“Like every other crew, we wanted this mission. It was special, it was a first, it would cover territory that the jet had never been in, and it would provide…
The first of a series of Silverjavelin-coded long-distance, high-speed, high-altitude test flights took place on January 27, 1965. In about one hour and forty minutes, article Number 129 flew the…
The contract for the first six U-2s the CIA bought is the subject of an urban legend David Peters, an SR 71 pilot, was accepted into the program in 1976…
“With no forward visibility from the back seat, my RSO was looking through his view sight and had picked up the sequence of flashing lights beneath the aircraft. It was…
Robert Powell, the first SR-71 pilot to clock 1,000 hours of flight time in the 9th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing at Beale AFB, passed away on August 27, 2021, at the…
“You know the part in the ‘High Flight’ poem where it talks about putting out your hand to touch the face of God? Well, when we were ‘at speed and…
The crew chief signaled BC to halt as the SR-71 slowly taxied into the hangar and drew near the parking spot. As usual, BC hit the brakes, but the SR-71…
A flaw was found in the batch of suits NASA was producing for the pilots before the launch of Columbia on the first shuttle mission (STS-1). Since 1941, the David…
“We had to refuel right after takeoff for only one reason, and it wasn’t because we leaked JP-7 fuel on the ground…” Col. Richard H. Graham, former SR-71 Blackbird pilot…
“Talking to Lockheed engineers later, they determined there was a good possibility if we had gone supersonic, the entire nose section might have imploded from the supersonic shock wave,” Col. Richard…