This is an amazing essay from the pilot of an SR-71 (the Blackbird familiar even to X-Men comics fans).
In April 1986, following an attack on American soldiers in a Berlin disco, President Reagan ordered the bombing of Muammar Qaddafi’s terrorist camps in Libya. My duty was to fly over Libya and take photos recording the damage our F-111’s had inflicted. Qaddafi had established a ‘line of death,’ a territorial marking across the Gulf of Sidra, swearing to shoot down any intruder that crossed the boundary. On the morning of April 15, I rocketed past the line at 2,125 mph.
I was piloting the SR-71 spy plane, the world’s fastest jet, accompanied by Maj Walter Watson, the aircraft’s reconnaissance systems officer (RSO). We had crossed into Libya and were approaching our final turn over the bleak desert landscape when Walter informed me that he was receiving missile launch signals. I quickly increased our speed, calculating the time it would take for the weapons-most likely SA-2 and SA-4 surface-to-air missiles capable of Mach 5 – to reach our altitude. I estimated that we could beat the rocket-powered missiles to the turn and stayed our course, betting our lives on the plane’s performance.
Read the rest.
Wow, that is pretty good. I once flew over Gibraltar and Sicily in a C-130 on my way from the Azores to Saudi Arabia, and it took like three hours. Sounds like he did it in a few minutes.
That plane was specifically designed to outrun the SA-2.
When the SR-71 was finally allowed a public appearance at Farnborough Air Show (in the early 80s I think) the plane broke the world speed record flying across the Atlantic. While there it took off, and returned thirty minutes later with photos of Land’s End at the southwest tip of Britain and of the farthest northern point of Scotland. Then it broke the speed record going home that it had set crossing to Britain.
And the worst of it was, for the Soviets, that this airplane was based on early 60s technology (first one completed in 1962). They had to be thinking “What have the Americans got now, twenty years later?”
Used to love to see the Blackbird at the airshows at Offutt as a kid. Man, loud is an understatement.