Blackbird on aircraft carrier.

Whilst my parents were on holiday in NYC they went on one of those helicopter tours over the city, anyway one of the pictures was of an sr71 blackbird on an aircraft carrier which i thought was very strange. Can a carrier even launch one of those or was it just being transported to another part of the US?

PS it was around 1998. I will try and find the picture but it will take a while because my parents live abroad now, i will post a new thread when i get it though.

Its a museum. Thay used a crane to place it there.
www.intrepidmuseum.com...

Its actually an A-12 not an SR-71

Originally posted by FredT
Its a museum. Thay used a crane to place it there.
www.intrepidmuseum.com...

Its actually an A-12 not an SR-71

Thanks for the info, i always thought the blackbird was an sr-71.

The SR-71 Blackbird was preceded by the A-12 and YF-12, they look about 95% identical.

Originally posted by waynos
The SR-71 Blackbird was preceded by the A-12 and YF-12, they look about 95% identical.

The A-12 was build for the CIA and has only one pilot and is slightly faster. The YF-12 was an interceptor, has ventral fins and a slightly different chine that houser the IR sensors. NASA Flew the YF-12 for a while.

The last of the Familty is teh M-21/D-21 Mothership Drone combination. The last one can be seen at the Seattle Museum of flight and has the D-21 drone mounted on it.

I can never tell the difference from the A-12 and Sr-71. But your parents should have told you that there were other planes in the carrier which are also not carrier based since its only a museum.

Originally posted by WestPoint23
I can never tell the difference from the A-12 and Sr-71. But your parents should have told you that there were other planes in the carrier which are also not carrier based since its only a museum.

There are suble differneces. The easiest spot is the lack of a back window for the co pilot in the A-12 as they were single seaters.

The CIA flew U-2's from carriers in the Vietnam War era, so it's possible they also converted a few A-12's for a similar reconissance task

The A-12 would be too heavy and would crack from the stress of a carrier launch, and a whole carrier is not long enough for conventional operations.

Some people refer to the A-12 as the sneaky older brother of the SR-71... It was an earlier, faster skunkworks project that was flying before anyone knew of the SR-71 program... It was put in "ATS" storage in '68 and released in '81... I wonder what they had in the 90's that's in ATS storage that we CERTAINLY DESERVE TO SEE at this point?

The existence of the A-12 was announced in the 60s, as a result of political pressure on the then president (Lyndon I think). It became one of those yes-it-exists-and-no-you-can't-have-any-info-on-it projects. It's pretty much safe to say that the Aurora has been filling the fast recon plane gap for quite some time now.

Originally posted by hooptey
Some people refer to the A-12 as the sneaky older brother of the SR-71... It was an earlier, faster skunkworks project that was flying before anyone knew of the SR-71 program... It was put in "ATS" storage in '68 and released in '81... I wonder what they had in the 90's that's in ATS storage that we CERTAINLY DESERVE TO SEE at this point?

Ahem F-22 Raptor Cough.

www.globalsecurity.org...

Maybe more, I dunno.

Zip

originally posted by: roniii259
The A-12 would be too heavy and would crack from the stress of a carrier launch, and a whole carrier is not long enough for conventional operations.

This thread may be almost 20 years old, but in the 1960s Lockheed proposed a carrier-based version of the A-12, known as the A-12CB, which would have required JATO bottles below the fuselage to takeoff safely from an aircraft carrier. More details about the A-12CB can be found at this link:
www.secretprojects.co.uk...