Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, every mention
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Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird comes up
Porsche (with Doug DeMuro) · Acquired
- ▶ 47:52 Ben Gilbert Like, she is the SR-seventy-one pilot, and this, you know, playing on a local bar stage is flying a Cessna, and the machinery to do so is entirely different, in the same way that you're talking about car racing splitting at this moment in…
Lockheed Martin (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 47:36 David Rosenthal And then the Blackbird and everything else we're going to get into later in the story, all happening out of Area-Fifty-One.
- ▶ 1:28:57 Ben Gilbert And you might know that eventually after the U-II, Skunk Works would create the next great spy plane, the SR-seventy-one, which we will get to, but that wasn't for a little while, so this intelligence gap was filled by this secret, not…
- ▶ 1:29:18 David Rosenthal This is heretical to say, because it's so beloved, but I think the Blackbird was a decoy.
- ▶ 1:29:30 David Rosenthal And so everybody now is like, oh, the Blackbird, it's such a shame.
- ▶ 1:49:08 David Rosenthal Okay, two other things that I want to talk about with LMSC before we come back to the coda on Skunk Works and the Blackbird and all that.
- ▶ 1:56:24 David Rosenthal So, this program, if you know anything about the SR-seventy-one Blackbird, you're like, well that's a Air Force airplane.
- ▶ 1:56:34 David Rosenthal The Blackbird was not a CIA airplane.
- ▶ 1:56:36 David Rosenthal The program that the Blackbird ultimately came out of was the A-II Oxcart.
- ▶ 1:57:33 Ben Gilbert If you're standing on the ground, and you pick up a rifle, and you shoot it, and an SR-seventy-one flies over your head, the SR-seventy-one will beat the bullet.
- ▶ 1:57:50 Ben Gilbert So, there's a fun stat about the SR-seventy-one.
- ▶ 2:01:42 David Rosenthal There wasn't enough titanium in the United States to build all these blackbirds, or raw titanium, that they could easily source.
- ▶ 2:02:00 David Rosenthal And they source a large amount of the titanium that goes into the Blackbirds, the A-Twelfs and then the Blackbirds, out of the Soviet Union.
- ▶ 2:02:17 Ben Gilbert Titanium is so hard that it will damage your tools, so they had to machine new tools for the Blackbird itself out of titanium in order to manufacture the titanium plane.
- ▶ 2:03:22 David Rosenthal Ben, are you telling me that the Blackbird had panel gaps?
- ▶ 2:03:25 Ben Gilbert The Blackbird had panel gaps, and to add insult to injury, there are a variety of reasons they decided not to have custom fuel tanks.
- ▶ 2:04:46 David Rosenthal And I believe, actually, they weren't even able to get the J-fifty-eight in the first A-twelves, and then only later in the Blackbirds did they put it in?
- ▶ 2:04:54 Ben Gilbert And we should tell people the Blackbird, the SR 71, was the two-seater Air Force version of the single-seater.
- ▶ 2:05:27 David Rosenthal So if you're looking at a Blackbird and you look at the engines, they've got these like
- ▶ 2:05:35 David Rosenthal I mean, I'm sure everybody listening has seen a photo of Blackbird.
- ▶ 2:06:46 Ben Gilbert But they did consider, I think, Kelly and the Skunk Works team were really advocating to build a tactical aircraft that was based on this, or a bomber, and that never happened, so every version of the SR-V-I or the early prototypes of the…
- ▶ 2:07:38 David Rosenthal The Blackbird comes about.
- ▶ 2:07:41 David Rosenthal Within the Air Force and the Pentagon, the project originally was called the RS-seventy-one.
- ▶ 2:07:49 Ben Gilbert And the SR-seventy-one is strategic reconnaissance, but it ended up being backwards.
- ▶ 2:07:55 David Rosenthal It happened because President Lyndon Johnson actually announced the existence of this thing in a national speech, and, uh, during the speech he calls it the SR-seventy-one instead of the RS.
- ▶ 2:08:06 David Rosenthal There's some speculation that it wasn't that he messed up and made a mistake, but that his speechwriter wanted it to be called the SR-seventy-one and intentionally modified the speech.
- ▶ 2:08:38 David Rosenthal So, the first official flight of the Blackbird happens on December, 22nd, 1964.
- ▶ 2:09:22 David Rosenthal Obviously nobody really knows, but supposedly, according to internet lore, over 4000 missiles have been shot at Blackbirds and none of them have ever hit.
- ▶ 2:10:34 David Rosenthal If you need full flexibility, you need a Blackbird.
- ▶ 2:10:48 Ben Gilbert So the Blackbird doesn't fly today.
- ▶ 2:10:53 Ben Gilbert There's a crazy stat, a little piece of trivia, about the SR-I-I, and this really puts into context how early this was and how strange it is that we've had nothing faster since.
- ▶ 2:11:07 Ben Gilbert The SR-seventy-one first flight was closer to the Wright brothers than today.
- ▶ 2:11:55 David Rosenthal Now, I don't know the details of stealth with the Blackbird.
- ▶ 2:12:22 Ben Gilbert It's more, I think, that the SR-SV-I's bottom was one of the first airplanes with a flat bottom, rather than a rounded fuselage.
- ▶ 2:21:36 Ben Gilbert But somebody at the Skunk Works reads the paper and says, huh, I think all the ways that we've been thinking about trying to make an airplane stealth, like the SR-seventy-one, with flattening the bottom a little bit and trying to use…
- ▶ 2:26:04 David Rosenthal We don't like the Blackbird.
- ▶ 2:49:50 Ben Gilbert And, I mean, the F-二-two, much like the SR 71, there's not much we can complain about with the plane.
- ▶ 2:52:43 David Rosenthal It's the R&D, but also the tooling, like we were talking about with the Blackbird.
- ▶ 3:34:53 Ben Gilbert One is something that didn't quite fit anywhere in this episode, but if you love airplanes, and you are excited about the SR-seventy-one, you should google the SR-seventy-one Blackbird speed check story.
- ▶ 3:35:06 Ben Gilbert It's an awesome story that I'm not gonna spoil for you, but is, uh, about pilot jocks at their finest, and a triumphant Blackbird.