Sled Driver: Recollections of an SR71 Pilot

/k/ here!

We're dumping Sled Driver, a 142 page coffee table book full of photos from an SR71 Pilot. It would be awesome if any of you aviation enthusiasts could pop over and provide commentary or information that we might have missed.

Come check it out!

Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=LVByrAm0bi8
youtu.be/aLe7q-vqlE8
youtube.com/watch?v=wHuBsBOF4R8
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

Fuck off faggot, this board isn't /aeroplane/

>Le gun meme
Go die in a fire you backwards hick.

it does have a form of fly by wire but only to deal with variance in thermal drafts

There are more guns than cars in the US and despite that, guns kill fewer people than cars each year. If you own a car, you're more likely to kill someone than if you owned a firearm but not a car. There's no excuse for driving a tactical assault Miata when you could be riding a Honda Grom.

>If you own a car, you're more likely to kill someone than if you owned a firearm but not a car.
Exactly why you /k/ homos need to fuck off back to your circle jerk. Cars are the real deadly weapons, yet they are completely unrecognized by /k/. Yeah people are autistic here, but they aren't THAT autistic.

The SR71 is unarmed. It's a recconaissance aircraft.

>unarmed
>emits chemtrails

pick one

Ignore the ass burgers in here OP, the SR71 is interesting as fuck.

I'll come have a look

Go and stay gone, faggot.

LOVE IT!!!! MY FAV PIECE OF HUMAN ENGINEERING.

thanks!
very interesting

Technically, aircraft are /n/, but fuck it. Dump away.

Guns have killed more people than cars over the past years with car deaths being a downward trend

hurr durr guns kill people. here in iceland there's a gun in around 60% of homes and i think we only have like 3 gun deaths or some shit. insane people kill. not the guns.

last year someone went nuts and started firing out his window and the cops just came by and said:
>"hello mate isn't it time to stop?"
and he stopped and handed himself over. don't even think he got a jail sentence for it.

such is the life in white utopia

ayy, thanks for the heads up OP

...

>utopia
trouble is people forget what the outside world is like and forget why it should be kept out
then idol hands venture out and return with treachery

admittedly a nation is not its people but the ideal to witch they adhere
unfortunately petty identity gets in the way of betterment of the whole
and forces sow division and distractions that act on low level and non important aspects

I was just replying to the misinformation. As someone who works in an ethnically diverse American city, im very well aware of who/what is killing who.

Funnily enough, so are gun deaths.

Only autonomous cars should own guns.

Ignore these fuckers. If you're interested in cars but have no interest in planes you're an autist. The SR71 is sick as fuck and I wish I knew more about planes but I just can't warrant it because I can't apply my knowledge at all where I can with cars.

okay, that was a good red. dont know much about planes, but that was dope as fuck

Being an aerospace engineer in last days of the Soviet Union must have been frustration defined.

Fun fact: Those streaks on the wings are the fuel leaking out. The SR71 had to get up to a certain operating temperature to get the panels to expand and seal the fuel into the fuselage.

...

>Cars are the real deadly weapons, yet they are completely unrecognized by /k/.

Nope. The weapons capability of cars has been acknowledged.

youtube.com/watch?v=LVByrAm0bi8

It so happens that I've had several dinners with the very last SR-71 Pilot, Col. Yielding.

It helps that both of my parents were USAF colonels / jet pilots.

He said it's very quiet and very boring when flying at high-altitude although he is glad to have the memories.

...I'm not posting on /k/, sorry (yes, the son of two veteran officers is anti-gun lol).

Also the fact that the design of the plane is inherently unstable and the plane could not be flown without computers as they make thousands of tiny adjustments every second to keep the plane in the sky.

thats the case with most military aircraft nowadays, the B2's board computers have to check the attitude i think more than 1000 times a second and make adjustments, or it would just fall out of the sky

A lot of the cargo planes can be flown without hydraulics although it would take some crazy muscle but everything that goes fast is that way. The real reason for it is the way they design the planes to reflect radar creates angles, lines, and curves that create huge amounts of turbulence in random places.

I just recently learned that the Concorde essentially died because it wasn't allowed to fly over land due to the supersonic boom.
My father remembers the boom and said it really wasn't as bad as everyone made it out to be, very similar to thunder. Never heard one in real life.

there is no way you can fly a larger plane without hydraulics, youre even fucked to death if you have a trim runaway. other than the radar shit theres no reason a sane human would construct a plane that looks like the B2.

and the concorde stuff is pretty intresting.
basically, JFK (that fucking cunt) made flying over US in supersonic airliners ILLEGAL when he realized boeing is too fucking retarded to build one. and by illegal i mean, even if you fly subsonic. PAN-AM and a shitload of other US based airlines had options for the concorde, they cancelled them when they realized they wouldnt be allowed to fly over the US.

then, guess what, the fucking DC10 managed to send a few more people to their firey death when losing a part of the engine cover while taking off. the concorde rolled over the part while takeoff, the part destroyed the wing tank, and it all started to burn.

the whole concorde fleet was grounded and they had to make a lot of changes which costed MILLIONS AND MILLIONS per plane, so they decided to change, i think only 2 of them. and then at some point they decided to fuck it, and completely stop flying.

the concorde used 23000 kilos of fuel per hour at full power and had a capacity of ~90 pax.
the A380 uses around 18000 kilos and has a capacity of up to 800 pax.

dew the math

well to be honest linear actuators could do the work of hydraulics

i thought youre talking about a hydraulic failure kek
regarding the flying part, mostly its fly-by-wire now. everything you do goes into the computer and the computer gives the command to the control surfaces (or doesnt). so you dont even have an actual, mechanical or hydrauical connection anymore between the input device and the control surfaces.

I feel sorry for your parent for giving birth to such a faggot.

isnt an all electric system lighter than a hydraulic one? there would be no leaks to worry about either

You really are spamming this everywhere, OP

> TELL THE GROUNDSPEED STORY, PAPA

you do realize the plane first flew in 1962... not really an era for small or powerful computers.

You are probably thinking of the b-2

>these are the busriders you share this board with

Nice dump OP

Ayyy thanks OP

PIC related, the sub-sonic work horse I fly every day.

I love the SR-71

Thanks OP, will check it.

i fucking hate reddit

i feel no love for the sr71
it was interesting but it seemed a little daft.
just like the b58, a poor design which could not carry conventional bombs. a bomber that cant bomb? stupid.
sure the sr71 was a little exciting, but surely it could have been better. mig 25 was nearly as fast, could have a weapons payload, didn't leak fuel, was not high tech at all.

some aircraft seem like the engineers got a little too transfixed on a goal, and really could have made a much better plane if they saw a bigger picture.

this plane was a clusterfuck

/k/ and Veeky Forums are probably the closest boards youll find on Veeky Forums, so politely fuck off.

/k/ are practically br/o/'s

i guess its easy to look at the past and criticize though. i would have thought something like this would be a waste of resources to anyone though

> in some soviet states of america you can get a ticket for having a "non functioning" vehicle on your property.

>In russia they have whole fucking supersonic airliners in their yards and nobody gives a fuck.

...

>mig 25 was nearly as fas
the mig-25 could hit mach 2.8 for a few minutes before putting the engines at risk. It could get up above mach 3 with certain engine risk including engine destruction. It could also get up to 80,000 feet for a few minutes.

The sr-71 cruised at mach 3.2 at 80,000 feet. it could get up to mach 3.5+ and above 90,000 feet.

So not nearly as fast safely. Like comparing a chevy cavalier with shit tons of nos to a f1 car.

seems like the airframe was capable to me. just shit soviet engines. it is rather ugly isn't it?

its just the thing, a lower speed but it was armed and made of steel. if it had better engines blah blah it might have set a few records

where do you get these

Speaking of /k/ and Veeky Forums together, chrck this out
youtu.be/aLe7q-vqlE8

>/k/ are practically br/o/'s
Yeah fucking right, more like /k/ and /pol/

Nothing wrong with the B-70.

The SR-71 only leaked fuel at low altitudes because when it was at high altitudes the heat would cause the aircraft to expand and it would no longer leak. Also from day one it was mean to be a reconnaissance aircraft which means it wasn't meant to carry a payload other than a camera. If the Mig-25 hit mach three it would destroy its engines so it could not sustain that speed where as the SR-71 could do that its entire flight. Finally there was the A-12 model which could carry weapons.

>Made of steel

The Blackbird is made of Titanium which is better than steel.

Try harder Slavboo.

You still have hydraulics, just less of them

i hope a lot less.

> Finally there was the A-12 model which could carry weapons.

you missed my point completely. im sorry bud, i was saying the engineers were too focused on a specific target when they designed her. im not saying the mig is better. but it does do more. it can turn harder, without breaking apart, i already said the engines sucked. but it can take more abuse, and to me that counts for something.

also speaking of ancient aircraft why do we keep the U2?

pic related badass and faster than the sr71

>also speaking of ancient aircraft why do we keep the U2?

Because it can still do some high altitude science. And it doesn't have the ridiculously high support costs that trying to keep a couple of SR-71s running would.

The program was a clusterfuck. The XB-70 did what was intended to do quite nicely. It's just that missiles made what it was designed to do obsolete.

>Nothing wrong with the B-70
sure it looks fine...

we could have drones do that

what do you people feel about the X15
youtube.com/watch?v=wHuBsBOF4R8

>more like /k/ and /pol/
/k/ likes guns because they are mechanically interesting objects with a macabre purpose and a storied history that require skill and discipline to use effectively. /pol/ likes guns (half of them, with the other half being proto-fascist) because sometimes black people get in line behind them in the grocery store and that scares them. Just because some /pol/esmokers invade every time there's a shooting doesn't mean the boards are besties.

>comparing an expedited reconnaissance aircraft to a interceptor
>impying turn rate matters in either of those roles
>implying the SR-71 didn't achieve its goals of flying higher and faster than anything that could be of threat to it

>just like the b58, a poor design which could not carry conventional bombs. a bomber that cant bomb? stupid.
The B-58 was fast strategic bomber designed to a drop nuclear payload and zoom home at high speed. It wasn't designed to drop conventional bombs at all. Just like how the Sr-71 isn't designed for intercept like the MiG-25. It was made to fly high and fast and do reconnaissance. The US toyed with the idea of an A-12 intercept version, but unfortunately we didn't have any missiles at the time that could be fired from the A-12.

>this

/pol/ would probably like the fact that you think they're besties with everyone, the fact is they just fucking with the other boards.

Cars about as many people as guns do, per year, in the US. The difference is that more than 2/3rds of all gun deaths are suicides.

Your information was misinformation, both killed about 33,000 people in the US in 2014, the difference is that ~21,700 of the gun deaths were single person suicides that didn't hurt anyone else.

That burning ball of fire is an F-104 that crashed into it. You know what else is a burning ball of fire? Your homosexuality.

>Turning
>Mach 3

What?

777 a best plane

>sure it looks fine

Actually, it does in that picture. Minus it's vertical stabilizers. They got it into an unrecoverable spin because no rudder authority. Otherwise, had they landed it, the plane could have been repaired.

OP you're a legend. Thanks for sharing a great read.

Firing up x plane in your honor.

You're going to give OP shit for posting something badass, yet allow 'Twingo' threads to happen here everyday?
Yeah no, you're the ones who can fuck off.

Thanks for this. I've heard about this book so many times.