SR-71 Facts

Yah, I knew it was something like that. heh. What was amusing about the Libya flight was that the plane had been a stone cold to fly, until they crossed the border, then she settled right down and gave a nice smooth flight at that speed. I couldn't believe the numbers he was throwing out there on that flight.

Originally posted by ajsr71

The designs went through from A-1 to A-12

The A-11 was the near defintive configuration. Single vertical tail, ventral engines under the wings, and no chines.

The A-12 was the twelth design. twin tails. pointed wing tips. Very much the final design. Some minor changes made . Tails outward canted

I should have course said Miniimum Inward canted tails.

Thanks for that info ajsr So was the designating of the early prototypes A-11 a mistake then? Because as far as I know, no blackbird ever flew with non-canted fins or without chines.

Yes the A-11 was only a paper/model design.

The early A-12 study didnot have chines, these were added relativaly late on to met RCS requirments

If you can find James Goodall / J Millers LOCKHEEDS SR-71 BLACKBIRD FAMILY Book by Aerofax 2002 . It's a very good reference.

When the SR family was built, there was a lot of trial and error. No plane had ever been built out of titanium on this level, so they needed to desgin whole new tools and machines to work with it, and nobody knew much about what would and wouldn't work. They would write on the titanium with normal grease pencils, only to find that they would eat into the metal because of the acid in them. Machines that they were trying to use at first would break because of the strength of the metal. There was a lot of trial and mostly error going into the initial working of the titanium. It didn't take them long to figure things out though.

One interesting tidbit, if you see pics with things painted on them, I think there was one with a rabbit on it, those were done in some type of chalk. They tried to use paint to do it on one flight, but the paint melted and ran, so they tried to use some type of chalk and it stayed on better. That's what I was told anyway, not sure how true it is.

Yes they had high titanium components reject levels, over 80% another reason other than the pens was also down to the the impurities in the local water supply cuasing embrittlement of the titanium.

Some more info on the A-11.

On 29th Feb 1964 part of the security blanket around the Balckbird program was lifted when President Johnson announced that The A-11 Had been developed and several were under test at EdwardsAFB.

This was wrong on two fronts.

First at the request of Kelly Johnson the aircraft was referenced to the A-11, to mislead intelligence sources when actually it was the YF-12A..

Second they (YA-12A) were not at Edwards . They were at Groom Lake
Two YF-12A were rushed to Edwards and on arriving they were put straight into the hangers. The aircraft were still hot from thier rushed flight and set off the fire deluge system, coving aircraft and ground crew in water.

Originally posted by FredTThere is a possibility that an SR-71 was hit by a piece of schrapnel during a Habu mission (S/A-2) but thats as close as it got. And they knew the plane was coming but still could not down one.

No SR-71 ever received any sort of "battle damage". One A-12 did land with a piece of an S-75 (SA-2 GUIDELINE) embedded in the lower wing. This was after completing mission BX6743 over North Vietnam on 30 October, 1967, where a bunch of S-75s were fired at the OXCART. The shrapnel part was believed to have been part of the S-75's airframe, not a warhead pellet.

Thought you guys might be interested in this. Interesting reading.

www.voodoo.cz...

That's quite a loss rate - is that a record. Wonder why they are so dangerous?

They're not dangerous. They flew 20 years without another crash. You have to remember that when they started flying they had an unstart problem. They had that problem until the end of their careers, but after a time the engineers came up with a computerized nozzle control that would minimize the unstart problem. It made for fewer pilot controlled nozzle adjustments. I know that not all the crashes were caused by this problem, but at least a few were, or appear to be related to that problem. This was an entirely new design with entirely new technology involved. There were bound to be some growing pains. There were quite a few lost in the first years of it's life, but that stopped pretty quickly, relatively speaking.

Originally posted by ajsr71
The A-12 was the twelth design. twin tails. pointed wing tips. Very much the final design. Some minor changes made . Tails outward canted

Allow me to point out some small corrections:

First, the tails on the A-12 were canted Inward, not outward. Other changes in the A-12 included: Addition of RAM, Radar Absorbing Structure (RAS) along the wing leading edge, and the expansion grooves on the wings to alieviate some of the thermal stress.

"They're not dangerous. They flew 20 years without another crash. "

The last loss was in '89, but I guess that's a 17-year gap...but so so few aircraft flying so rarely. losing more than a third of the fleet seems like a lot. Does look like things got better after '72.

Winder that the rate is for MiG-25s, which are in some ways comparable and seem to be less of an evolutionary dead-end.

Originally posted by ghost

Originally posted by ajsr71
The A-12 was the twelth design. twin tails. pointed wing tips. Very much the final design. Some minor changes made . Tails outward canted

Allow me to point out some small corrections:

First, the tails on the A-12 were canted Inward, not outward. Other changes in the A-12 included: Addition of RAM, Radar Absorbing Structure (RAS) along the wing leading edge, and the expansion grooves on the wings to alieviate some of the thermal stress.


Ghost

I had already made the correction about the Outward Canted tails realised my mistake when I came back and read my post.

Originally posted by AeroQuake
I actually did A report on Lockheed. Both the SR-71 Blackbird and the F117-A Nighthawk were built at the Lockheed Skunkworks, ALTHOUGH. Both were tested at Groom lake, in the report lights seen close to the groom lake are was the Blackbird. Interesting enough it is now being painted to resemble F-19s. Also what is interesting is that the SR-71 Blackbird was taken out of operation, it cost 200 to 300 Hundred Million dollars a year. Although that is not the reason. Reason? The Aurora.

Actually, the Airforce still uses the S/R-71. A guy I used to work with was in the AirForce and worked on the avionics systems on F-15's. NASA still flys 2 of them and I believe that the Air Force flys 1. The Aurora project I do not believe is for actuall flight testing, but highspeed testing. A prototype is bult to test the ability of what our new aircraft are capable of. They also say that the U-2 was taken out of service. Thats a lie, they use them all the time.

IIRC about 71-72 was when they came out with the automatic nozzle adjusting fix. Once that was in service, the pilots didn't have to worry so much about flying the nozzles and the airplane and could concentrate on the airplane and let it fix the unstarts most of the time.

I tried to find an appropriate thread to hook this SR-71 video up to. It´s an interview with a former SR-71 pilot and commander, Richard Graham. Probably old news to some of you but i will take my chances and post it anyway as i never seen it before. There´s also a videointerview with the same guy checking out the cocpit.

Enjoy!

www.youtube.com...

i was an operations specialist in the navy, radar operator, on board the u.s.s. nimitz. mainly on the spa49 long range air search radar. while we were on the way over for our 88-89 westpac, we were roughly 500 miles off of japan. i picked up a contact incoming. usually, we wait for two sweeps to make sure it is a solid contact. after the second sweep, something was weird. so i waited a third sweep. yep, solid contact. i called to our trac supe, "trac supe, take a look at my contact, bearing 275 at 65,000 feet. solid contact going mach 2.5 and squawking i.f.f.."

"lets look at the i.f.f. and see who and what it is. it's one of ours, you just got a sr-271 blackbird on your scope. good job!"

Cool story blackthorne!

Richard Graham talks a little bit about the radar signature as he heard it from radar operators. They talked about something the size of a piper cub, although i guess the altitude and speed kinda gives it away as something different than a cub

tomra
I tried to find an appropriate thread to hook this SR-71 video up to. It´s an interview with a former SR-71 pilot and commander, Richard Graham. Probably old news to some of you but i will take my chances and post it anyway as i never seen it before. There´s also a videointerview with the same guy checking out the cocpit.

Enjoy!

www.youtube.com...

I met him at Duxford. He signed his book.

Nice guy.