It's time for a Spod post! I have been larking about on Wikipedia which is always good for randomly smart things. Today I read about Lockheed-Martin who make very cool stuff. The pictured SR 71 Blackbird is about the coolest thing they made and it was pretty versatile as well as being nippy. Flying at a height of 17 miles it had a camera that could take a picture of a car number plate - feck!
When the plane was retired in 1990 one if its pilots did a US coast to coast speed run and crossed America in 68 minutes. How smart is that? He had to slow down to refuel on the way. Also to verify a speed record, the plane hoofed it between two radar points in St Louis & Cincinnati - these two are 350 miles apart (had to look that up as I couldn't place them on a map) and that part of the flight lasted 9 minutes. The same plane did New York to London in 1hr 56 mins. That's not bad for a plane made in the early seventies.
Next time Barack O calls me for a strategy brief (Tuesday, I reckon) I am going to ask him if he can arrange a go in said plane once he gets to The White House.
If this plane was 30 years old I wonder what they have now.
PS: Zoom in on the pic - it's me flying it! You have to look closely though, like the dude in the coffee beans pic.
4 comments:
Ha!
If you can fly that, can you give us a lift on Tuesday morning?!
We are all a bit worked up about flying and although this aircraft would prob. be terrifying to fly in, at least we'd get there quickly!!
Seriously though, the design is almost a work of art.
Hope your Sunday is good, not gardening weather at the moment though.
That's quite fast. But you could look up the scramjet for super-fast -- one of them could do London to Sydney in under two hours. A scramjet was tested over the Atlantic last year and hit 7000km/h.
I ought to add that during that test there was another scramjet in front doing 6800km/h and the controller of the jet behind was heard to shout all manner of obscenities.
Also -- not that I want to spam your blog -- one Blackbird taking a photo of a certain Merc over a certain UK city nearly crashed due to the utter shininess of the nail dazzling the pilot..
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