If you look around online you'll find the story of a civilian Cessna checking in with atc air traffic control, for a speed and altitude check overheard by a marine f4 phantom 2, the marine pilot asked for the same from atc, atc replied to the marine pilot I have you at altitude blah blah, speed 640 knots, an SR-71 returning from a recon mission broke regulations, and radioed to the atc requesting the same, received a reply I hold you at 80,000 feet moving at 3,000 mph😂😂😂

I’m in the same boat. It’s my favorite aircraft overall. The look, performance, and era of service was all top notch.

Yup! I still remember stumbling across it in an Encyclopedia Britannica, in my elementary school's library in the very-early 90s. I just happened to pick up that book, at random, and was paging through it, when there she was... A photo of the Blackbird, set against a mountain range! 😳 🥹 That was all it took! ❤ From then on, whenever we had 'library time'... I was over there trying to find that same book, trying to find that same page!

Don't forget that it was designed without a calculator, but a slide rule

​@@someguy95981and it will never be used to that degree again..... Human precision I think everything will be ai generated it will be absolutely superior but won't hold the magic of the BB

does anyone know why its called HABU? or what that stands for?

🤣🤣👍👍

@@justachipn3039 Tall tales right?

@@SaltyMeatHook Well, I'm an old retired Navy Carrier Vet that loves aircrafts. I've heard a lot of really cool stories about the SR-71. Yours is one of many... there's more stories similar to yours. Thx... If you have any more, I'd love to hear them.

@@justachipn3039 Thanks for your service. My Beale days were the best of my career.

@@SaltyMeatHook some people just can't accept that military or defense industry workers due to t heir interests end up in the comment sections of videos in that same genre of the jobs they worked or served our country in.

Radar lock is easy to achieve. It's getting the missile to catch it that's the problem.

@@kinte1870 No, it's not. While modern radar absorbing surfaces were not available at the time, the designer(s) of the SR-71 put composite-honeycomb areas on the nacelle inlet spikes, the nacelle chines and on the wing and elevon edges, as well as on the fuselage chines. This, along with the round engine compartments and curved surfaces on the fuselage, reduced the radar cross sections tremendously. In addition to all these design measures, the max. speed of the Blackbird made it very difficult to achieve a lock that was needed to guide a mid- or long-range (air-to-air) missile to the target. And even if such a lock would have been achieved, the missile still needed the (constant) guidance/reflection of the interceptor's radar, until it reached the terminal path (where it could use its internal radar or IR). And that's where the low radar profile and the high speed of the SR-71 kicked in. Quotes/pilot statements mentioned in this video prove that interceptors needed to know the exact flight path and that the SR-71s even had to dump fuel to highlight their positions, during these training sessions. Large stationary Soviet radar sites on the ground may have detected SR-71s in Soviet airspace occasionally, maybe even regularly, but the Blackbirds' ECMs, speed and altitudes made it impossible to intercept them with ground-to-air missiles. Dispatched Soviet interceptors had to be guided by large ground stations (as the radars of the S-75 AA-systems were usually jammed or suffering of drop-ins caused by the ECMs and the SR-71s low radar profile), as their on-board radars struggled with the SR-71's low profile and speed, but the interceptors were usually unable to find and/or chase the Blackbirds, let alone getting sufficient lock/guidance time. The crippled SR-71 over Warsaw Pact territory was a different matter, obviously, I am guessing that it could be chased and maybe even be tracked visually for some time, at least.

@@kinte1870 Yes, and that's why the Viggen is alone to have _confirmed_ radar lock "kills" among non-US airplanes. And several confirmed locks to that...

As an American with family in Sweden, I appreciate your telling of that story. I think the creator of this video told it in an older video of his. The Swedish pilots are true heroes and I hope the US continues to honor their bravery through support and cooperation. Most countries are only as strong as their allies. History has shown us that the US is no exception. I thank my ancestors, family, you, and your countrymen for keeping the Blackbird safe in such a dangerous era.

​@@kinte1870Now the blackbird couldn't evade anything we have lazers now, no matter how fast it is it can't surpass the speed of light. Still my favorite aircraft like the biggest troll aircraft to the world. 😂

Your correct, the SAABS escorted the SR71 to safety from Russia fighters

@@kevinroark5024 ok just making sure I’m not going crazy 🤣

100% correct

heh Indeed! I do believe Alex included that story in one of his other Blackbird videos ☺️ And if *_I'm_* also remembering correctly, they were giving thank-you medals from the US, but also that it's officially still classified... Or that it was, up until only recently...

Yes the got the medals in 2018 , a couple nof years before the sr-71 was delivered to Duxford for the help the UK did with det4...where the plane in that story flew out from.

That sounds worse than a potus election.

James - Election? I am assuming that you meant elevation?

@pike100 thanks. No, it was supposed to be an ejection.

That was he one where the drone collided with the 71, correct? I don't think the crew ejected right away. They stayed with the nose section until they'd descended to a safer altitude and slower speed. Both crew survived the ejection and came down safely, but they landed in water and the RIO opened his visor....letting water in and drowning him.

@samsignorelli No, the one I'm talking about is the only one at altitude. They had an engine shutdown, and it ripped part of the left wing off. We still don't know how the crew got out the piolet died the reo survived. But he was knocked out and woke up somewhere around 30k feet falling to the ground. I believe it was over west TX.

I couldn’t agree more

Would make sense that it could hit that speed, given that it's published cruising speed is mach 3.2 and top is 3.3, that seems too close together. If it pushed all out it definitely could go faster

Nope, the engine shock cones couldn’t handle that

The issue is surface heating at those speeds in that era for those prolonged times the plane would borderline liquify some of its parts lol. I suspect that xit could prolly push up close to Mach 4 in a pinch but would need a lot of TLC on the ground after it did it.

@@mattadams7922 and only in short a burst so the skin doesn't get to full temperature

@@mcamp9445they could and did. They were more at risk for an un start at those speeds, but were achievable and by many accounts achieved.

F-22 has more RADAR power than the F-14, that's what was said in the video. It also has a properly pressurized cockpit (and so does the F-35), so if it could make it's way up to 60k feet and stay there, the pilot wouldn't have a problem. I'm quite certain that the FB-22, had it been developed, would have likely been able to attain a higher ceiling still than even the F-22, due simply to the fact that that design had significantly more wing area with the same engines.

F22 is Just mind blowing. A true Apex predator. Props to American aeronautical engineers.

@@44R0Ndin I didn't catch it in this video either, but Alex has stated before in other videos (correctly) that the F-22 has more thrust per engine than the SR-71 did. So OP is actually right. It obviously has a more powerful radar than the F-14... the Tomcat's radar is pretty iffy by modern standards.

@@collander7766yeah major difference is the sr-71 is most efficient above Mach 3.

@@collander7766the raptor engines make more thrust at sea level and well below 1,400mph. A blackbird makes far more thrust than a raptor at 60,000 feet and above Mach 2.

I was just ranting about this very thing in on another comment. Those engines made that jet from my POV. It sort of just barely worked, but it consistently and constantly worked at the new limits it unlocked. We need a new type of engine that does a similar thing with our jets. One that unlocks new fuel efficiency and power capacity by expanding the range of the engine capabilities with a hybrid engine. We could have had one now if there was the budget and urgency for one. It's time to start focusing on new tech that truly changes the options available to fight with and shores up the weaknesses we have with fuel transport. Possible enemies have much greater capabilities now. Our advantages have been countered. We need jets that have much longer legs and we also need a lot more missiles. Like, a lot a lot more more missiles. We truly lack the capacity for a sustained fight and the ability defend and deliver fuel for the weapons we have. More fuel and ammo please. If an enemy overwhelms our defense capability and destroy our refueling ability we will suddenly be in a situation where a force multiplier gets divided and we end up in a far more bloody battle. The refueling capability we have is much weaker now for both jets and ships. The engine makes the jet.

Celestial navigation aided with inertial reference is still only good for about a quarter mile accuracy, even with the SR71's R2D2. It was nowhere close to GPS accuracy but it didn't need to be any more precise than that anyway.

@@Skinflaps_Meatslapper I read that it was better than 300 ft accuracy. Translating that to English, it was probably within 30 feet.

@@LostAnFound 1300ft, you're missing a digit. And that's already in English.

my dad did the software for the celestial navigation system, working at Eglin AFB i the 1960's. It was also used on icbm's because they didn't have GPS then.

@@Skinflaps_Meatslapper I'm translating from publicly available military number to probable, actual numbers. When they give a number followed by a plus sign, the plus, or better than, is a big plus and much better than

Isn't it the same airship just set up with missles and bombs?

@nadewitt-yf6ng If I understand your question, essentially yes. The YF-12 was a modified A-12. The SR-71 was also a modified version of the A-12. IIRC, the A-12 was a CIA reconnaissance airplane and was the first to be ordered, designed and built. Then, to cover up this covert operation, the YF-12 was submitted as an intercepted to the US Air Force. The modification to the YF-12 were not trivial, and I understand it. And the modifications for the the SR-71 were extensive.

​@@bmobertthank you!

Yes, we had them at Kadena!

Nope. They had special missions aimed to lock on to the Blackbird. Those Viggens that escorted the damaged Blackbird was only on ordinary patrol when they got the call.

Jupp, there were 4 Viggens in the air that day, the first pair responding to help and the second pair taking over when the first had to go refuel, I don't know about the first pair, but the second pair was from F10, the same airbase hyoercar maker Koenigsegg use today and Koenigsegg agreed to keep the logo, so the ghost that brought that Blackbird home is still worn by Swedish powerhouses to this day

If a Tomcat was set up specifically for a Blackbird intercept, and it happened to be in exactly the right place, altitude, and direction, and an AWACS or ground radar station had a good track and guided it in, and if the Tomcat driver did his bedtime prayers the night before and was carrying his lucky egg and the RIO had his four-leaf clover, it could have a chance. The physics of the F-14 and AIM-54 are at least in the right ball-park.

@@gregiep The AIM 54 has a closing speed of Mach 5! The Blackbird would have been toast.

The SR having the altitude advantage and the beat sensors and electronic countermeasures of the era, It would have been fine. 4,000 missiles were fired at it with no hits, let alone losses. If the SR changed heading of 5 degrees upon noticing an F-14 directly ahead climbing to intercept, the SR would end up 50-100 miles laterally offset. Impossible to catch. And the blackbirds countermeasures are known to intercept the inbound missiles radar signal, copy and repeat it back to the missile off-time to make the jet appear somewhere else... And it worked close to 4000:0 (infinite) odds.

@gregiep Exactly, so in a real world scenario, no chance. I still don't know why the F-14's radar could see farther than any until the F-22. Navy, heavier and necessity? F-16 was a dogfighter..etc etc. I'd like to know the scenario under which the Viggen "obtained a lock" on a SR-71. Was it employing countermeasures/jamming and did they know exactly when it was overlying, were they at attitude and mach cruising speed over friendly skies and why a Viggen would try to lock it? Anybody know?

@tumslucks9781 No. I know the speed of the missle. I see what social media now calls a "fan boy". Besides Top Gun being an sll time great movie and that dogshit Top Gun Maverick being one of the worst movies ever, besides the F-14A stalling, being very heavy and designed in the early 1960s and the SR-71 in the 1950s, the SR-71 would be long gone before even a Phoenix was fired at over a million dollars per missle and the extreme weight of it. My father worked for Raytheon. They made missles and textbooks for children. ;) Also, the first microwave/radar ranges I believe. I PREFER THE CONVAIR KINGFISH!

The AIM-260 might make a difference too…

Sadly there were too many sole-source things like the fuel for it to come out of retirement. There’s no KC-135Q either…

I don’t know myself, but to shed some light on your experience, stop to wheels up time is also affected by stall speed, and top speed vs acceleration don’t always match very cleanly

F-22 top speed is limited to Mach 2 due to damage done to the low observable coatings.

Phantom zoom climb to 80K?

it's part of how the Swedes did it. They knew where the plane would be, and their radar was all "pull up now" to tell them when to climb. They then had mere seconds to get a lock, and if the Blackbird changed course at all during the climb, there would be no lock.

​@@brucegoodwin634 I said that and then took it down. After a Google search an F-4 back in 1959 climbed to 98,xxx feet. I was totally suprised.

Whoa! Thank you for that! At the "edge" of space!@@nadewitt-yf6ng

Sync, not sinc

Awsome info from the “Navy” world and I’ll have to admit that I always loved the F-14, but at least give Golden Credit to the F-15 for being the only “known”aircraft (or Hot Rod) to ever take off from a dead stop and still manage to shoot down a satellite. Now That’s doing something truly spectacular!!!

Yeah, I was not expecting the boiling point of blood to be a relevant issue.

​@@CptJistuce well... it isn't... unless you carve open the pilot with a knife first, ofc ^^ The human body is an enclosed system and extremely resilient to changes in outside pressure. Even in the vacuum of space your blood wouldn't boil as long as it stays inside your body! Different story for fluids outside your body (sweat, saliva, tears). But boiling blood is a trope of bad scifi movies ;)

@@Seth90 I thought it was a problem, but only in the lungs.

length! it took 40 achers to turn it around because of wing length!

The RAF had a long range 1 mW peak power E/F band radar in West Berlin in the 2nd half of the 1980's. (Range gate limit of 270 Nautical Miles). A former Warrant Officer Aerospace System Operator I know was based there and he told me that they did on one occasion spot a Mig 25 or Mig 31 get close enough to a SR-71 to be in a position to fire a missile within its no escape zone. The event was to the north of East Germany over the Baltic. If the Soviets had been tracking the Blackbird for a while and they had their Sh*t together, it would be very possible to set up. I did 6 years on the same Type 94 radar in the UK and the Falklands, most of it on the west coast at Portreath in Cornwell and Ty-Croes on Anglsey and saw many a Concorde over the Bristol Channel doing its transonic part of the run in and out of Heathrow. That shifted across the scopes as well at max chat, though one thing I did note was as soon as the aircraft went supersonic, the raw radar paint did become somewhat brighter / bigger. I wonder if the RAF tried anything against the Blackbirds out of Mildenhall, they did against Concorde's doing air tests over the North Sea in the mid 1980's (i first heard of it in March 1985 and at that time nobody had done a stern attack, the infamous Lightning one happened the April). Nice explanation on why most NATO pilots didn't arse about trying to intercept U-2's as well. It wasn't because their aircraft were not capable, it was because their survival equipment wouldn't keep them alive if the cockpit depressurized for long enough to get to lower altitudes.

Seen the A-12 on the Intrepid, a few SR-71's on the ground at Mildenhall and other air shows on USAF bases in the UK and plus the one at Duxford. Seen them in flight twice, once at the Mildenhall Air Fate and once while driving past the base in 1988.

@@richardvernon317 I saw the one on the intrepid as well, that's a nice museum.

Actually the first version of the SR-71 was the YF-12 which was equipped as a fighter. If my memory doesn't fail me only two were produced. They differenciate from the SR-71 in a sleeker nose, the SR-71 more resembling a Cobra.

My guess would be pretty well given their sensor performance and weapons capabilities. You don’t have to catch up to the target as long as your radar and weapons can

@@wtbanation6268the missiles still would need speed, range and maneuverability if an SR71 was aware it had been fired upon. So sensors and stealth alone isn’t sufficient. But they certainly ought to be able to blow the Swedish Baltic Express intercept away. Put yourself ahead of a predicted SR71 track. Then fire a good IR guided missile so the SR71 doesn’t realize there is a radar lock to evade. Ought to work. But good mission planning on the intercept or lazy SR71 planning is essential for successful kill.

@@randomgeocacher literally could not have said it any better myself. Thanks for the more detailed explanation 👌

Disagree on thrust vectoring. That is an advantage in a maneuvering fight which the SR-71 is not going to do. This is pure intercept where raw speed and a fast, long range missile is the requirement.

@@scottkelley1558 Thrust vectoring enables extremely small control surfaces & smoother maneuvering at high altitude. Both greatly reduce drag on a missile which is required to maintain at least mach 4. Sufficiently large control surfaces alone would also require ablative coatings to stay within operating temperatures. As the missile will need to accelerate from mach 2.1 at launch to mach 4+ while climbing 20,000'. Engagement length cound easily start at 60+ miles meaning even the simplest tactics by the SR could force substantial maneuvering.

RUS.🇷🇺. The Age of Space for All Mankind - Began according to Moscow Time. according to the Time of the Country with the Capital in Moscow. Gagarin - The First Earthman who Made a Manned Flight into Space. Titov - The First Earthling who Made a Manned Daily Flight into Space. Leonov - The First Earthling who Made the Entrance into the Open Space. The First artificial satellite of the Planet Earth 🌏 - Russian Sputnik 1. The First stable Signal from Space (which Mankind managed to receive) was Sent to Planet Earth - Russian Sputnik 1. Russians are Pioneers in the Sphere of Space.