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One of my favorites. Here's Brian Shul telling the story live: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lg73GKm7GgI
Might as well link to the full talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wigZsFypdyI It's a great speech about overcoming his war injuries and getting to fly on of the most special planes in history, along with actually documenting most of it himself.
I didn't make it past the first lovely sentence. "With a sleek needle nose and a swept double-delta wing with two prominent nacelles, the supersonic SR-1 Blackbird spy plane is the stuff aviation legend." SR-1? "Stuff aviation legend"? I'd expect a little better editing from Popular Mechanics.
The thing that really amazes me is that these badass planes were designed with slide rules, drafting tables, and wind tunnels. No fluid-flow simulations; these things predate the CDC6600. The engineering was as badass as the product.
And no wind tunnel can produce Mach 3 flows. Test pilots had to slowly expand the flight envelope of prototype aircraft.
I didn't make it past the first lovely sentence. "With a sleek needle nose and a swept double-delta wing with two prominent nacelles, the supersonic SR-1 Blackbird spy plane is the stuff aviation legend." SR-1? "Stuff aviation legend"? I'd expect a little better editing from Popular Mechanics.
You stopped reading the entire article because they dropped an "of"?
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"tough to replicate with computers" I was under the impression that computers can fly planes which are impossible for humans to fly (e.g. the F-117, or any fighter with forward-swept wings). Since the U-2 is much closer to a "conventional" aircraft, and can be stick-flown by a human, wouldn't it be a walk in the park for a compute to fly it?
I'm not saying a computer can't fly the U2, but I do think it'd be more complex than a conventional aircraft. It has some pretty unique flight characteristics. From Wikipedia: "...To maintain their operational ceiling of 70,000 feet (21,000 m), the early U-2A and U-2C models had to fly very near their never-exceed speed (VNE). The margin between that maximum speed and the stall speed at that altitude was only 10 knot…
I had a coworker once who claimed that he got a ride on one before it was declassified. Apparently he was waiting at an air station to go home on leave and was constantly being bumped from flights by higher ranks. A "special" fight came in that he could get on, though, after signing some paperwork to keep quiet about it.
My favorite story about the SR-71 being badass: http://oppositelock.kinja.com/favorite-sr-71-story-107912704...
https://theaviationist.com/2015/03/17/sr-71-mid-air-disinteg...
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One of my favorites. Here's Brian Shul telling the story live: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lg73GKm7GgI
It's a running gag on some websites now (apparently including hacker news) that whenever there's a mention of the sr71, that story gets posted. I still read it every time too.
What the OP forgets to mention is that the 71 was not intended initially as a surveillance aircraft. It was meant as an interceptor. The phoenix missile system, of f14 fame, was initially meant for an SR71/Oxcart-type airframe. This thing was mean to shoot down valkyrie-class bombers. That image of mach3/4 aircraft chasing each other down never really happened.
The interceptor variant is definitely interesting, but it's a side branch of the spy plane lineage.