SR-71 Flight Manual

[[AK]Hylander]

Blackbird

[[AK]Sonic Boom]

How in the hell did I miss this post?

Man, that is the coolest thing I've seen all week!

As an aside, I've been a SR-71 freak ever since I saw my first one at Paine field when I was nine years old. I also got to see one flying low and banking around on a shakedown flight when I was at a Winston Cup race at Riverside in about 1984.

When the filght data was first declassified, there was a symposium of Blackbird pilots, crew chiefs, and mechanics at the Museum of Flight in Seattle and it was the first time they had been able to speak openly in public as a group.

Anyway, they had a Q&A session and I managed to schmooze the emcee and I got to ask the question that everyone knew was coming. "How high and how fast could it really go?"

One of the pilots said that the whole thing was predicated on exhaust gas temperature, with a balance of altitude (i.e. air temperature) and throttle.

He said that he was on a mission off the northern coast of the U.S.S.R. over the Arctic Ocean and they recorded the coldest temperature that an SR-71 had ever flown in... something like -170f. He said that the cold air boosted the efficiency to the point that he had the throttle almost completely shut off with only the afterburner running...and the EGT still continued to rise. He then started to fly higher to cool things off and the plane just kept on accelerating. Eventually he was able to get things balanced out at an altitude of 97,000 feet and a speed of something like Mach 3.38.

He said that although there were many rumors about the plane, it was actually designed to operate in a very narrow range of parameters and that was about the most performance anyone could remember getting out of it.

He also said the SR-71 is the closest thing to a perpetual motion machine that mankind has ever created, since at speed most of the thrust comes from the air self-heating as it's rammed into the combustion chamber.

If I can find 'em, I'll post a few photos from the conference and the Riverside flight.

EDIT: Edited for clarity. (My Firefox spell-check program isn't working properly yet, so this is what you get... I did win my school spelling bee in 7th grade if that counts for anything.)