This particular copy-pasta of the story is dated to 2022, but the story is much older (I mean, obviously it happened in the 60s, but I think the word-for-word copy is more recent). The story was published online at least as early as 2007: https://web.archive.org/web/20071201072335/http://www.916-st...
I love hearing these stories about these little automatic backups and failsafes kicking-in and heroically doing their jobs in the case of unthinkable situations (e.g
the flight suit emergency oxygen, automatic parachute etc here). I get kinda goose pimples thinking about all the systems that were probably spasmodically firing off in that last second or two or flight (and perhaps in the split seconds after breakup if they had power still?), trying their damn best to valiantly do their final important tasks, even when doomed to fail.
Kudos to all the engineers involved.
Anyone got any other first-hand stories or links to similar stuff?
I'd highly recommend the book Skunk Works by Ben Rich. It's about the engineering team at Lockheed Martin that designed the Blackbird (and the U-2, and several other amazing planes), and describes many of the engineering challenges in detail.
The Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 community has been going nuts over the latest Maverick release in the sim. In this, you can fly the Darkstar and take it up to around 250,000' AGL and hit Mach 10. The whole trailer is worth watching but the Darkstar scene is at the end.
Words do not describe the feeling of flying this thing in VR on a high end gaming rig with a full HOTAS setup. Although truth be told the FA-18 is the more fun plane to fly with the low altitude landing challenges.
I was breathing very hard by the end of one but nailed the A rating. It was intense.
I thought the Darkstar plane (or a copy, since it disintegrates in flight) would return at the end of the movie to save the day or as a surprise, but it didn't.
I got the feeling they recut a lot of the first act in post. A lot of effort was put into the darkstar both in production and in marketing and it was turned into a throwaway
I got the feeling that the whole Darkstar scene, and the entire movie after the helicopter gunship missed with his cannon, were added just to padded the trailer with nice footage. I absolutely loved seeing the (virtual) F-14 fly, I think that I've seen all publicly available F-14 footage on Youtube a dozen times. But the actual story was bookmarked between Maverick getting sent to Mirimar (or North Shore, whatever) and looking down the barrels of the Mil MI.
I don't think disintegrating at mach 10 would be survivable. You're basically a meteorite at that point burning up in the atmosphere, not to mention the speed at which you'll hit the ground even with a parachute if the parachute could even stay intact at that speed.
Yeah that scene completely ruined my suspension of disbelief (which was already set to 7/10 because Top Gun is pure entertainment anyway).
I guess you could theorize a 'capsule' consisting of some part of the cockpit that would last long enough to decelerate the pilot to a "more survivable" speed, no idea what the engineering tradeoffs are there though.
Is there a large difference between being ejected at mach 3 or mach 10? The heat is probably unpleasant after a while but wouldn't be the strongest drag force be felt around mach 1? Different mechanism but imagining a kung-fu master breaking a steel bar with his pinky right now...
I've read declassified CIA documents about ISINGLASS and RHEINBERRY, proposed very high speed recon platforms.
One "advantage" — apparently not to be emphasized to the pilot — was that there was no way for a pilot to eject and be captured in enemy territory, a la Francis Gary Powers. At the velocities the a/c would reach over the USSR, if it had a mishap the environment would be so severe the Soviets wouldn't even be able to determine from the wreckage if it was manned at all.
I could have literally been thrown together for marketing reasons. It was turned into a nice promotional event in both microsoft flight simulator and Ace Combat 7
Such a fascinating read! I particularly enjoyed the part where they are testing the radar cross section of Have Blue, the initial design for the F-117. They had put it up on the test stand, but think the radar is malfunctioning, as they don't see any returns on the scope. Finally, they get a tiny return -- a bird had landed on the test object!
The F-117 is such great plane, and defense project. Developed as complete black project, it was delivered in time and, allegedly, in budget. The latter point is hard to verify, after all they used parts from the F-15 and F-16 programms. Up to the point where congress challenegd the spare needs for those programms.
The B-2 and F-117 are so bizarre and alien looking compared to everything that came before and after (in a good way). If we were picking planes for a space opera, IMO the big villain guy would fly around in a B-2, his minions would get F-117s, and probably the hero would get a Blackbird (although, with a less menacing paint job).
Love that book. Sled Driver is also worth checking out. It focuses on things from the pilots perspective, but from memory the pilots had to have a fairly intimate understanding of their vehicles, so a lot of discussion of the mechanics/engineering.
Offtopic: Skunkworks, and Master's of Doom are two of my favourite non fiction books, and they both had a similar vibe. Liftoff (Eric Berger) was another. Can people recommend more books like this?
I 2ed this recommendation. After reading the book, I felt like I understood the fundamentals of why the Blackbird program was limited in scope and time in contrast to their cheeper to build and operate style aircraft.
I second this recommendation. I've read this book more than once. I'm amazed at how quickly they developed and shipped product, and developed their own tooling in the process.
Related to backups and fail-safes heroically doing their jobs - Found on HN awhile ago - stories of successful ejection seat deployment saving each pilots life. https://martin-baker.com/ejection-tie-club/
Synopsis: Goose's death was based on a real accident, but ejection protocol was changed by the Top-Gun timeline. Had Goose followed procedure, he should have survived the ejection.
Even modern 0/0 seats (i.e. theoretically survivable for zero airspeed and zero altitude ejections) carry inherent risk. When I was in the military a friend of mine was killed ejecting in an emergency shortly after takeoff. You're sitting on a loaded and primed tube of explosives; there's no way to make that totally benign. Just a few days ago the Iranians lost two pilots when their ejector seats malfunctioned in a hangar and catapulted the occupants into the roof of the hangar.
Ejection seats are inherently dangerous for sure. Even an ideal ejection is a big enough hit on your spinal column your height will measure different for a bit afterwards.
To those interested in the blackbird, the museum of flight had a series of panels on their youtube channel, including actuals sr71 pilots and mechanics [1]
Lots of more minor annecdotes (including a brown pants one). One thing I learned is that the idea that the sr71 flew faster than anti-air missiles is a misconception. But the missiles at the time couldn't be reprogrammed once launched, so what made it safe is that because the sr71 flies so fast and so high, between the time the missile is launched and the time the missile reaches the expected sr71 position and altitude, the sr71 will have had time to change course and be far away.
That's what I immediately thought of as well; for some reason the people telling SR-71 stories seem to be great story tellers, and despite having read the Speed Check Story probably a dozen times by now, it's hard to resist when it pops up again.
There is currently no efficient process for going from the oxide to the metal. The only processes used at scale involve reducing titanium chloride with more reactive metals (sodium or magnesium). They are batch processes and there are significant waste issues and inefficiencies having to consume a more reactive metal to make the metallic titanium.
The articles are dead or just impossible to find now, but at the time I recall reading about a vicious intellectual property fight between the Metalysis founders and some of the other researchers who had worked on it at Cambridge. My take was that Metalysis won the IP fight but the people who lost had better hands-on knowledge of how to make the process work, so everyone lost in the end. Metalysis took forever to actually offer titanium powder as a product even though it was "almost ready" for a decade.
The other issue affecting Metalysis product, which might have persisted even if not for the IP fight, is that it has more trace oxygen in it than titanium made in the traditional batch processes. This is important because titanium loses ductility at even low levels of oxygen incorporation.
There's a reason why the Washington Monument in Washington DC was topped by an aluminum tip. At the time it was one of the fanciest metals you could get to honor the Father of the Nation.
“On the planned test profile, we entered a programmed 35-deg. bank turn to the right. An immediate unstart occurred on the right engine, forcing the aircraft to roll further right and start to pitch up. I jammed the control stick as far left and forward as it would go. No response. I instantly knew we were in for a wild ride." ... at Mach 3.2 and 78k ft.
An unstart is a specific phenomenon where supersonic flow of air into the engine gets disrupted. It's very different from a compressor stall where the airflow _inside_ the engine is disrupted. Wikipedia has a pretty decent explanation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unstart
In movies you see military folks with a very dry sense of humor. Doubly so for Airforce/Navy pilots, and then test pilots just bury the needle.
Having worked with a few different veterans over the years (army, Intelligence, and submarine) I don't have anything in my small but diverse sample size that disagrees with that mythos.
Golden Era NASA was mostly pilots and quite a few of them test pilots. "Houston, we have a problem" is iconic but as far as I can tell, not exceptional.
I read Chuck Yeager's autobiography when I was a kid. I remember from that that when a fellow test pilot fatally crashed, they'd say he "bought the farm".
I do wonder if the words should be further away from each other phonetically though - start … unstart seem close enough to be confused if the radio is noisy
Nobody is going to be talking about an unstart over the radio in an emergency situation. It took 2-3 seconds between the unstart and the aircraft disintegrating.
I suspect the pilots and ground crew save their energy to fight about the things they are likely to say over a radio and let the engineers do whatever they want with the rest.
Unstart is a lot less evocative than “flameout” as used in the Top Gun movie. Flameout sounds like the plane is on fire. Especially if garbled.
Meanwhile, if your righter pilot sounds like he said engine start while flying? That’s only gonna happen if the engine already shut down. So that’s only ambiguous until the pilot keeps talking, in which case you know he was able to restart the engine before losing consciousness, versus the end of that conversation.
The supersonic shockwave-cone would enter the engine intake, which leads to an un-start. The weird cones that stick out the front of the engines can be manipulated to slow down the incoming air and keep it below supersonic at the intakes, which is normally done automatically with little analog computers that apparently failed somewhat regularly and in this case spectacularly during a banking turn.
In the course of helping an acquaintance do research for a book, I listened to hours of interviews with an 80 year old aerodynamics specialist who worked for Boeing for decades. It was fascinating stuff. One of his specialties was the design of the inlets for jet engines and, through the conversation, I learned that the inlet is the entire aerodynamic approach to the actual engine intake, starting before the air even encounters any of the structure of the aircraft. Turns out that certain designs cause turbulence out in front of the aircraft and all of that path to the intake must be taken into account.
He referred to the SR-71 inlet design and called the potentially catastrophic disruption of the air an "inlet unstart."
The unstart problem was eventually solved by microelectronics becoming sufficiently advanced to add a digital computer controlling each engine spike, I believe based on a 68k.
>“The next day, our flight profile was duplicated on the SR-71 flight simulator at Beale AFB, Calif. The outcome was identical. Steps were immediately taken to prevent a recurrence of our accident."
When he says 'flight profile', is he referring to the full flight plan/mission (i.e. it could have been simulated beforehand and prevented the crash), or does he mean the specific circumstances that arose during the flight (the malfunction)?
Educated guess they mean the moments leading up to the accident. FTA this was an incident during a test flight. If they lost the plane during a normal mission then they'd need repro steps, but in this case the flight was itself an experiment, so the distinction between the two is pretty fine.
> On Jan. 25, 1966 Lockheed test pilots Bill Weaver and Jim Zwayer were flying SR-71 Blackbird #952 at Mach 3.2, at 78,800 feet when a serious engine unstart and the subsequent “instantaneous loss of engine thrust” occurred.
A bit later he says:
> “On the planned test profile, we entered a programmed 35-deg. bank turn to the right. An immediate unstart occurred on the right engine, forcing the aircraft to roll further right and start to pitch up. I jammed the control stick as far left and forward as it would go. No response. I instantly knew we were in for a wild ride."
For Blackbird fans, the Intrepid museum in New York (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrepid_Sea,_Air_&_Space_Muse...) has a real one on display; technically it's an A-12, the reconnaissance version. That's in addition to a Concorde, that you go over :) and a space shuttle that you can't :(
Perhaps it was due to the aircraft's larger-than-life reputation, but the real thing was rather smaller and must less striking that I was expecting :(
The Seattle Museum of Flight also has an A-12 Blackbird (an M-21), and a Concorde that you can actually walk through. No space shuttle, but they do have a Shuttle Trainer Crew Compartment that you can walk through.
It’s well worth a visit if you’re in the Seattle area and are into aviation or space stuff.
This is the most exciting story I’ve read this year. What a ride. The bit at the end about his copilot wondering if he’s still there was awesome. Netflix should make a series about this.
You can experience this first-hand if you are driving: roll down one window and keep the others up while you are at highway speeds, oftentimes that feeling of the air vibrating and pulsing when you do that is the same effect. Outside air at slightly less pressure due to the movement across the car body is interacting with the cabin air, causing the whole mass to oscillate, also called wind buffeting.
When airflow around an object is spoiled, not aerodynamic, it creates oscillations of high and low pressure. Here's an example of buffeting on a wing during a stall. https://youtu.be/6UlsArvbTeo?t=94
Basically getting banged around. It's like a series of rapid blows. In the case of aircraft it's where everything just rapidly swings from side to side.
Eh, no, the pre-stall buffeting in small aviation is more like driving on small rubble, or like touching some of that vibrating paint marking the side of a highway, maybe a bit stronger than that. Some aircraft do not buffet at all when approaching critical angle of attack, which is actually worse for safety - you're deprived of a useful signal. And regardless of whether they buffet or not the standard stall warning in big aviation consists of shaking/vibrating the stick/yoke (called a "stick-shaker"). Every professional pilot is intimately familiar with that kind of feedback from their training on smaller aircraft and will instinctively push on their controls mostly without thinking. Unless they actually want to stall the plane, for example for aerobatics.
Think of the condition of a loosely attached tarp covering a load on a trailer. The condition of the tarp after even a relatively short drive at highway speeds will be pretty rough (and the same for whatever it's beating into). This flapping around is called buffeting, or occasionally (much to my vicarious chagrin) "buffering" in motorcycle circles.
Just wind hitting the body. If you've ever ridden a motorcycle in high winds (or high speeds) it's amazing how much force it exerts on your body. It typically "buffets" or feels like a rapid series of someone pushing or lightly hitting your body. That's at ~70mph, I can't imagine what it's like at mach 3.
I believe it's related to the phenomenon that makes whistles work. A flow instability produces an oscillation, which results in intense pressure fluctuations adjacent to a surface which then experiences corresponding mechanical forces.
Using 2200 mph (not 22,000) I get about 0.6 g acceleration. What surprised me is that to do a 180 would take 314 miles / 36 miles per minute or 8.5 minutes.
Wups. I'd misplaced a comma & added a zero. 1,000 m/s ~= 2,200 mph, and that's what I'd used in calculating.
That said, I'm still not sure I'm using the calculator correctly, though I've checked against a few alternate methods and designs (e.g., the Stanford Torus, at 1.8 km / 1 RPM) and results check out.
> After helping me with the chute, Mitchell said he’d check on Jim. He climbed into his helicopter, flew a short distance away and returned about 10 min. later with devastating news: Jim was dead. Apparently, he had suffered a broken neck during the aircraft’s disintegration and was killed instantly. Mitchell said his ranch foreman would soon arrive to watch over Jim’s body until the authorities arrived.
Luck and great engineering. You're right, by the pilot's admission he was only along for the ride once the plane disintegrated. The headline could be seen as a bit misleading, but the story as told by the pilot is pretty interesting.
Reminds me of a quote attributed to Picasso: Inspiration exists, but is has to find us working. The hard engineering work and planning is what enabled the good luck to exist.
The work of the engineers that kept him alive was all done before the accident, not simultaneous to it. When the accident was unfolding, the engineers were either unaware or assumed the pilot was dead.
I parsed it the way you did at first, but on second reading, I believe it could be rephrased to "the work of 100 engineers simultaneously attempt" to make it clear the simultaneity referenced all the various systems working together.
“100 engineer’s” isn’t grammatically correct to begin with. You need either “100 engineers” or “100 engineers’”. The parent post assumed the former and you the latter.
That was more than just luck, descending in the pressurize suit and having the presence of mine to understand the situation, ascertain limitations and abilities, saved his life. He could’ve easily panicked on the way down especially with the oxygen line the way it was.
Right, for example he said he took off his mask so that he could see his altitude and manually deploy his shoot if necessary.
The whole story sounds horrific and it's very unfortunate the co-pilot died.
The other bit I found interesting was how they were able to replicate the accident in a flight simulator. Can you imagine the work that went into that simulator as well? Would be awesome to see the systems involved.
Very cool story - makes you wonder what the state of the art is.
He didn't take off his mask, he took off his visor (or rather held it out of the way). The flight crew of an SR-71 wear pressure suits very similar to that of astronauts. The helmets they were are also similar in appearance, at least. They've got a "sunglass" visor that slides down over the transparent bubble of the helmet. This is likely what he was "removing". It sounded like the latch that would normally hold it in its stowed position broke, necessitating him holding it out of the way (mentioned several times). You can see a close up of the helmet here [0], full body view [1], side view with the visor up [2]. The crew doesn't wear a mask light you'd see in, say, a fighter jet. The entire suit is pressurized. I'm not even sure a crew member is capable of removing their helmet without assistance. They certainly need help getting the entire suit, gloves and helmet on & sealed.
The sim also struck me as very interesting, especially for 1960's technology! How much do you want to bet that they ran every test flight through the simulator first after this accident?
I watched this movie just a couple of nights ago, and I have to admit that this looks very plausible. At the same time, this very SR-71 breakup story may be the inspiration for the Darkstar breakup, considering that Lockheed Martin was involved in the production.
I hate the "it was all a dream" take. You see it for literally every movie and it's a completely lazy way to analyze a film. I like this idea better; that maybe, just maybe, they took inspiration from a real life event where the pilot did survive. There's numerous stories from the 50's and 60's of pilots landing in farmers fields having ejected from their disintegrated aircraft.
Previously discussed:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=133282 (2008)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=519337 (2009)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4652643 (2012)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21500153 (2019)