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SR-71 "Upstarts"

MarkOttawa

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From Car magazine, Stephen Bayley, Feb. 2007, p.26 (text not online as far as I can find):
http://www.carmagazine.co.uk/

...the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird.  Many years ago (I was driving a Scirocco GTi at the time so that's how many years ago it was), the Suffolk branch of the USAF vouchsafed me a sneak look at Mildenhall [still there].  Just back from a Mach 5 tour of the Soviet Union [target doubtful], I found this enormous, startling, sinister aerial hot rod of the Cold War just as it had been tugged into its hangar.  The Blackbird routinely stretched by 18 inches during flight, but back on chilly Earth the elastic patterns of its exotic metals had to reverse themselves.

So there it sat, crackling, ping-ing, boing-ing, and ticking: engines and systems silent and mute, but the carcass still alive.  Such an amazing machine.  I asked the pilot about the legendary 'Upstarts' (flyboy euphemism for a single ram-jet 'stopping' and the dire effects of massive assymmetric thrust at 3000mph) and he said 'Well, gee, it just waters the crap right out of your eyes'.

Mark
Ottawa

 
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