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I’m Flying Over Tucson And I Can See Downtown LA
The Lockheed SR-71, one of Lockheed’s greatest achievements, no longer flies and has found a home in air museums instead.
The F-22 Raptor, and the F-35 Lightning, The F-117 Stealth Fighter, although it is more of a bomber, when written about are not usually prefaced with the Lockheed name. When the SR-71 is written about it more often than not it is prefaced with “Lockheed”.
The Lockheed SR-71 looks impressive parked in a museum, but it was more impressive in the air. The video of a former SR-71 pilot speaking about a flight across the US is an entertaining humorous story, but if you listen carefully the story contains some information about just how impressive this aircraft was in the air.
Published in General
I love that story.
Love that plane, too.
I like this longer and a bit more professionally-made clip of one of Brian Shul’s presentations:
Great story.
Speaking of F35, how did we spend $1.5T on that? I would think you could buy a Death Star for that much money.
You left out a few facts from the link you provided:
Small correction: the Stealth Fighter is F-117.
Corrected, thank you.
There are some things to remember about cost concerning the F-35:
How can we spend $300 on a simple wrench? Black ops money has to be accounted for. As well as kickbacks.
More on the F-35 from Motley Fool investing:
It’s easy to forget how quickly combat aircraft improve. The now 49 year old A10 can carry twice the bomb load of a B17, with one crewman on board versus 10. Granted, different missions . The A1 Skyraider, Viet Nam ground attack workhorse (closest predecessor to an A10) could carry half of the bomb load of the A10 (and no apocalyptic 30mm rotary cannon), and virtually the same bomb load as a B17 less than 20 years after the time when the B17 was new technology.
I was pretty skeptical, despite working on parts of it, but I keep seeing things like this:
My emphasis added.
Seven or eight flights. Four kills.
What impressed me the most about the SR-71 was how the engineers designed a plane that could accomodate how much it stretched due to the heat at top speed. I say bring it back . . .
From the movie Space Cowboys:
As to the post, I knew to whom it was referring just from the title.
A consequence of that was that it leaked like a sieve when it was sitting on the ground. They would gas it up, take off, then find the tanker to top off the tanks.
And the YF-12 program was an interceptor based on the SR71 platform (that didn’t work out). Back in the early 80’s I was TDY to Wright-Patterson and my AF student pilot wife was visiting for the weekend. Security was light and we drove onto one of the annexes and discovered a trove of aircraft awaiting cleanup to be displays. We crawled all over the dusty YF12 prototype that was sitting in the midst of a mini boneyard.
I was at an air show At Wright Patterson in Dayton Ohio in the 80’s. The highlight was going to be a rare supersonic pass from an SR 71. I remember the announcer telling us, “the Blackbird is now taking off from Beale AFB (Ca) and should be overhead in 45 minutes”. 45 minutes. California to Ohio.
Unfortunately they had trouble hooking up to the tanker and had to cancel so I never got to see that supersonic fly by.
When I was a radar tech at Wilder, Idaho (78-79) the refueling route for Beale based SR-71’s went close enough to watch. IIRC, they had a special gel fuel and special tankers to deliver it. When I was a 2LT at Grand Forks (82-84) one flying by had an engine failure and made an emergency landing (giant SAC runway). The debris actually closed the runway for a while (big deal at an active SAC base during the Cold War). They had to jury rig a tow boom to get it off of the runway and flew in a 135 full of parts and technicians to repair it the next day,
Occasionally I will hear reference to the Lockheed Martin F-16 or see one with the company name on it…and it just feels wrong. It is, and will forever be, the General Dynamics F-16.
There are a number of videos on the SR 71, A New Zealand girl reacts to them:
She also has reactions to the LA Speed Story, and Buzz the Tower…
Does a girl from New Zealand understand how far it is from California to Ohio, as in the earlier comment?
I think so. She does reaction videos to American sports and cultural things – because she was planning to move to America. Her plans had since changed.