The Blackbird Chronicles

Hey, I’m excited to have you all come back! Again, I’m sorry if you don’t want to be here and would rather watch TV right now, but let’s make the most of it. The past few weeks, I have mainly addressed broad topics, my love for aviation, environmental impacts, etc. This week I would like to cover a much more specific part of aviation history- the SR-71 Blackbird.
The SR-71 Blackbird’s origins can be traced back to the late 1950s. The famous Lockheed Skunkworks designed the plan for the aircraft. Skunkworks is responsible for many of the military’s secret projects, but most projects have been declassified. The A-12 Oxcart, the original version of this plane, first flew in 1964.

In case you are wondering, 1964 was 58 years ago; also the year my father was born. It is just hard for me to believe that something built that long ago has never been surpassed by another piece of machinery. The SR-71 Blackbird is most well-known for its speed, but just saying this plane was fast does not do it justice. The Blackbird could cruise at a max speed of Mach 3.2. That is 3.2 times the speed of sound, approximately 2,200 mph. A bullet exits a hunting rifle at about 3,200 feet per second. The SR-71 could climb at 3,300 feet per second.

If a missile was fired at a Blackbird, the pilot only needed to nudge the throttle forwards, and the missile would have no chance of catching it. As I said above, the reported max speed of the SR-71 was around Mach 3.2. However, most pilots who have flown the airplane say that they exceeded that speed on many occasions, and pilot Brian Shul reported exceeding Mach 3.5 during an operation. Brian Shul took this picture below during one of his flights in the Blackbird.

Now, if you can’t tell, the SR-71 is my favorite aircraft of all time. I have a picture of the aircraft right above my desk where I am typing this very blog post. I received my first model airplane -a SR-71- when I was just two years old. I liked it for its sleek looks and jet-black paint then. Now, I love the story behind it. The SR-71 was truly a weapon of war. But it did not have any guns, it could not drop any bombs, and it did not carry any missiles. It only brought two things to the table: a camera and speed.

The Blackbird would fly over or around countries (mainly the Soviet Union) and take pictures of military bases while flying at 85,000 feet. But after years of flying, what could be left to be accomplished with the aircraft? Surely everything had been captured by its cameras.

President Ronald Reagan found a way to use the airplane to invoke fear in the enemy. Communist leaders from around the world hosted a meeting in North Korea. Of course, the United States couldn’t join the meeting, as there is hostility between ideologies. President Ronald Reagan decided to send 2 SR-71 Blackbirds to fly over the meeting location in a figure-eight pattern. The meeting could hear the deafening sonic boom about every 6 minutes. The country could not do anything about it because no missile could catch the airplane. It must be so powerful to say, “I know you are here, and you know I am here, but you cannot do anything about it.”

I recommend watching Brian Shul’s speech from 2016 about the SR-71 Blackbird, but also human resilience: