Warbird Information Exchange

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYsMli57 ... re=related

I love the comments on this one that was linked from the beach vid.

DVK

Hate the "special sound effects" on the first, love the comments on the second, especially the one from the "Ford GT" guy, who claims that the SR-71 is still classified... If it was, then I couldn't get a copy of the full flight manuals and the pilots who were at the public unveiling of the SR-71 sim at the Frontiers of Flight museum couldn't have said most of what they said about the performance (and more importantly performance limitations) of the aircraft and the engines.

Isn't the top speed still "classified", or at least has yet to be revealed? Or am I living in the 80's?

greg v.

The SR has gone over M3.5 during operational missions, but that was the exception, rather than the rule. It has the excess power to continue accelerating beyond M3.5, but nobody wanted to lose a pilot and plane determining exactly how much faster than M3.5 the airplane would go before it came apart.

Everything I've read indicated that the airplane (in particular the inlets) were designed for a cruise point of M 3.35. You could go faster, but things started getting hot - both the airframe and engine.

The aircraft actually rarely flew above M2.8. The limiting factor was not the airframe, it was the temperature at the face of the LP Compressor (i.e. the first disk of blades). Because once the airplane entered hypersonic flight and the engines converted to ramjets, the turbine was simply freewheeling, the front face of the LP Compressor would get very hot and there wasn't much that could be done to prevent it. As such, the temperature would get to a point that the titanium blades would become plastic and be badly damaged. Thus, the limiting speed on all missions was that temperature (1250*C if I remember correctly). Typically this restricted missions to M2.75 although in the dead of winter over Siberia, higher speeds could occasionally be reached. Talking to several of the pilots, they all said that there had been attempts to find ways to stop the turbine once the engine "converted", but they were all too heavy or complex to be usable. Had a way been devised, the aircraft more than certainly could have gone much faster.

Interestingly enough, this problem with the inlet face temperature was the same thing that limited the top speed of the F-104. The airplane was capable of quite a bit more, but again because you couldn't lock-down the blades , the speed had to be limited.

The Blackbird flew over Siberia ?? When did that happen ?

Probably quite often.

Mudge the suspicious

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