I'd be more astonished if there isn't something superior to the SR71 (likely unmanned) that has been flying around at night from facilities like Groom Lake for years. Look at how long the RQ180 was flying around in semi-public and known about before it became seen in daylight by plane spotters in Greece. And a long time before that there were public relations approved photos of the Lockheed Martin Polecat.
There were a series of extremely public quotations from senior DoD officially recently about how they plan to aggressively retire the Global Hawk program (which is a mostly non stealth aircraft), reading between the lines it's because they have something much better.
I suspect everything comparable of late has been orbital, which begs the question what is it they’re worried about with orbital? Satellite warfare is already accelerating if the rumors are true, is it that this is untouchable still? Is there some new camera sensor where eliminating that extra atmospheric diffraction or slowing down (lol) is needed?
I am sure that the orbital capabilities are also vastly improved from what the public has ever seen. But I think there's likely a high degree of tactical value in having something that can keep station over a certain active conflict area (as an RQ180 can, maybe flying in a racetrack pattern at altitude, with sensors aimed down).
If you've ever seen the publicly released videos and audio of an RQ9 operator in communication with ground units watching the activity of a group of men/vehicles on the ground, in live real time, something like that.
As compared to periodic revisits by LEO orbit satellites that don't maintain persistent live coverage, or the extreme distance and data acquisition problem that aiming sensors in geostationary orbit at a 10x10km target area might pose.
There are satellites in geostationary orbit that have realtime live feed and agile pointing capability. However, besides the SAR, RGB style observations are limited by clouds, and also you can’t switch out the sensors on a whim. Airborne platforms are always more flexible and cheaper for certain missions.
Without leaking anything that's even remotely close to classified, WAMI (wide area multispectral imagery) sensor systems that can mount on even relatively medium sized group 3 UAV are really damn good these days. This is a pretty basic unit compared to the things that aren't publicly known:
The problem is the people in charge now have not earned that kind of faith. If they’re truly trying to relight these things, my heart goes out in advance to the neighborhood in the Southwest that burns down before they rethink it.
> The problem is the people in charge now have not earned that kind of faith.
If you set partisan politics aside for 90 seconds, you might realize that regardless of the administration publicly in charge, the government is always doing stuff behind closed doors that your brain could not even begin to comprehend how they pull it off.
Stories like this hilariously implausible "grizzled old man casually leaks secret program to Aviation Week" is like throwing a cat a ball of yarn.
Or something as mundane as cleaning up and fixing something that's been out in the weather for 20 years so it doesn't look shabby at the front gate of their base.
Or the whole "retired guy in his late 70s gives a quotation to aviation week" is a red herring intended for US adversaries, which seems like a fairly basic ruse, but might have been put together as a coordinated plan. It could have its own value of sending opposing nation state intelligence agencies and air defense people down a man-hour wasting dead end of investigating something that'll never happen.
If they were doing that they would say so. In fact if they were smart they would say that regardless of the true story. The fact they aren't saying that means they're either stupid or playing 4D chess. I know which I'd bet on.
Another theory is that some smart people already know better, and they know they're going to waste many millions of dollars investigating its feasibility, but they've been given an order from Whiskey Pete and have to at least go through the motions of writing a study/detailed report on why it's not possible to reactivate in a reasonable amount of time or budget. Never underestimate how often the US military will send a group of subordinate people to do what is effectively busy-work.
I know it's probably a forbidden topic around these parts, but the 'tic tac' thing that those FA18 pilots saw several years ago may be indicative of what Lockheed etc are flying up there. It's a hot topic in conspiracy circles but it wouldn't surprise me if a bulk load of ufo sightings were black projects being tested.
If those tic-tac videos were actually a classified aircraft, those airmen would have signed an NDA before they left the carrier. The fact that we know about it (and see the FLIR videos, regularly, released by the government) suggests that they are exactly what they claim to be; UFOs. It could be phenomena, it could be noumenon.
We've seen a lot of the stuff that used to be classified from Skunk Works, none of them are supersonic orb prototypes or flying tic-tacs. I'm not saying they can't develop that technology and hide it from the public, but it's unclear how all of the puzzle pieces we have fit together to support "Lockheed sends flying orb to Syria without telling CENTCOM" in any way.
The Tacit Blue is kinda tic-tac shaped (with wings sticking out the sides), but it's also a historical museum artifact now and, as far as I know, was quite slow and cumbersome.
This feels like the steam catapault kerfuffle from earlier this year. Maybe I'm missing some vital reason these retired technologies must be revived, but it's not inspiring when our military doctrine is "let's go back to what worked 60 years ago"
Don't forget the new 'Battleship'. You should have seen the looks on the faces of some of the DoD people when they trotted out the big CGI rendered posterboard of the thing. They know it's a boondoggle and they're kicking the can down the road.
NASA (Specifically, hotshot NASA administrator Jared Isaacman) is fixing to kill themselves some pilots.
Trivia, SR71 backseater Colonel Robert J. Roetcisender, RIP, on the right in the image below, was the designated pilot examiner who did my private pilot checkride many many years ago. It was pretty intimidating. All he asked is that I make the flight as boring as possible.
Generations of aviation enthusiasts will look back on the legendary risk management of NASA and wonder how it was entrusted to a MiG-29 aerobatics pilot.
> The Air Force and NASA destroyed a $600 million supply of spare parts for the Blackbird fleet in 2007. The move came long after it seemed unlikely, if not impossible, that an SR-71A would return to operational service.
There's also the issue of converting a tanker back so it can carry the SR-71's unique fuel again. And for that matter, making a supply of JP-7 again. No other planes today use JP-7.
it looks like it would be much easier to get a powerful regular fighter jet engine (even old Mig-25 engines were fine for 2.8M), stick it to pilotless frame and just launch. Work a bit on intake shape, modern materials, CFD, and probably you can push it well into 3+.
As time goes on, Warhammer 40k will become a better and better guide to current events, apparently. Only one question: after recovering this lost standard template constructor pattern, how will the rites be learned to appease such a venerated machine spirit?
> or processes can be restarted if they were not preserved and actively practiced.
One of the reasons why the UK went vastly over budget and behind schedule when they built the first Astute class submarine, because almost everyone who had domestic UK based hands on experience building a nuclear sub had long since retired. There's certain technical things, both military or non military, where if you stop making them for a long period of time (at even a minimal rate of production), the institutional capacity to implement them dissolves away.
To give you an idea how ridiculous this is: to start each engine, they made a cart out of two Buick V8 engines tied together - so four V8 engines to start the plane. Those V8 engines were long since out of production, so at one point they went around the country, to every junkyard, buying up every one of those V8s they could find, so they would have spares to start planes up in different places. If an SR71 had an issue and landed at an unusual airport, they had to fly the start cart and other equipment to that airport to start the plane again. Everything about this plane is expensive and one-of-a-kind. It's a hot rod that goes to space.
Rather than re-engineer the cart to use a different block? I mean, I guess when a part reaches end-of-life, your first move is to buy as many as you can, before you try to re-engineer things so it isn't needed, but... horsepower is horsepower. Torque is torque. It shouldn't be that hard to replace...
The SR-71 is cool, but this article is not at all confidence inspiring on many fronts.
Guy being interviewed by a reporter about a secret project. A secret project that is trying to resurrect an antique plane that has been subject to weather and on display as a museum piece for many years.
It sounds like a clown-show staged around a cool looking plane that's older than 90+% of HN readers.
It’s almost certainly being done by clowns on the orders of one of the clowns in chief. Note that quote, “I would drop everything to work on that” said guy who did not in fact drop anything to work on that. Reading between the lines I can hear old Mr loaf belting out “I would do anything for love, but I won’t do that!”
There was something special about the 60s in the US. Your comment implies you might not appreciate how absurd the SR-71 was. The F-35 is our latest fighter jet. It has a top speed of 1200 mph, the SR-71 had a top speed of 2200 mph. The F-35 is capable of operating at around 50,000 ft, the SR-71 was capable of operating at 85,000 ft. The F-35 has a self fueled range of about 1350 miles, the SR-71 had a self fueled range of 2,900 miles.
Look up aviation records and you'll find the SR-71. It even still holds the #1 spot for the fastest airflight (by a plane) ever. Basically, the SR-71 is old, but old doesn't mean antiquated. The 60s was the era that we went from knowing basically nothing about space, to putting a man on the Moon in 7 years (Kennedy gave his 'to the Moon' speech in 1962, first landing 1969), while we currently flail about trying to recreate it with a program lasting into the decades already. The SR-71 was another product of this era.
Back when the SR-71 was active, this magazine was nicknamed "Aviation Leak and Space Mythology" - them doing an article after the other rumours and Isaacman quotes reduces the credibility of the story, at least among Old Folk :-)
Clown show is my guess too. There's no utility for it other than rattling windows and other airshow shenanigans for bragging press releases.
There are faster (X-43 is mach 9.6 but unmanned) and higher and stealthier ships. But unless you're going to dip into the classified catalog, a rusty SR-71 is faster than the next fastest two ships which are both MiGs.
Well, the President wants to redesign the Navy to look "cool" - battleships, carriers with steam catapults again and center islands. Why not the Air Force too?
I gather they serve mostly as aggressors and test aircraft - certainly one wouldn't fly that plane into combat. They were never ruinously expensive to operate. The SR-71 on the other hand...
What? The SR-71 was a strategic reconnaissance aircraft. It was not, and never was, an interceptor. And the F-35 was never tasked with replacing an interceptor, but is a slow-ish multirole aircraft with a heavy emphasis on strike capability. And the USAF hasn't had an "interceptor" in decades (single mission, short range, high speed, point defense aircraft).
Not a trick to make an old plane fly again. The trick is holding it together and landing it.
I would imagine the problem they have with the 70 year olds they’re trying to recruit is that there are old pilots and bold pilots but well, you know the rest.
More like Mission: Impossible. Replete with a mini-doco about how Tom Cruise literally for reals skydove out of the Blackbird without a chute and landed on the enemy rocket in one take.
There were a series of extremely public quotations from senior DoD officially recently about how they plan to aggressively retire the Global Hawk program (which is a mostly non stealth aircraft), reading between the lines it's because they have something much better.
edit: for those who haven't seen the RQ180: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=RQ180+gre...
edit 2 (apologies for the X link): https://x.com/MechDesignxyz/status/2041281689838584193
If you've ever seen the publicly released videos and audio of an RQ9 operator in communication with ground units watching the activity of a group of men/vehicles on the ground, in live real time, something like that.
As compared to periodic revisits by LEO orbit satellites that don't maintain persistent live coverage, or the extreme distance and data acquisition problem that aiming sensors in geostationary orbit at a 10x10km target area might pose.
https://www.logostech.net/products/redkite/
https://www.logostech.net/products/blackkite-i/
Makes me wonder if this whole operation is just public cover for something like that.
If you set partisan politics aside for 90 seconds, you might realize that regardless of the administration publicly in charge, the government is always doing stuff behind closed doors that your brain could not even begin to comprehend how they pull it off.
Stories like this hilariously implausible "grizzled old man casually leaks secret program to Aviation Week" is like throwing a cat a ball of yarn.
We've seen a lot of the stuff that used to be classified from Skunk Works, none of them are supersonic orb prototypes or flying tic-tacs. I'm not saying they can't develop that technology and hide it from the public, but it's unclear how all of the puzzle pieces we have fit together to support "Lockheed sends flying orb to Syria without telling CENTCOM" in any way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump-class_battleship
Trivia, SR71 backseater Colonel Robert J. Roetcisender, RIP, on the right in the image below, was the designated pilot examiner who did my private pilot checkride many many years ago. It was pretty intimidating. All he asked is that I make the flight as boring as possible.
https://www.blackbirds.net/sr71/sr-crew-photos/SR71-crews/da...
There's also the issue of converting a tanker back so it can carry the SR-71's unique fuel again. And for that matter, making a supply of JP-7 again. No other planes today use JP-7.
"It's not my money!"
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=hermeus+q...
or processes can be restarted if they were not preserved and actively practiced.
One of the reasons why the UK went vastly over budget and behind schedule when they built the first Astute class submarine, because almost everyone who had domestic UK based hands on experience building a nuclear sub had long since retired. There's certain technical things, both military or non military, where if you stop making them for a long period of time (at even a minimal rate of production), the institutional capacity to implement them dissolves away.
> And Lockheed’s operational manuals for the SR-71A still exist—and are superb...
I appreciate this level of documentation.
Guy being interviewed by a reporter about a secret project. A secret project that is trying to resurrect an antique plane that has been subject to weather and on display as a museum piece for many years.
It sounds like a clown-show staged around a cool looking plane that's older than 90+% of HN readers.
Look up aviation records and you'll find the SR-71. It even still holds the #1 spot for the fastest airflight (by a plane) ever. Basically, the SR-71 is old, but old doesn't mean antiquated. The 60s was the era that we went from knowing basically nothing about space, to putting a man on the Moon in 7 years (Kennedy gave his 'to the Moon' speech in 1962, first landing 1969), while we currently flail about trying to recreate it with a program lasting into the decades already. The SR-71 was another product of this era.
There are faster (X-43 is mach 9.6 but unmanned) and higher and stealthier ships. But unless you're going to dip into the classified catalog, a rusty SR-71 is faster than the next fastest two ships which are both MiGs.
Well, the President wants to redesign the Navy to look "cool" - battleships, carriers with steam catapults again and center islands. Why not the Air Force too?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZFwOGfhRZ8
I gather they serve mostly as aggressors and test aircraft - certainly one wouldn't fly that plane into combat. They were never ruinously expensive to operate. The SR-71 on the other hand...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_v._Pepsico%2C_Inc.
It’s a true marvel of engineering.
I would imagine the problem they have with the 70 year olds they’re trying to recruit is that there are old pilots and bold pilots but well, you know the rest.