Wednesday, July 11, 2012

SR-71 Blackbird Operating Manual

The SR-71 Blackbird (SR stands for Special Reconnaissance) is or rather was one of the most famous artifacts of the Cold War, being an exotic-technology spy plane designed by Lockheed's Skunk Works.  

Its existence was famously leaked by LBJ in 1964 who also reversed the letters by mistake (it was the RS-71 until he made this public mistake, so they changed the name to SR-71...)

The plane is weird. All SR planes are weird, I guess.   My favorite story about this one is that this very large airplane leaks aviation fuel like a sieve on the ground, because the plates that make up the airframe have to expand so much when the thing is flying at altitude at its cruise speed.

The operating manual for this very expensive "national asset" has been released and I am sure that all you budding Cold Warriors out there will want to rush out and learn how to fly one of these.

The manual is at
http://www.sr-71.org/blackbird/manual/

One page of the "description section" is included here in case the online manual should disappear one day.



For a general description of the SR-71 see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_SR-71_Blackbird

For a more eclectic description, see
http://www.voodoo-world.cz/sr71/sr71.html

No comments:

Post a Comment