in the program twice the first time I went through I know the RSO only got one ride I thought in the a model before we flew together was it the same let me know and I did it I remember probably so yeah it was just just one so ed can tell you a little bit about his first plane before I tell you a little bit about this so there's somebody here I'd like to acknowledge Lieutenant Colonel Jack Beth sr-71 Pyle say hello jack [Music] [Applause] so the first time the RSO gets to fly in the sr platform other than the simulator he's flying with it operationally qualified pilot and you get to go Mach three on your first flight so what you're doing at that time is still the continuation of the training program and actually getting to see the airplane as we called it work in flight with hopefully not very many malfunctions like you had in a simulator so it's always an exhilarating time and it was the first time I died I was in 111th and we went supersonic there but we certainly didn't go Mark through so you're flying with a qualified pilot one of the first things you're working on is making the rendezvous with the kc-135 or the kc-10 refueling aircraft we accomplished that with a differential ranging device and with the RF direction finder on the tanker we both had a instrument that would synchronize and we had pointers in the aircraft that would tell you distance and DME to the tanker the aircraft has a radar but it's not a conventional radar which means we couldn't do weather detection or ground mapping or even air-to-air detection it was a synthetic aperture radar which is a radar a really high resolution and meant for looking at terrain on either side of the aircraft so you were dependent on the instrumentation to get the rendezvous with the tanker before the pilot could pick him up visually and Maury flew with Chuck Yeager and when when Yeager flew with him part of Yeager's claim to fame had always been that he had great eyesight and Maury could actually confirmed that he saw the tanker way up there he did I was impressed you know he probably saw the tanker at 30 plus miles so then after you're the repealing usually standard procedure you would take off with a lighter weight fuel load go out conduct the rendezvous and unload gas and then go in and do a hot legis we used to call it where you'd climb to altitude and and speed of mark 3 so once you started the training to be qualified and be able to go on operational sorties they had to accumulate a hundred hours in the airplane it was probably it was actually closer to 75 for the back seat er wasn't it 75 80 hours because of the difference in the flights that the pilot got more training flights than the navigator I don't think any first operational deployments went to the Mildenhall did they they all went to Kadena all to Kadena yeah your first flights went to Okinawa Japan to Kadena Air Base and I think part of that was we flew a lot of nights or days out of milkman Hall yeah and you one of they one of the time built up Kadena Krait correct so that way that was that was your first deployment and we normally would go there on a kc-135 q model one of the tankers that we refueled on we would fly over with other crew members that would usually be on a swap out where there were maintenance personnel would be swapping and also some of the mission planners and the crew members would be swapping a swap out of crew members also so that was your first trip over and you normally was a six week deployment to Japan and then back to B laughter that the when you first got to Kadena for your first deployment then there was a lot of orientation with regard to procedures and rules of engagement and so forth before you actually flew your first flight I don't recall if we actually got to hop around the island we didn't do a hot boy no we just went right on an operational sortie right yeah yeah so one of the first things you did when you got to Kadena as the new crew you were still kind of in training and you're still being evaluated if you will by DEP commander and the other operational crews so one of the things they used to do to the new crews was what they called frag which was a usually a sophisticated practical joke where they would get you out and put you in the airplane for some reason that you had to do some kind of radio check or instrument check and then everybody would leave another time we dismantled the deck commander's office and set it up out in the hair of his race of May and he came to work in his entire desk an office including the flag and all of his books was setting in the middle of the hangar so the worst frag that they gave Laurie and I was they didn't give us one so sort of like the simulator you were talking to me we were waiting till the last day to the sky to fall and it never did so that was kind of ugly of them yeah and the anticipation and you're just waiting and they're you become so nervous about well it's gonna happen you're looking over your shoulder all the time so we're gonna tell you at the end another little story about our first deployment at Kadena that'll be coming up so as I mentioned earlier a hundred flight hours for the pilot before deployment and in the simulator you've probably had over 200 hours of simulator time so you can see it's pretty intensive as far as becoming routine if you could call it that with the procedures as long as nothing's changing too rapidly and one of the other bases we mentioned that we would reach routinely deployed to was RAF Mildenhall north of London North East Anglia I guess it was and we we went in the fall did we go in the fall yes our first one yeah that was right after our deployment to Kadena so they didn't frag us but we I wouldn't say fragged ourselves but we had a little bit of excitement on our first deployment together there's six weeks that and I were there on our last sortie before we were scheduled to return to the L Air Force Base we've kind of covered some of these as we've talked about here for me personally getting in the program was a lifelong achievement and it was kind of the pinnacle as far as being a navigator in fact to get to fly into this airplane it was something that was only given to a select group of aviators and I was very fortunate to get to fly an airplane particularly with Maureen for for almost four years so this is something that Maury alluded to we're gonna talk to you a little bit about which is some of the personal events this was at the end of our first tour it was actually our final flight of our first tour we flew in through the DMZ in between North and South Korea and there's a R or peninsula that sticks into the DMZ which is talked re was that the name of the island they don't use they don't know they don't know say it was it yeah sorry I couldn't resist that's good yeah and we made several passes through the DMZ with no defensive or intercept type actions from the North Korean side of the DMZ which could be unusual not that unusual sometimes nothing was going on but on that particular flight the flights prior to that that other crew members had been flying and I think we may have even flown some there would had been a lot of activity from the North Koreans trying to lock onto the airplane sometimes locking onto the airplane sometimes spoofing the airplane that there's gonna fire a missile and it was being watched critically by our Intel we would brief what not just us but other flights that went before us they would brief the activity after the flight at our post flight briefing and tell them what instruments we saw mainly that was a the back Cedars job with regard to the interpretation of what the defensive equipment was getting and if they were turning on jammers against it and so forth so there was quite a bit of attention at a different level than normal and prior to that flight the Intel officer for the pre-flight portion of the briefing would brief about the Sam site that they suspected was there and we asked what changed what's the criteria for Sam site you know who decides if it's real or it's suspected and this I think he was a first lieutenant wouldn't he and he was smart first lieutenant he said that's above my pay grade so who makes those decisions so the reason we want to tell you a little bit about this event is guess who were still dealing with and the thing that US aviators who flew in proximity with these people always worried about is their unpredictability I mean these guys just opened fired three Sam's at us in international airspace for no particular reason that we know of other than they wanted to so the depiction in the lower left is obviously a cartoon but it's something like Maury probably saw we found out after the fact that they had actually launched three Sam's which was part of their protocol one did not stage the other one blew up on the launcher but the third one got to our altitude and maybe memorable though tell you what he saw yeah once once ed went through the normal procedures of picking up the radar sweeping or painting our airplane and then going to a narrower lock-on where it's high frequency pulsing on the aircraft that they are concentrating on us and have a good lock on and then it goes into a missile launch that he can detect and they talked to the missile to guide it and at that point the sophistication of our aircraft was we could tell if the missile responded or answered the guidance signals and IDI was able to do that and so he's jamming the aircraft and I looked over the nose of the aircraft and that's pretty similar to what I saw was the contrail of the exhaust initially in the contrail of the rocket coming up this sa - coming up at us and I relayed that to him hey my boys got a little higher pitch yeah and he was right on top of it thinking ahead as he said well let's accelerate and turn away which is what we what we did I saw it go by off the right side and I saw the warhead explode and it was it's hard to judge distance at altitude and I think I estimated a mile and a half two miles and I saw the explosion and so it was a real thing both of them Maury and I had seen him in Vietnam this was a we most of the people didn't know the Sam was gonna go that high and in fact when we got back and told some of the Intel guys he's got well that version doesn't go that high and I said I think we have an update for you because if it went off of slightly above us but the one thing it did and the ECM system on the airplane was made by Northrop Grumman at the time God level it used a very sophisticated radar jamming technique where it displaced the signal that the Sam radar was deceiving to a higher gain signal off of your airplane and the same would go for the higher gain signal and not the actual target so it worked it worked beautifully and as we were leaving the area one of the things you did was you had to keep in contact with mother back home so you were supposed to give a operational report on the HF radio and we turned out of the area and both collected our thoughts as we headed back toward the cadena we didn't talk for a while and I'm sitting back there going through my calm flimsy and Maurice are you gonna give a radio report then I said well I'm thinking about it and I said I don't think we're gonna give one and he said why I know I said I don't have anything that fits this situation it was a peacetime bag for complem C and if we'd had a wartime bag you might have had something in there about an incident of being fired on but we didn't have anything and needless to say we kept them worrying back at Kadena and after we landed usually the commander with me - he'd run up the ladder and our commander at the time was Colonel Randy Herzog Jack remembers him he was a interesting character smoked by and he runs up the ladder and says alright McKim beers on you no ops normal report and I told him I said sir we had a situation we probably need to go in your office and talk about and he kept bugging me and he wanted to know what happened why didn't you give me a radio report and I told him finally I said we were fired on by sa-2 missile and you see in my office right away so after they got in there we hadn't even gotten out of our pressure shoots yet we were setting in there with the commander in the the squadron Kampai comes in and opens up this giant book and showed it to Colonel Herzog he said you have to call the Pentagon speaking to Colonel Hertzog so if you guys have ever conducted military priority radio traffic you know there's a hierarchy and he was trying to get out on flash and he couldn't so there was only one other that was flashover right which meant we were at nuclear war hopefully he wasn't there but Colonel Hertz I go he he had a nice experience as we did as well yeah that sort of wraps up this portion of the presentation and we'd like to open it up for questions and go ahead young lady right here the question was we're flying fast and high how did you make any ground references or anything well we really didn't I as a backseater had an optical view sight but we navigated the aircraft by an inertial system which was coupled to an Astro tracker this was before GPS remember so that's how we navigated and you could take a fix with the radar after it came on but you couldn't depend on the radar for navigation because it was a reconnaissance type radar and it didn't give you ground mapping well the sensors the sensors did that as crew members we didn't do that kind of visual reconnaissance this the sensors yeah there was a follow-on question with we didn't do any actual ground reconnaissance but as Ed was saying that this the sensors did they so they could pick all that so we had radar in the nose and we had high-definition cameras in what we call the chines along the side of the aircraft and in the nose that we could also install what was called an optical bar camera besides the radar which is still flying on the YouTube believe it or not that camera is still flying he asked if I had as a pilot if I had any DeltaWing time get you know like the f-102 or the f-106 before I got into the sr-71 program and I did not when I was flew f-4s out of Japan while I flew a f4 is in vietnam in 67 I spent three years in Japan after that flying F Wars so that was January of 68 when they stole the Pueblo and we deployed a lot of other aircraft over to South Korea and as things calm down we did what fighter pilots do when we're out training and sometimes we would jump other aircraft and we had a lot of aircraft there we had f-105s f-4s f-106 s I'm trying to think what else if they're if they still flying someone hundreds there I don't remember that but I got jumped by some f-106 is sometimes and those guys were Air Defense Command and they didn't wear G suits I don't think they were juicy G suits when they were in South Korea Thor and I discovered if he got behind me if I could sustain about 5 G's he couldn't stay behind me and follow me cuz I had a G suit I didn't black out the question is the fastest I ever went in the sr-71 and on the Mach meter I'd say it was about 3.3 Mach which is about maybe a little over 2200 miles per hour you have you know sensation the speed is just like finding a commercial airliner there's nothing's going by you know how many cloud references yeah never above all the clouds so yeah indifferently have any sensation of how fast you're going in in the front seat we we had a mileage meter or whatever you want to call it just like on your car and odometer that counts off tenths of a mile and ours was counting off miles and it went about as fast as the tenth of a mile on yours if you're doing about 60 or 70 miles an hour you know that's moving at a pretty good clip that's that's how the mile one was clicking off one of the most impressive things I have to admit I ever saw in the airplane was occasionally I it was once a year or so we had four airplanes deployed to to Kadena and to two Mildenhall and during some time during that year we would change out the aircraft and bring it back to Palmdale where they were retrofitted in overhaul so if you were lucky enough got to fly the airplane home instead of making the 20 hour tanker ride you get home in about three hours right when you did that we normally would try to fly an operational mission if we were coming east toward Alaska we fly along Kamchatka Peninsula there and the one thing we used to try to do was coordinate where the other airplane was we knew where he was we knew where we were but you could tune in the air to air attack him and watch a Mach 6 closure that was impressive that was impressive the question is in today's world is there any advantage aircraft has over a satellite with regard to monitoring what's going on and my personal opinion is yes I feel that the aircraft an airplane not only can be used more you judiciously with regard to timing and with regard to a satellite you have to wait till it's back in that orbit they can maneuver satellites its maneuverability is limited to a degree so an aircraft is more responsive in a critical situation and if nothing else with the sr-71 you know it was the sound of freedom we could go right over and boom somebody and they couldn't touch that airplane at the time of its you know life when it was flying those things remember the satellite was predictable in its orbit question was after we air air refueled he wanted to know about available thrust to climb to speed and altitude and he had read something about what was called a dipsy-doodle maneuver and and that's what what it was called what we would do we would come off the tanker we'd go into afterburner and we would start a climb at a 0.9 Mach normally we disconnected at about 25,000 feet off the tanker and we'd start a climb to about 30,000 feet and as we were approaching 30,000 feet we'd go max afterburner and we'd push the aircraft over sort of a parabolic arc type thing and that was to get through what's called the transonic range just a minute it is an airport but that was where there was the most drag in that was in the transonic range and by pointing the nose down and getting a 1g force of gravity with you you would get through it quicker as you accelerated through the Mach and then once you went through Mach one you would start back pressure on the stick and you would start a climb as you were accelerating and we transitioned to Kies which is knots equivalent airspeed there was a readout and we'd get 450 keys and we'd start climbing at 450 keys and the aircraft would continue to accelerate the question was what to replace the sr-71 and can you talk about it and I'd just said nothing as far as the manned aircraft I know of nothing else oh so back to a this gentleman asked about satellites versus the aircraft a quick story which is what most you guys probably came to listen to anyway we were mission planning one day and finished up in the wing commander came in and he never the wing commander never came to the squadron unless he's gonna choose somebody outright so he shows up and said you guys need to go over to the vault and there's somebody over there you're supposed to meet so we didn't know what was going on going on so we went over there and we met two guys in black suits with black ties and they had credentials and everything I didn't know who they were he said you guys be on time tomorrow he said sir we're always on time and he said be on time tomorrow at your target while we were flying around Cuba the next day long story short was we didn't have any sensors on the airplane when we got out there we're trying to figure out what the heck's going on right what had happened was that mr. Castro was having a change of command ceremony at our time over target and we nailed it just about the time he transferred the flag we gave him a big sonic boom just kind of say hello the question see out getting lost and what did you use for backup navigation in the early days before we made some modifications to the aircraft navigation system you got to remember if any airplane you fly it's all by dr right time and hitting whatever airplane you're flying it didn't matter if you're flying at a hundred knots or 2,000 knots usually one of the things you always had to do was you wherever you were you would have a turn to direction where do I turn to get out of trouble and then figure out what the heck's going wrong but what had happened the inertial system was pretty reliable but in the latter part of the program we put in a backup f-16 stand alone inertial and that thing just ran three inertial it only had like a half a mile drift rate an hour and you just left that alone and that was your backup navigation if you had a problem the question was about running the navigation system and looking at the program data point or the program turn points that were in the computer that was done by an old paper tape in the old days that they punched a lot on a computer that tape was sent out and read into the airplane and was your job as the what we call the backup crew the no they got the guys who did the pre-flight and everything the other crew anyway we had a we had a backup we had a backup crew that would pre-flight the airplane for you they'd be with you out there if you had a problem we have written the pressure suit these guys are in flight suits it was also part of their job to read out all of these points and confirm their proper coordinates I don't know if it was that good but it was pretty darn accurate see this it was tied to an astral tracker as I mentioned and that would keep the inertial system what we call bounded by a certain amount of drift air but before we do another question since we've been talking about the navigational stuff the I want to I just read an article here a week or so ago and it was about the sr-71 Astro inertial navigation system and basically what it's telling you is an inertial system is gyroscopic that drifts gyros can drift and the Astro portion of it is tracking the Stars yes and you had to feed in the information of what hemisphere you were in the Julian date that time of the year and all this kind of stuff so there were star patterns and it knew what stars to look for and then it could track up to three stars it had a catalog of I don't know how many 150 200 stars that it could look at anyhow the Astro part of it what it did was it kept the gyros from drifting it would update them so that they wouldn't drift now I told you all that in this article the gist of the article was that part of a new defense system is being able to jam navigational systems that we have in different weaponry missiles aircraft I'm trying to think what else ships and it said that this article was talking about how the sr-71 this older system you cannot jam an Astro tracker you can't Jam the gyro that's spinning and they were looking at some method of updating these new devices so that they were less vulnerable and they said they're considering some sort of Astro tracking have you read that I did yeah if any of you are fortunate enough recently to go to the Smithsonian they're on the mall in Washington they have a navigation display area if you will and there one of the astral tracker units in their own display the question was is the Astro tracker like the b-58 b-58 yeah I don't remember the b-58 had an Astro tracker it did I stand corrected I didn't fly it it was just a later version as gyros got better the Kalman filter which is some of you guys may be familiar with that mathematical technique of how it determined air got better and the SR at any one time we figured it out later I got to work at the skunk works on the program and we looked at it we figured at any one time even early on it was in about within about a thousand feet of where it should have been which is darn good for that era of navigation the question was did we have any incidences in the airplane you had where we had yeah malfunctions specifically he said with the engine and I don't know if anybody saw there's a new snith Sounion release that I did it wasn't with Edie this was with this was in 1974 I think with the Don Bullock and we were at Kadena Air Base and we had a test top a functional check flight that came up the aircraft needed a double engine change and as best as I recall I don't know if you were around there gene yeah yeah yeah the well what it was was the Pratt & Whitney had sent over some spare air engines and we had one spare I believe on station and when they went to do the double engine change these spares that had just arrived hadn't had they hadn't had time to do all the inspections that they do on him and they put the one that was already there that our maintenance people had inspected from Pratt that came from Pratt & Whitney and the other one had our maintenance people hadn't had the time to go through the whole thing but they said we'll stick it in there anyhow and so we went up on this test top and Don Bullock and myself and part of the test op was to go as and as fast as it would go and then back off and when we when we went to back off we had what was called an aerodynamic disturbance or a nun start and that's when the nacelle or the engine hiccups so to speak like a backfire and the way the system worked as the aircraft went supersonic the engine did less and less of the thrust you had a ramjet effect and the cone in the front of that and the cell would retract back into the nacelle about 26 inches and it was a this was a analog system they hadn't gone to DAF expense it would have made but if you want to say it was a dump system the only way it knew to fix the system was to drive the the reason the system malfunction excuse me was there were sensors inside the nacelle where the shock wave should be and they were not sensing it was in the proper position so the dump system would kick the spike forward to kick the shock wave out and then recapture it and you could lose approximately 80% of your thrust when it did that so the airplane wanted to turn sideways and they above Mach 2.1 they crossed what they call cross tide the inlets so that if one side to let go the other side would let go so you had more controllability so the right side which I didn't know which engine was in which engine you know or which system to sell the right side was the engine that they had not inspected and it unstarted and the fire light came on shortly after it unstarted so I was relaying to the backseater we had a nun start in a fire light and I looked into periscope to look behind me and I said we have smoke and his comment was worth 78 thousand feet were too high for contrails and we start going through the fire checklist and as we're going through the fire checklist the aircraft were initiating a supersonic descent and from flight tests they tell us that the aircraft can be extremely violent in a supersonic descent with pitch yaw and roll and we're really bouncing around as we're starting down and going through the engine shut down the fire lights still on it finally goes out and is about the time it goes out the left generator trips off the line and we start to lose cabin pressurization the left engine due to the extreme pitch yaw enrole had flamed out from starvation air starvation and the backseat ER when all this was going on he was a he's a great big guy he's about six foot four and he tried to steady himself in the back seat and he put his hands down on the side rails here where the calm calm switches work and he turned off the comm between unknowingly between he and I so we're not talking to each other and he's not reading anymore checklist to me and as my pressure suit starts to inflate you're like the Michelin tire guy you know it starts it will come up over your head there's a tie-down strap I pull the strap down and I realized the engines not running I move the left throttle and there's no response so I jammed it in that afterburner and it lit right off I got the nose pointed pretty steep dive we were probably coming down now at about 45 or 50 degrees and I'm looking all I see in front of me is ocean and we're going through probably about just guessing somewhere in the 60,000 foot range and I know I have a lot of area to drop but we're dropping like a rock and I'm thinking if I don't get this thing started we're bailing out over the water here and the thought I'm having is how long will it take him to find us but it lit off and just about the time it lit off I put the generator back on pressurization coming back and the backseater figured out what he had done and he back on the air and he's a really good guy good navigator and smart gentleman and he says where are you in the checklist and I said what happened to you and he said I'll tell you later so in other words it was just like a simulator yeah so we put that scenario in the training program question is where is Kadena it's on the island of southern part of the island of Okinawa it's an airbase military billet area but yes yeah oh we still have active-duty military there today we're we're not as welcome as we once were but we're still there the question is could you jump out or bail out of a supersonic aircraft the sr-71 the sr-71 ejection system was considered what they call a zero zero system you could bail out standing still sitting on the ramp or you could bail out at max altitude and max speed and it was a success it would be a successful system and at the highest altitude and speed there's actually less dynamic forces on the body because the molecules are further apart the air molecules and the worst range to bail out in the sr-71 was probably between 40 and 60 thousand feet depending on how fast you're going if you're supersonic the first shuttle excuse me yep gene yeah that's right we the aircraft with us with a single engine we brought back Don and I were how I had mentioned how the new guys and you're still in training on your first tour and everything I think this was actually might have been the second tour for Don Bullock and I and we were still considered new guys and so when we recovered the aircraft and we were subsonic and we were flying and we were headed back to Kadena on this test flight and we called in and told him we had a single-engine they were a little skeptical and didn't know what had happened and we you know we didn't do a lot of radio discussion but we told him we had had an engine blow up so anyhow when we landed and taxied in normally we would go taxi into the hangar but they stopped us outside the hangar and I like this because Fraser was the senior chief maintenance chief Frazier at Kadena and I love this gentleman he reminded me of a World War two character when I was growing up you'd see in the movies he was bald-headed had a cigar stuck in his mouth I never saw him smoking it but there was always a cigar stuck in his mouth and he had forearms like Popeye or somebody and he was hell on wheels but they all respected him I mean he was a good gentleman and I see him coming under the airplane he's the first person I see going under that airplane and we're getting out of the airplane and I'm coming down the ladder and this sort of describes the devotion that everybody had to this program because the first thing out of the chief I was a captain at the time he comes up to me and he says captain what the hell did you do to my airplane there's holes in it no no we didn't receive a trophy we got a well done award someone had asked about the ejection system it was built by Lockheed and if some of you may remember it was on board the first space shuttle flight with Griffin and Jung and they soon discovered that there was only a very minimal window during the a sin of the shuttle as it accelerated that you could actually get out alive but the the seats were in the first shuttle launch the same seats things EADS the question is did we ever fly any of the early d-21 drone sorties and if not could we tell why it was unsuccessful well the there was about three to four generations of pilots and navigators in the sr-71 and the drone program was in more on the CIA side the a12 although they used the sr-71 but what I was going to say was that that that was more of a first generation I came in when I came in in 73 I guess I would say I was in the second generation of crew members coming into the program and Ed was after that so he was like in the third so no we didn't and unsuccessful nacelle let ed take that sure the I was when I was in the program I came in an eighty that program was still being flown in the Air Force it was so classified we didn't even know about it as crew members so that's how close they held what was going on and the very basic reason for its failure was it just didn't have a good enough inertia system to navigate that vehicle to the desired turn points and get it to come back it was a device decades ahead of its time based on what we're doing now with remote aircraft and drones but the basic reason was the inertial state-of-the-art at that time was just not good enough the question was about the s are flying over Vietnam in 63 to 68 is that was the question sir viii whither was the a12 or the sr-71 I I can't honestly I can't tell you but I can make the statement that as I mentioned that I was in Vietnam in 67 and then went to Japan and right after that so I was in Japan in 68 flying out of Korea we'd go to Korea TDY and over Vietnam before I left Vietnam in 67 late 67 I thought I spotted a high altitude target go past me one time so whether it was an 8 12 or an sr-71 I don't know the a12 originally flew in Vietnam as you described later on it was transitioned to the sr-71 as the a12 was phased out a very interesting story I just read recently was dealt with the I had a couple friends in Hanoi Hilton while they had a very secret mission and the way they communicated with those guys you may have learned something about the tap code and how they were communicating outside when they elected to try to make a raid on the Hanoi Hilton the code signal for the go-ahead was 2 s ours that overflew Hanoi about 30 seconds apart in the sonic boom dome and the guys in the POWs camp knew that the attempted breed was on by that signal the question was what was the big difference between mach 2.8 and 3.0 in the aircraft and it was the heat the heat that gets generated exponentially increases as you go faster and that the heats the for everything for all the systems the engines and so forth the the when I was in the the first tour and the sr-71 from 73 to 78 we were still over flying South Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos and well the war was still going on when when it was right towards the end of the war actually I guess when I got in it but we I just remember coming in over Hanoi one time and we we accelerated because we were getting def signals and the pilots had a compressor Inlet temperature gage called a CIT compressor Inlet temperature and it was limited for speed for our Mach 3 but it was limited on temperature was the big limitation for the engine and as I recall it just pops in my head like 427 degrees centigrade and I remember turning into over Hanoi one time and we got Sam's signals or deaf signals or whatever I pushed it the power up and I was looking outside looking for anything coming up at us and I looked back in and I think I was I had passed 427 and I thought oh my gosh so when we landed I at maintenance debrief I brought that up to the crew chief as we went around the table and he said I know your book says 427 I don't remember what his is this is higher yeah this they said it not an inspection arts goes higher you don't trust us [Music] the question is with the success of the program and what it was capable of doing why did they retire it and honest personal opinion with some fact politics and money the that was the reason right there one of the other significant reasons is the satellite mafia got to the chief of staff of the Air Force and told him they could do this job for a hell of a lot cheaper and depending on how you cook the numbers you could make it look cheaper there was always a big argument sr against the u2 about the cost osprey flying our cost per mile we even figured it out a number of ways but they never entered the equation about the SR got there and got back before the u2 ever got there that's that was somehow lost in translation is part of the arguments but the real reason was we didn't have a chief of staff of the air play of the air force who wanted the airplane he didn't understand the airplane he didn't understand what it did and once the capabilities work so they made a reason for budgetary reasons that was their excuse for getting rid of it and as you recall President Clinton line-item veto did first time ever and that's how it was taken out of the budget question is how many aircraft were made between the a12 program and the sr-71 it was what 32 33 32 32 the question is could I talk about the controllability between the sr-71 and the you how close were you to V stall on the sr-71 compared to the u2 and that what what he's getting at is when the u2 was cruising they had a very narrow speed range with regard to getting into a stall the the I don't know that much about the u2 so you know compared Comparative ility I know that we had a larger stall margin but the and I don't know the stall characteristics of the u2 or with the sr-71 it was a delta wing aircraft it didn't have a classic wing and Buffett with regard to a stall oh the controllability at high Mach was it's like sitting in your car doing 60 miles an hour in no traffic yeah I hope you have a good tires well one of the unique features on the SR from the pilot's perspective it had a stick shaker and it would just shake the stick when you would get him to the onset of high angle of attack and if you didn't unload it would unload for you and you weren't gonna defeat 3,000 psi so you always he always had to be cognizant of where he was on the angle of attack curve no matter how fast he was flying the question was how many flight hours and how many missions do we each have in the sr-71 flight flight hours I ended up with I claim the most operational hours because they I have a thousand and ninety two hours there are other pilots that had more than that but most or all of them got the time from leaving Beale and being in flight test and flying flight test and not operational sorties all of mine were in the operational end of it and I only ended up with about 600 hours that's a lot of miles so so that old adage about is it your age or how many miles you got on here that was a good question though the other thing that happened is when you'd reach different milestones as far as hours in the aircraft Lockheed provided you pins so you got an initial pin for your first mock pre-flight then you got subsequent pins at 300 and 600 was it nine hundred and then a thousand or something so those were very unique pins if you ever get a chance to somebody's got one of those he has I I got two but the question was that the dread that each aircraft has its own personality and quirks and that's true they were all slightly different even though it's a manufactured aircraft I don't know in the process of manufacturing it there were just put together with some different personalities and that's the way the airplanes work I this is my own impression of how I feel with regard to having flown that aircraft and the hours I had in it you read about in the early days of aviation and some of these pilots that went through it and you know they had the feel or the could fly by the seat of their pants type thing and they could more or less really talk to the airplane so to speak I don't know that I ever felt that way flying the f4 but in the sr-71 I felt more in tune with the aircraft and I don't know if some of it was just the intense training that you had gone through and your scan or your watching everything all the time all the different instruments instruments even though you're looking outside you're looking inside and concentrating and it was almost sometimes I could sense that my fuels getting out of balance and I'd check the gauge and sure enough you know so I was getting a feel for that so to speak and I don't know if it's just possibly subconsciously your mind has a little timer and you knew that an hour and a half into the supersonic leg you're going to be coming down and the fuel needs to be balanced better one of the other things you asked about that was I was lucky enough to be a system engineer at the skunk works after I flew the airplane for a while and usually on modern aircraft one of the requirements you're on into is interchangeability of panels they like to do that this panel will fit this aircraft in that aircraft but you couldn't do that on the SR they were all unique they were all slightly different size they had different drill holes so each aircraft from that perspective was an individual aircraft you couldn't interchange panels I I think I understand the question the question was this is my sister my older sister so her question was about how did you know they were different until you got in it was that the question you you you didn't until you'd flown it a few times and I having had two tours in the sr-71 I flew a lot of the different tail numbers so consequently I could relate one tail number to another tail number that I had previously flown and knew that some handled and felt different than the others is that was that the answer you're welcome my wife is here also as you know she was introduced though these are leading questions for the audience and I know what she's alluding to the question is did you ever fly over commercial airport airports that was the question from my wife because yes and the and the rest of the question or the rest of the answer is I think it was the 1982 or 83 Toronto Air Show I was a participant and we took an sr-71 there and it was three crew members went one crew flew it in one crew flew the second day air show and the third crew which was myself flew just a couple of flybys that the third day of the air show and then actually flew the aircraft back to Beale Air Force Base and the Toronto air shows over the what does it Labor Day weekend is it the Labor Day weekend in September what's the first it's Monday yeah that that's when they always have it and when we end it's a holiday weekend so when I came back into the Sacramento area and I was descending down to land at Beale and we had a lot of fuel and we had to work on the holiday and I said yeah I asked the backseater I said you want to make an approach at sac Metro and he said can we do that and I said why not you can do anything once yeah exactly so so so I on approach control I when we got over to approach control I asked if sac Metro was available for a an approach and they said they switch this over to sac Metro and they cleared us for an approach so as we were coming down final and we had configured the airplane with the gear down and we're about two miles out on final I asked the controller they switch this over to tower and I asked the tower I said would you like a flyby down the runway or down the ramp the guy said down the ramp and I said okay I sucked the gear up and I pushed the power up and we started heading towards the ramp towards the tower and as we were approaching it I rolled the plane up away from the tower and lit the afterburners and we went around and made a pass and the tower controller said beautiful beautiful come back and do another one and I said I better not I want to go to Beal so we went back to Beal and we landed and as I mentioned holiday weekend and Colonel lonnie list was the was either he was the director of flight operations the do sorry straight blah knee straight lonnie yeah anyhow so he met us when we pulled in the hangar after we landed as i mentioned that was a normal procedure and i thought well that's nice that he came out as I came down the ladder from the aircraft he looked at me he said Maury and I said yes sir he said do we have any regulations that say we can't make approaches at Sacramento Airport I said no sir I want one on my desk at seven o'clock tomorrow morning now there's a continuation to this story I retired in 87 and flew with United Airlines when I went I had previously flown for United I had a break in service when I went back to United I was a 760 copilot 760 yeah Boeing 767 copilot and one of my that first year in 87 I think it was either the fall of 87 or the winter of 88 right after the new year I was flying a 767 from Washington DC to San Francisco and an air traffic controller wanted to know if they could ride in the cockpit and the captain of the plane signed it off they have that privilege or if they want to do that and the aircraft normally when they do that if there's an empty seat somewhere the captain allows one of the flight attendants to come in an empty seat in the back of the plane the plane was full so this young lady the air traffic controller she came in she's quite attractive young lady and the captain I was flying with was I don't know if he was married or not but I know he's a big flirt I hadn't flown with him before so I was flying it was my leg from DC to San Francisco you would trade off flying legs in the airlines and we're flying and he's just talking to her halfway across the country and at some point he asked her how long she'd worked at San Francisco Airport and she hadn't been there that long she said I used to work sac Metro so this is nine I think was 1988 and I looked over my shoulder at this young lady and I said were you working sac Metro in 1982 or whatever it was 82 or 83 and she looked at me and she said yeah I was why do you ask and I said were you working tower when the sr-71 buzzed it and she said oh yeah I was how do you know that and I told her it was me and she started laughing and she said you scared the hell out of people she said there she said there were people in the terminal that dived to the ground they thought the airplane was going to hit the door [Applause] [Music] good job when did I learn to fly or start flying was when I joined the military I had not flown prior to that yeah same for me learned in the military the question was do we need a specialized runway group or airport the answer was not really if we had an adequate runway length the airport the aircraft had a certain specified minimum runway length and you also had to consider that runway length in the case of an abort so you didn't want to sell yourself short on runway length remember what is that the three minutes were sloped things air above you the runway behind you and something else I don't know and the question was how long could you fly the aircraft before you were just physically exhausted and I I you know your adrenaline was really going all the time and it was amazing that you know the longest mission I think I flew was over a little over seven hours how about you I flew one from the US over to Europe we were on a reconnaissance mission that that mission was about eleven hours so that meant you're in the suit about fourteen and that was a lot that was much as I wanted but what I was gonna say to that was the one I flew that was a little over seven hours was amazingly the time seemed to go by so fast I couldn't believe it two quick questions and you pointed to somebody else I'll take this Dylan he want to know how many refuelings and it just depended on the on the the mission and the sortie and and how much tab you had and also the nitrogen for inerting the tanks yeah we had these flasks that contained liquid nitrogen and it would devolve into a gaseous state and to keep a head pressure on the fuel tanks and also protect them from igniting from heat yep the tip was a chemical that would ignite the afterburner the afterburner would not ignite like a modern-day fighter on its own with a gold plug or whatever so he had to use a chemical ignition system to light the afterburner and there were a limited quantity of that material onboard the aircraft oh my refuelings longest flight I have to think about it we've refueled right after we took off out of Beale we refueled off the off the Hudson Bay we refueled off of Norway we came out of Murmansk and we took off lo a token offload I guess four or five was probably the most refuelings I ever did four on that 11 our mission then I was on one of the great things if you would take off from Beale particularly if you were going to the debt just kind of a side story you could take off in the dark after about 30 minutes you could capture the Sun sunrise had come up again that was pretty cool because you're flying faster than his son was traveling around the earth was driving question was well what was the weather minimums and did we use GCA ground controlled approach systems yeah we did use GCA the ILS was extremely accurate with regard to the astronaut and you you could monitor it right and how accurate accurate it was so the weather minimums was depending on with was an operational mission or not I did not fly this mission but I launched a mission an operational sortie out of Beale actually and the weather was what they call below minimums zero zero for departure and we passed that on to the execution authority which was coming from the Pentagon and they came back and said pilots choice and he took off so once you got the aircraft subsonic it was it it was a regular aircraft quite frankly and of course he had to abide by all the FAA rules and regulations and standard approach plate procedures for minimums that kind of thing question is how long does in-flight refueling take the actual offload does not much more than what 15 minutes about 20 minutes 15 20 minutes max for the offload but we would often just hang in position because the navigator or the so would plan the point of disconnect so that we were pointed in the right direction at the right point to just drop off light the burners and go straight so sometimes you'd be on the on the boom for 30 minutes or 40 minutes the question was the because of heat expansion as the aircraft heated up that the airframe actually grew in length and and that that is true if you go to the Smithsonian or someplace route to the Palmdale to the air park out there Blackbird air Park you see gaps in where the leading edge comes in to the chine and the gaps actually expanded and came together one of the other historical things which a lot of people find anecdotal about the airplane is it leaked a lot of gas on the ground and the crew chiefs and the other guys would wear slickers and boots because that jp-7 would eat the soles off your shoes but the tanks weren't were steel on the inside and they had sealant joints that would deteriorate over a period of time it wasn't anything dangerous it just meant that the aircraft would leak fuel but once you once you got to altitude and the heat would penetrating the aircraft those tanks would expand and it would seal off and they didn't leak thank you thank you for watching Peninsula seniors out and about I'm Betty Wheaton see you next time [Music] you you

Channel: PeninsulaSrsVideos

Views: 304,646

Keywords: SR-71, Pilot, blackbird, CIA, spy, cold war, secret, stealth, veteran, Air Force, Rosenberg, McKim, Betty Wheaton, documentary, Western Museum of Flight, Chuck Yeager, air show, Beale Air Force Base, Okinawa, Vietnam, Cuba, SA-5, SAM, Russia, missile, A-12, Mendenhall, Blackbird Air Park, U-2

Id: iexlShI9eFc

Length: 85min 30sec (5130 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 12 2018