The SR-71 Blackbird

*“At 85,000 feet and Mach 3, it was almost a religious experience. Nothing had prepared me to fly that fast… My God, even now, I get goose bumps remembering. ” - Col. Jim Wadkins, USAF*

The SR-71 Blackbird completed its first test flight four years before the first episode of the original Star Trek aired on television, and it somehow still holds the record for the fastest and highest-flying manned aircraft ever built by humanity. It was a badass jet-black recon aircraft that looked like a UFO had sex with a Sykes-Fairbairn combat knife, was built of composite titanium, flew at roughly 2,500 miles per hour at an altitude of 16 miles above the planet's surface, and was so fucking fast that it's standard operating procedure for evading surface-to-air missiles was to accelerate to a speed faster than the missile. You had to wear a Gemini spacesuit to fly the damn thing, it was never shot down in its entire operational history, and even though it was first launched seven years before the Moon Landing we were still flying these things above war zones in Iraq and Bosnia in the 1990s. It's the first Stealth, the fastest plane ever built, and an unkillable, undetectable aircraft so badass that the only reason they decommissioned it was because its strategic role was eventually replaced by recon satellites.

The development of the SR-71 predates the creation of The Beatles, starting back in early 1960 when the Soviet Union shot down an American U-2 spy plane over Russia. This was not only really embarrassing for the CIA and the pilot who got captured by the Russkies, but also pretty much almost started World War III and resulted in the thermonuclear annihilation of the entire human species and most of the living organisms on earth. U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower immediately was like, "Ok, hey, let's not let that happen again," (it did, two years later, when another U-2 was shot down over Cuba at the height of the freakin' Cuban Missile Crisis), so he called up the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works in Burbank, California and made a very simple request:

Make a spy plane that is undetectable by radar and cannot be shot down. You have twenty months.

The lead aircraft designer for the Skunk Works, Kelly Johnson, dubbed the mission Project Archangel and got to work busting out one of the most insane feats of engineering in the history of aviation.

Johnson wanted this super-top-secret aircraft to exceed 2,000 miles an hour, which, planes at the time technically could do that speed while in afterburn, but afterburn only works for like eight or nine seconds and Project Archangel needed to be able to sustain a speed of 3x the speed of sound for hours at a time. The first problem with that is that at speeds that crazy, the fucking friction of the air whipping past the fuselage is enough to super-heat the metal on the hull to a point where it would have melted any conventional aircraft in minutes. So, he not only needed the plane to be able to literally travel faster than any aircraft has ever traveled, but he needed to build it in such a way that its hull could withstand temperatures of over 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit (14 degrees Celsius) but also do so at an altitude where the air outside the cockpit is -60 degrees Fahrenheit (9 degrees Celsius).

No problem. Johnson and the engineers at the Skunk Works decided to go with a titanium alloy for the airframe, which was way harder to work with than steel or aluminum but was also much better at resisting heat. Using high-tech titanium alloys and badass Area-51 technology recovered from the UFO crash in Roswell New Mexico in 1947 (probably), Lockheed Martin designed an aircraft so nuts that you literally could not work on it with regular airplane-building tools – they had to design and build entirely new equipment just to work on this thing, and then train their production staff in how to use that shit.

Fun side note: Most of the titanium in the world is mined in Russia, so in order to get enough metal to build these things the CIA had to build a bunch of fake front companies and then buy a shitload of titanium from the Soviets, which we then turne… — Fun side note: Most of the titanium in the world is mined in Russia, so in order to get enough metal to build these things the CIA had to build a bunch of fake front companies and then buy a shitload of titanium from the Soviets, which we then turned into airplanes designed to spy on them.

One weird thing about building with titanium is that it's a metal that expands a lot more than traditional aircraft metals, so during flight the plane would literally grow four inches in length! (This, incidentally, is also what most aircraft enthusiasts do when they see this thing in a museum). An interesting side-effect of this is that when this thing was fully-loaded and prepping for takeoff it would leak fuel out of its joints, and if you look at them you'll notice that many of the panels don't sit flush with each other. Personally, I tend to like to board aircraft that have flush joints and don't leak jet fuel, but I guess that's why nobody asked me to zip into a fucking spacesuit and blast myself off literally into the stratosphere.

The SR-71 is painted black because black paint tends to both absorb and emit heat, and also because it gives good visual camo during nighttime and also looks fuckin' dope. It was built primarily as a stealth aircraft (the first one ever, depending on how you want to measure that sort of thing), and, since we didn't quite know what the Russkies could do in terms of radar detection, we decided to all-in on the stealth angle. In addition to carrying an electronics counter-measures suite that looked like it came off the set of Star Trek TOS but still somehow made a Klingon cloaking device look a dog hiding under a blanket, all of its surfaces are all designed to reflect radar, and even the paint was somehow engineered to be radar-absorbing paint. They tested it out by putting it up on a pylon outside Area-51 (at a time when the CIA knew there would be no Soviet satellites overhead) and then bringing out a bunch of radars and firing them off at the thing from like 100 yards away, and to everyone's satisfaction, they learned that the radar cross-section of the Blackbird was reduced by a full 90 percent – on radar it registered as something a little larger than a seagull but not quite as big as Superman.

The first prototype, the A-12, flew on April 30, 1962 at (of course) Area 51. The final SR-71 completed its first successful flight a couple years later, on December 22, 1964, kicking off a service career that would have it blasting through the upper atmosphere at ludicrous speeds for the next 35 years.

The SR-71 was powered by two Pratt & Whitney J58 axial-flow turbojets, each of which weighed about 3 tons and generated 32,500 pounds of thrust – about 160,000 horsepower. They were the size of a small car, and were so nuts that the only way to turn them on was by jump-starting them with a "start cart", which was honestly just two bigass Chevy V8 Impala engines strapped together and hooked up to some jumper cables. The Blackbird carried 80,000 pounds of fuel (the maximum allowable weight you can carry inside one of those giant 18-wheeler semis you see on the highway), and could basically haul fucking ass at sustained speeds of 3,000 feet per second at an altitude of 78,000 feet. Almost immediately, the SR-71 set aircraft records in highest altitude (85,069 feet | 25,929 meters) and speed (2,193 mph | 3,529 kph) that to this day have never been broken. This shit was fucking flying so fast that the cockpit had to be made out of that quartz glass that they put on ovens so you can see if your casserole is done, and at these speeds that glass would get so hot that pilots would cook their dang lunches by pressing their food up against the inside of the cockpit glass.

There were no weapons aboard the Blackbird (they did build a badass fighter-interceptor version of it called the YF-12 that carried missiles, but it never entered military service), but it's still one of the fucking coolest airplanes in the history of aviation. There's a reason why the X-Men fly one of these things, and why they made a Thunderjets Fruit Snack out of it (and, to a lesser degree, why it turns into a Transformer in the one where Shia LaBeouf goes to Robot Heaven, but I guess that's probably not a great argument since they also turn a Mountain Dew machine into a murder-bot). In the 35-year operational history of the SR-71, not a single aircraft was destroyed by the enemy. There were a few destroyed in accidents, which kind of makes sense because this thing hit the runway at 200mph on landing and needed to deploy a drop parachute to slow it down, but those accidents only resulted in the death of a single Blackbird pilot during the plane's entire three-decade history.

Part of this is because the defensive capabilities of this thing were fucking nuts – and not just because it registered as a half-dozen pigeons on any radar system that had been constructed prior to 2014. Basically, the way this thing evaded any kind of threat was by simply accelerating in a straight line. Enemy fighters were no threat to it, since the Blackbird's cruising altitude was so far above the service ceiling of the MiG-25 Foxbat that the Russian pilots couldn't see the SR-71 with a telescope, and any surface-to-air missiles lucky enough to ID the Blackbird had no prayer of getting a missile out fast enough to catch it. Blackbird pilots laugh it off, saying that, yeah, every once in a while they'd get a little red light on the cockpit indicating a SAM launch, but they'd just yawn and slide the throttle forward ten degrees and the light would switch off.

Over 3,551 missions and 53,490 flight hours (including 11,000+ hours at Mach 3+), the Blackbird flew recon missions over the Middle East, Vietnam, North Korea, Libya, and even over Desert Storm and Kosovo during the Bosnia War (the government has hilariously denied ever flying it over Russia though… the official government stance is that the last time an American recon aircraft flew over Russian airspace was when that U-2 got shot down in 1960). Because most of the stuff it did was super black-ops top secret, we'll probably never know the full extent of what it did, which is kind of sad but also badass and mysterious.

The SR-71 was eventually phased out in the 1990s, mostly because the advent of spy satellites and UAVs pretty much negated the need for manned high-speed reconnaissance aircraft. After being phased out, two Blackbirds went to work for NASA, who used them for high-altitude experiments on "aerodynamics, propulsion, structures, thermal protection materials, high-speed and high-temperature instrumentation, atmospheric studies, and sonic boom characterization," which all sound like things Geordi LaForge would talk about on an episode of TNG and sound nebulous enough to seem important without me having any idea what any of that stuff means (man, I'm crushing the Trek references today, though).

The Blackbird was finally discontinued in 1999, and the remaining aircraft were retired to quiet lives in museums across America. On the Blackbird's final flight, it traveled from Washington, DC to Burbank, California in 67 minutes at a sustained speed of Mach 3.

It remains the fasted flight ever made between those two cities.