Pilot explains how he Survived Blackbird Disintegration at Mach 3.2
theaviationgeekclub.com
theaviationgeekclub.com
Previously discussed:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=133282 (2008)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=519337 (2009)
Kudos to all the engineers involved.
Anyone got any other first-hand stories or links to similar stuff?
Plus, it was a beautiful plane.
[0] https://www.lockheedmartin.com/content/dam/lockheed-martin/a...
I thought the Darkstar plane (or a copy, since it disintegrates in flight) would return at the end of the movie to save the day or as a surprise, but it didn't.
I don't think disintegrating at mach 10 would be survivable. You're basically a meteorite at that point burning up in the atmosphere, not to mention the speed at which you'll hit the ground even with a parachute if the parachute could even stay intact at that speed.
I guess you could theorize a 'capsule' consisting of some part of the cockpit that would last long enough to decelerate the pilot to a "more survivable" speed, no idea what the engineering tradeoffs are there though.
The B-58 hustler is one, and the F-111 was capable of separating the entire cockpit from the airframe.
Kelly Johnson even claimed that a mach 3 ejection from the A-12/YF-12/SR-71 was survivable in just the pressure suit...
https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/79732/why-does-...
Not sure what zero lift means in this context, perhaps the drag induced by lift is neglected. It is still > 0 so drag does still increase...
One "advantage" — apparently not to be emphasized to the pilot — was that there was no way for a pilot to eject and be captured in enemy territory, a la Francis Gary Powers. At the velocities the a/c would reach over the USSR, if it had a mishap the environment would be so severe the Soviets wouldn't even be able to determine from the wreckage if it was manned at all.
Maverick died during that crash and the whole movie is just his last DMT hit before brain death. (Not my theory, lifted from the internets)
Words do not describe the feeling of flying this thing in VR on a high end gaming rig with a full HOTAS setup. Although truth be told the FA-18 is the more fun plane to fly with the low altitude landing challenges.
I was breathing very hard by the end of one but nailed the A rating. It was intense.
Offtopic: Skunkworks, and Master's of Doom are two of my favourite non fiction books, and they both had a similar vibe. Liftoff (Eric Berger) was another. Can people recommend more books like this?
https://www.amazon.com/Blind-Mans-Bluff-Submarine-Espionage/...
I think it's on par with Skunk Works. Absolutely amazing stories about submarine espionage, stealth fighters but underwater.
The Truth About the F-14 and Goose’s Death:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwS1k8LKxJg
Synopsis: Goose's death was based on a real accident, but ejection protocol was changed by the Top-Gun timeline. Had Goose followed procedure, he should have survived the ejection.
Lots of more minor annecdotes (including a brown pants one). One thing I learned is that the idea that the sr71 flew faster than anti-air missiles is a misconception. But the missiles at the time couldn't be reprogrammed once launched, so what made it safe is that because the sr71 flies so fast and so high, between the time the missile is launched and the time the missile reaches the expected sr71 position and altitude, the sr71 will have had time to change course and be far away.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbuOD6bgPc4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1uq-qOzf5o
https://www.thesr71blackbird.com/Aircraft/Stories/sr-71-blac...
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/crazy-story-how-russi...
Reducing aluminum chloride with sodium is how aluminum was produced before direct electrolysis, and it too was a much more expensive process: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_aluminium#Early_ind...
A company named Metalysis has been working on an electrolytic process starting with oxide for a long time: https://www.enterprise.cam.ac.uk/news/metalysis-successfully...
The articles are dead or just impossible to find now, but at the time I recall reading about a vicious intellectual property fight between the Metalysis founders and some of the other researchers who had worked on it at Cambridge. My take was that Metalysis won the IP fight but the people who lost had better hands-on knowledge of how to make the process work, so everyone lost in the end. Metalysis took forever to actually offer titanium powder as a product even though it was "almost ready" for a decade.
The other issue affecting Metalysis product, which might have persisted even if not for the IP fight, is that it has more trace oxygen in it than titanium made in the traditional batch processes. This is important because titanium loses ductility at even low levels of oxygen incorporation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument#Aluminum_a...
"stall" has a specific meaning, and it isn't what happened.
He referred to the SR-71 inlet design and called the potentially catastrophic disruption of the air an "inlet unstart."
Having worked with a few different veterans over the years (army, Intelligence, and submarine) I don't have anything in my small but diverse sample size that disagrees with that mythos.
Golden Era NASA was mostly pilots and quite a few of them test pilots. "Houston, we have a problem" is iconic but as far as I can tell, not exceptional.
A lot of people comment on this, but it succinctly relays the severity, in that the the pilot is alive, and the radio works.
Unstart is a lot less evocative than “flameout” as used in the Top Gun movie. Flameout sounds like the plane is on fire. Especially if garbled.
Meanwhile, if your righter pilot sounds like he said engine start while flying? That’s only gonna happen if the engine already shut down. So that’s only ambiguous until the pilot keeps talking, in which case you know he was able to restart the engine before losing consciousness, versus the end of that conversation.
When he says 'flight profile', is he referring to the full flight plan/mission (i.e. it could have been simulated beforehand and prevented the crash), or does he mean the specific circumstances that arose during the flight (the malfunction)?
> On Jan. 25, 1966 Lockheed test pilots Bill Weaver and Jim Zwayer were flying SR-71 Blackbird #952 at Mach 3.2, at 78,800 feet when a serious engine unstart and the subsequent “instantaneous loss of engine thrust” occurred.
A bit later he says:
> “On the planned test profile, we entered a programmed 35-deg. bank turn to the right. An immediate unstart occurred on the right engine, forcing the aircraft to roll further right and start to pitch up. I jammed the control stick as far left and forward as it would go. No response. I instantly knew we were in for a wild ride."
Perhaps it was due to the aircraft's larger-than-life reputation, but the real thing was rather smaller and must less striking that I was expecting :(
It’s well worth a visit if you’re in the Seattle area and are into aviation or space stuff.
javascript:(function(){let list = document.getElementsByTagName('p'); for (let element of list) { element.style.fontWeight = 'bold'}})();What is "buffeting"?
Remembering car rides as a kid, I think we rolled the offending window up just enough so the whole thing would happen above the ears.
> The SR-71 had a turning radius of about 100 mi. at that speed and altitude
At speed, that is about 4 minutes to make a 90 degree turn, traveling an arc length of 160 miles.
If I'm using this calculator right, at 2,200 mph (~1,000 m/s) and 100 mi (161,000 m), the aircraft, and pilots, are experiencing 6Gs of acceleration.
The airframe could probably handle more. Pilots probably not, especially for a sustained maneuver.
That said, I'm still not sure I'm using the calculator correctly, though I've checked against a few alternate methods and designs (e.g., the Stanford Torus, at 1.8 km / 1 RPM) and results check out.
(I'm not sure I'm doing my maths correctly, mind.)
> After helping me with the chute, Mitchell said he’d check on Jim. He climbed into his helicopter, flew a short distance away and returned about 10 min. later with devastating news: Jim was dead. Apparently, he had suffered a broken neck during the aircraft’s disintegration and was killed instantly. Mitchell said his ranch foreman would soon arrive to watch over Jim’s body until the authorities arrived.
The whole story sounds horrific and it's very unfortunate the co-pilot died.
The other bit I found interesting was how they were able to replicate the accident in a flight simulator. Can you imagine the work that went into that simulator as well? Would be awesome to see the systems involved.
Very cool story - makes you wonder what the state of the art is.
He didn't take off his mask, he took off his visor (or rather held it out of the way). The flight crew of an SR-71 wear pressure suits very similar to that of astronauts. The helmets they were are also similar in appearance, at least. They've got a "sunglass" visor that slides down over the transparent bubble of the helmet. This is likely what he was "removing". It sounded like the latch that would normally hold it in its stowed position broke, necessitating him holding it out of the way (mentioned several times). You can see a close up of the helmet here [0], full body view [1], side view with the visor up [2]. The crew doesn't wear a mask light you'd see in, say, a fighter jet. The entire suit is pressurized. I'm not even sure a crew member is capable of removing their helmet without assistance. They certainly need help getting the entire suit, gloves and helmet on & sealed.
[0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brian_Shul_in_the_co... [1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SR71_crew.jpg#/media... [2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brian_Shul_in_the_co...
My belief is that "engineer's work" changed the subject to the work.
Whilst "engineers work" makes the subject the engineers. Is that right or wrong?
Deleted after people crying spoiler but an event within the first 10 mins seems like a bit of a stretch.
We've used escape capsules instead of ejection seats at times; the B-58 had a nifty one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_crew_capsule