SR-71--Now my Cobra feels Flaccid!

[olddog]

Great reading and a sexy story, but I have to tell you, I think it was internet BS. Sorry to be the party pooper.

Quote (copy paste) from the link:
As inconceivable as it may sound, I once discarded the plane. Literally. My first encounter with the SR-71 came when I was 10 years old in the form of molded black plastic in a Revell kit. Cementing together the long fuselage parts proved tricky, and my finished product looked less than menacing. Glue,oozing from the seams, discolored the black plastic. It seemed ungainly alongside the fighter planes in my collection, and I threw it away.

Twenty-nine years later, I stood awe-struck in a Beale Air Force Base hangar, staring at the very real SR-71 before me.

end quote.

Ronald Regan declassified the SR71 in the 1980's, when this guy claimed to be flying the SR71 (the bombing of Libia was in the 1980's). 29 years before this, there were no plastic models to build as it was a clasified air craft at that time. Many other statement sounded quite fishy to me as well.

But if a SR71 doesn't give you a mental woody, you are not a man.

PS doing the math 29 years before the mid 1980's puts you in the mid 1950's. I do not think the SR71 was even a wild thought in the designers mind.

[thudmaster]

I live just outside Beale AFB in Yuba City. I have been on and off with the SR since 1969. No I did not fly this aircraft. We never thought it was really that classified. Flew in and out of the base day in and day out. During the base air shows people were allowed to get up close and personal looks into the cockpit. It is probally one of the finest aircraft ever to grace our skys.

Sorry to hear about your model............

[olddog]

Originally Posted by thudmaster

I live just outside Beale AFB in Yuba City. I have been on and off with the SR since 1969. No I did not fly this aircraft. We never thought it was really that classified. Flew in and out of the base day in and day out. During the base air shows people were allowed to get up close and personal looks into the cockpit. It is probally one of the finest aircraft ever to grace our skys.

Sorry to hear about your model............

In 1969 the SR71 was such a closely guarded secret that it only flew at night. It came out of the hanger with the power on and rolling. When landing it rolled into the hanger without stopping. These plane were never outside a hanger in daylight hours.

I worked with a guy who fueled the SR71 (ground crew) when it was flying over Vietnam. He never uttered a word about this plane until after it was declasified.

[thudmaster]

I watched it fly out in the day time also.........I know I was on the flightline with it.........your friend was fueling it with jp-7.......I watched that also. I am not here to argue about the plane. I am also a member of the Blackbird Association. People who disigned, built, maintained, and flew it.

[David Kirkham]

So Thudmaster...

What is your take???

BS?
True Story?
Not yet sure?

The part about the model does seem quite fishy.

David

[thudmaster]

The model part does not bother me because it is probally true. It just wasn't called the SR then. He never said it was.
I will have to refrain from comment on the book until I check it out with some of the retired SR pilots I play golf with at Beale.
The offer I made you today David is an open invitation so clear your books and take me up on it.

[David Kirkham]

Thanks! I'll wait for the verdict.

David

[turnpike boy]

According to a Squadron/Signals Publications book I have (printed 1982), Lockheed was given the contract to develop the plane in 1959 and the first flight was April 26, 1962. Would have been tough to build a plastic model in the mid-50's of a plane that hadn't been designed yet.

Still, there's a lot in the story that parallels both the aforementioned book and the book that Ben Rich, Johnson's protoge', wrote a few years ago. So, maybe the author of the story does have some seat time in the projectile.

Although....neither his name, as a pilot, nor that of his RIO show up on the list contained in lovehamr's link.

[thudmaster]

Habu snakes usually only come out at night.....hence the referance.

[Historybuff]

I went to one at Riverside's March AFB just this year. Anybody can go, I had to pay a $10 entrance fee, but check for a website on SR71s and it will tell you when the next one is happening. At the one I went to, there were at least 4 to 5 former pilots, one of whom flew them so early he flew the two seater versions when they were still CIA planes. They also had an engine on display but not knowing engines, I couldn't tell how special it was from its first incarnation (for another plane) . One pilot told of aborting a take off, and plowing through a cornfield only to find his back seat man had ejected in panic. Another said he bailed out at 1600 mph but didn't get hurt, something about the rotation of the earth not making it as fast as it sounds.


The funniest comment was from one little old man (60's anyway) who said when he would go to parties after the plane was no longer secret and people would ask him "What'd you fly in the Air Force?" he would say "Blackbird" and they would say "Com'on, you're not tall enough and handsome enough to have flown that." Now he is a teacher at a Colorado branch of that famous Aeronautical school based in Florida.

There's a lot of parallels between Shelby American and the SR-71 program--a mere handful of men determined to succeed, against all odds, etc. etc. I like ithe SR a lot better than the Stealth fighter which to me relies way too much on computers to fly. The cockpit of the SR71 looks downright primitive! I always thought they missed their chance to rattle the Russkies--and would have liked to see one of those Blue Angelstyle flybys over Hanoi with six or so Blackbirds, each at a different altitutude and coming from a different direction, converging at Mach 2 over a set point over red square. It would have got their attention!

[lovehamr]

Originally Posted by olddog

PS doing the math 29 years before the mid 1980's puts you in the mid 1950's. I do not think the SR71 was even a wild thought in the designers mind.

Considering the first A12 flew in 1962, the fact they got the contract in 1959 and what I have read about Clarence J. "Kelly" Johnson's imagination I think you may have overstepped your BS grounds.

Steve
P.S.
From Habu.org:
"When the A-12s (and later the SR-71s) were first flown to their new remote base at Kadena AFB in Okinawa, the local people thought that this strange and somewhat wicked-looking airplane was shaped like the habu snake. They started calling it the habu airplane, and later just habu. Crews who flew the airplane were also called Habu, and the name came to be recognized with the blackbird program and even incorporated into the insignia worn by the crews on their uniforms."

I still remember references to it all over the island, even in concrete slabs miles from the base.