The Legend: The SR-71 Blackbird was an engineering marvel, flying at Mach 3+ and evading all air defenses. There even seems like a follow on project, the SR-72, is coming soon.
The Question: Yet, despite its unmatched speed, the U.S. Air Force retired it in 1989 due to high costs, interservice politics, and operational limitations. Was this a mistake?
The Reasons: While invaluable for rapid intelligence gathering, the SR-71 lacked real-time data transmission and required time-intensive film processing. In contrast, the U-2 Dragon Lady could loiter over targets for hours, providing continuous surveillance.
SR-71 Blackbird Reality: Ultimately, the U-2’s adaptability, digital data transfer, and cost-effectiveness ensured its longevity, while the Blackbird faded into history—despite calls for its return amid modern security challenges.
Why the SR-71 Blackbird Was Retired Despite Its Unmatched Speed
When the United States Air Force (USAF) retired the SR-71 Blackbird in 1989, plenty cried out that it was an inadvisable move. There were warnings that retiring the aircraft threatened the nation’s ability to gain advance notice of any movements by the Soviets that could result in another “Pearl Harbor type of surprise.”
There was nothing like the networks of so many different surveillance systems that are in use today, so the aircraft was needed, it was said, to fill the gaps when necessary.
The SR-71 was a technological marvel in its day. It could fly at speeds and altitudes that put it out of reach of any adversary air defense systems or interceptor aircraft. Its onboard camera systems were some of the most advanced and sophisticated in the world at that time.
Back in Moscow, the Soviet Union’s military and security services were focused on finding any means to defeat the aircraft. Engineering teams at the Mikoyan Design Bureau and at the Gorky Aviation Plant (Aircraft Plant No. 21) dedicated themselves to the development of the MiG-25 interceptor.
The objective was for the aircraft to intercept the SR-71, one of the project’s prime requirements.
As one history of the program recalls, taking down an SR-71 was the “holy grail” of the Soviet Air Defense Forces (PVO) surface-to-air missile (SAM) batteries and the squadrons of interceptor aircraft they operated.
In Soviet times, the Air Force and the PVO existed as separate branches of the armed forces before being combined into one joint service in 1998.
Reasons For The Retirement of the Blackbird Spyplane
The cost of operating the SR-71 fleet in the 1980s was $260 million annually in the dollars of those years. This budget included the fleet of SR-71s flying numerous missions, and a significant portion of the operational costs at Beale AFB were charged to the Blackbird program.
In total, the program comprised two detachments of two SR-71s each, aerial refueling tanker support, and the USAF’s rather voluminous overhead charges.
The USAF is rarely scared by high-cost aircraft programs—provided the Air Force benefits from them. But the fact was that the major customers for the SR-71 were not the USAF, but the CIA, State Department, and the US Navy.
At this latter point, interservice rivalry and politics enter the equation. As a historical narrative article written by of the personnel who supported the program at Lockheed’s Skunk Works explained, “funding for the SR-71 came out of USAF’s budget, where it competed with other programs USAF wanted more,” which made the fact that it was the Navy and not the Air Force benefiting from the aircraft a big problem.
“There was also limited talk of the USN funding the program,” he continues, “but this also went nowhere. I don’t know any of the details, but one can surmise one hurdle: If you’re the Navy are you going to fund an aircraft that isn’t yours?
If you’re USAF, you may not want the plane, but there’s no way you’re going to let anyone paint ‘Navy’ on the side of it.”
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The other side of the SR-71 story is that it was not the only high-altitude airborne surveillance option out there, said some U-2 pilots I’ve met over the years and talked to about the differences between the two platforms at the time.
The Blackbird had some drawbacks in comparison, “which is why the U-2 stayed in service long after the SR-71 was retired,” explained a pilot who had worked with both programs.
The SR-71 was called the “sled” by people in the community because it was this Mach 3+, faster-than-a- speeding-bullet aircraft. It could outrun anything—including air defense missiles—said the pilot, “but it is a here one half a second and gone the next. No one can shoot it down, but it is not in one spot long enough to catch in the camera lens what you can with the U-2,” he explained.
“With the U-2 I can park myself over an area that needs reconnoitering and stay on station for hours—all the while taking imagery. This is the kind of coverage needed in the present day when there are developments on the ground that have to be monitored over a long period of time.”
The other issue, said a retired US expert on the two programs, is “there was a sense of rivalry between the two programs. There was this stigma attached to the U-2 people that they were somehow the ‘second string or the JV team,’ and the SR-71 was number at the top of the pyramid. This made the U-2 people try harder.”
“Trying harder meant they made themselves easier to work with. The U-2 went to continuous digital download in real-time of what it was seeing. The SR-71 never did. If you wanted to utilize their aircraft you still had to drop film, have it developed – it was time-consuming and resource-intensive in the way the U-2 was not.”
SR-71. SR-71 photo taken at the National Air and Space Museum. Taken by 19FortyFive on 10/1/2022.
“The SR-71 people never wanted to change,” he concluded. “They would tell you that ‘we serve the national interest, so you have to do everything our way.’ The U-2 just made it an easy choice to utilize them over the SR-71, which is why the ‘sled’ was taken out of service when it was.”
About the Author: Reuben F. Johnson
Reuben F. Johnson is a survivor of the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and is now an Expert on Foreign Military Affairs with the Fundacja im. Kazimierza Pułaskiego in Warsaw. He has been a consultant to the Pentagon, several NATO governments and the Australian government in the fields of defense technology and weapon systems design. Over the past 30 years he has resided in and reported from Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Brazil, the People’s Republic of China and Australia.
