Aerospace & Defense
The SR-71 Blackbird’s shape gets the credit, but its two Pratt & Whitney J58 engines did the work: a compressor bleed-bypass that turned a...
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The SR-71 Blackbird’s shape gets the credit, but its two Pratt & Whitney J58 engines did the work: a compressor bleed-bypass that turned a...
The SR-71 Blackbird leaked JP-7 on the runway by design, and the one at the Smithsonian still does. But pilot Col. Richard Graham says...
Shell built JP-7 for the SR-71 with a 140-degree flash point so 80,000 pounds of it could sit in uninsulated tanks at Mach 3.2...
In 1984, SR-71 tail 61-7974 suffered a violent unstart at 83,000 feet and Mach 3 near the Kola Peninsula. The pilot shut down the...
To survive 1,000-degree leading edges at Mach 3.2, the SR-71 Blackbird had to be about 90 percent titanium, and the world’s dominant supplier was...
At Mach 3 the SR-71 Blackbird drank 8,000 gallons of JP-7 an hour, so pilots pumped fuel aft to zero the trim, nudged the...
He went up on instinct. Collins and his RSO Conrad Seagroves climbed past the known 85,000-foot ceiling and kept going — until only one...
Ben Rich's paper reshaped the Blackbird's forward fuselage with blunter chines, a rounded underside and a longer nose for radar to fit the 14-foot...
The 85% titanium skin broke drill bits every 17 holes and could only be washed with distilled water. Lockheed has teased an unmanned SR-72...
Its cavities may be packed with sand and water, its engines have sat for 30-plus years, and the spare parts were disposed of in...