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SR-71 Blackbird Communication to Tower
- rbanffy 16y agoI know this has been posted many times before, but I love it every time.
- da5e 16y agoI like the metaphor of being "ahead of the jet." as a term for mastery. I know that feeling exactly sometimes.
- steveh73 16y agoIt means you know where the plane is going to be before it gets there, if you didn't already know. As in, you're planning ahead, rather than reacting to what's happening. Which I would imagine takes a lot of experience at 1900 knots.
- blhack 16y agoThere is a plane called a Beech Bonanza that is nicknamed "The doctor killer." It gets this name because it's a single engine plane, which attracts wealthy hobbyist pilots (like doctors) but it's fast. Much much faster than what these hobbyist pilots are used to. This causes "the plane to get in front of them", and for them to crash.
- kwantam 16y agoIn fairness, the other part of the killer reputation has to do with apparent design instabilities as a result of the V-tail on the x35 models. Both these and the x36 models really are beautiful planes. Another airplane with the killer epithet because of its on average high power to wisdom of pilot ratio is the Piper Malibu and its later brother the Mirage. Again, a beautiful, fast, well-designed plane that gets out in front of you if you let it. Growing up, my father flew thousands of hours in both of these planes with me in the right seat, and he was always careful to warn me about having respect for the plane's power lest it get away from you. In a way, I think he was reminding himself as much as me.
- blhack 16y agoI fly the right seat in a Bonanza pretty regularly too. A V-tail, no less D-: I worries me a little, but we're not doing anything nuts in the thing.
- isaaclang 16y agoHere's the scoop... In turbulance slow down to "manovering" speed. Don't fly in IFR conditions unless you must. Stay VFR. The airplane is designed for VFR. You say, this is not true... how many backup instruments does it have? A turn and bank? How many "partial panel" non-prcision approaches has the pilot flown in the last six months... I will anwser. NONE! Can you do a timed turn using only the wet compass? NO! Can you fly an approach using only the altimeter, VSI and wet compass? NO! Remember... only one engine and one set of primary instruments without a standby horizon and power supply. It is just common sense.
- marquis 16y agoWould you please explain what is meant by "get out in front of you"? I have very limited flying experience and am not familiar with what this means, in pilot terms: i.e. what would you experience as a pilot, and what would be happening to the airplane. Google didn't help in this matter.
- run4yourlives 16y agoThe aircraft is flying faster than it is taking you to process the changes that are occurring during the flight. There are a number of things you need to process as you fly, from radios to maps to situational awareness. For less experienced pilots, or when you have passengers than are pointing out all sorts of shit, this can take time. During all this time the aircraft is moving and the condition is changing. You need to not only know where you are now, but where you will be in the future. If you lose this, you find the aircraft getting to places faster than you can prepare for, and that can be nasty. To relate, it's very similar to driving a car for the first time. There seems to be so much more to check, from mirrors to gauges to the road. The reaction for new drivers is to slow down to give yourself time to catch up. Another analogy would be sports. If you play a team sport with those that have played for years, you can find yourself reacting to things after they have happened. This isn't because you don't know what to do, but more so because by the time you've figured it out and acted, the event has already occurred.
- isaaclang 16y agoNot really. It is an advanced design for a civilian airplane. Most Cessnas are capable of only 4g's at cruise speed. The Bonanza is capable of 11 or 12 g's. It has the potential to destroy itself due to the dynamic energy it has available at cruise speed. The V tail is very well designed. As airspeed increases the pull on the yoke is less rather than more for increased G. One design flaw was to increase the tail cord length starting with the C model without moving the front spar. This created a dynamic twisting which, under G load, causes the aircraft G load to increase without pilot input. The fix was to tie down the leading edge of the stabilizer. I have owned a Bonanza for 28 years and love it. It is an aircraft designed about fifty years ahead of itself. It is very, very safe when flown by pilots aware of the design. Unfortunately the FAA does not require owners to be trained in the capabilities of the design. Whose fault is that? I love the airplane.
- DanielBMarkham 16y agoWhen I was learning to fly complex high-performance single-engine aircraft, my instructor took me aside after one of our first flights and said, "Good news, Markham, you won't have to worry about being in a wreck in this airplane" "Really?" "Yep. You're so far behind the plane that you won't show up to the accident until ten minutes after it happens" Ouch. It's a great phrase. I think flying is absolutely the best hobby anybody can have. I could read stories like OP all day long.
- cstross 16y agoSame pilot, different anecdote, "how slow can it go?" http://tailspinstales.blogspot.com/2010/01/slowest-blackbird.html http://tailspinstales.blogspot.com/2010/01/slowest-blackbird...
- icegreentea 16y agoThe Blackbird is full of amazing stories. Skunkworks - Ben Rich's memoirs [1] is full of ridiculous stories, both of making the SR-71 as well as stories from pilots (as well as a lot of other projects). Not every thing in there can be taken at face value (his rant against the paint locker on the Sea Shadow for example... it's really the 'toxic solvents and chemicals locker'), but still full of gold. For example, they had into all sorts of problems wielding titanium for the first time. Chlorine would wreck all sorts of havoc on the plates they used, which they discovered when someone drew on a plate with a ball-point pen. And then they completely ripped their hair out when the municipality increased the chlorination in the water they were using to clean the plates. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Skunk-Works-Personal-Memoir-Lockheed/dp/0316743003 http://www.amazon.com/Skunk-Works-Personal-Memoir-Lockheed/d...
- runjake 16y agoI second the recommendation for Ben Rich's book. It's a great history lesson and explanations behind the thinking of some of the greatest aerospace hackers & out-of-box thinkers. I thought the passage about "600 mph birds" was particularly humorous because that was the first thing my young hacker mind thought of during a training section on the radar cross-section of the aircraft I was working on. It went something like this: Instructor: "So the radar cross section is reduced considerably to approximately the size of a small bird" Me: "So why don't they just look for a small bird going 600 mph?" Instructor: "..." Some years after, an F-117 was shot down during the Kosovo War, reportedly using this method (I had nothing to do with it :). I think this was probably a big learning lesson in regard to stealth technology. And no disrespect to my instructor, he was a professional and a god of his domain.
- Nemo999 16y ago
- mdaniel 16y agoThank you again, http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ , for making my web browsing experience safe from the onslaught of backgrounds and fonts.
- pero 16y agoWish I knew about this before reading; much thanks.
- shizcakes 16y agoThis is AMAZING. I didn't mind the maroon on beige as much as some, but I hate the crammed feel of a blogspot page, and it does an amazing job of freeing that content.
- zacharyz 16y agoI was wishing for a site exactly like this when I was reading.
- alanh 16y agoI’m using the iReader extension for Chrome. Works like Safari’s integrated Readability.
- fsniper 16y agoI knew Readability, but just used "no style view".
- cvg 16y agoThanks! This is a bit easier than hacking the DOM. Could have saved a few seconds.
- yuvadm 16y agoGreat story. But, seriously, Comic Sans?
- findm 16y agoman thats so bad ass
- naz 16y agoComic Sans MS, maroon on a beige background, this is what Readability was made for.
- gord 16y agoAgreed, has the visual readability of a Captcha
- joeycfan 16y agooooo THERES an idea for a project - ANTIreadability - it redoes the entire page in capcha....
- moontear 16y agoI read this on my RSS reader and was shaken when opening the original page. Why would anyone do this?
- danio 16y agoI think you need a link there to http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ : thought you just meant it wasn't readable! Readability is great: before that I was just copy & pasting to a text editor...
- shrikant 16y agoIMHO, I thought this was one of those occasions when the content and its delivery trumped presentation.
- mgedmin 16y agoThe content is why I googled for the Readability bookmarklet instead of just closing the browser tab.
- stuhacking 16y agoI honestly don't see what the big fuss about Comic Sans MS is. I read the original page just fine.
- gwtw 16y agohttp://www.regulation-london.com/attachments/images/product_large/big_fat_cock_sheath_2_v1.jpg http://www.regulation-london.com/attachments/images/product_... http://www.flightsim.com/review/alphsr71/1.jpg http://www.flightsim.com/review/alphsr71/1.jpg This happened with me and cofounder. We were stealth mode and had developed a super fast NoSQL engine that we were keeping to ourselves. We were itching to go public, but needed to score our initial round of investors before we let out our competitive advantage. Our system was clever but obvious once you read about it, so we had to keep quiet. But we were already getting a buzz among the early adopters we had invited that we rocked. Our social graph was very nimble I tell you. Now Joey (not his real name) was in charge of PR with the startup. Normally, I like to wear all the hats in a startup at its inception phase, but the incubator program we were signed up with had put it out that they preferred co-founders, so here we were. As it was our practice, we made a point of making the rounds of the various bofs, meetups, and what have you. The air was thick with repressed entrepreneural energies. Here you had the little startup doing their little dance. Ground check! Next up the guy with "serial entrepreneurs on board" and dancing the dance. Ground check! What indignities. Did PG ever go through all this? http://www.thisdaytrivia.com/content/red_baron.jpg http://www.thisdaytrivia.com/content/red_baron.jpg http://philosophistry.com/scans/2009/06/paul-graham-face.jpg http://philosophistry.com/scans/2009/06/paul-graham-face.jpg I don't know but we gotta go through it. Soooo, to make a very long (hehe) story short I was screaming in my vaneroid "smart" phone "we have the fastest No-SQL enginge!!!!" but I couldn't face my inner entrepreneur (standing right next to Joe, no less, mf..) looking at me like "dude! think!!" So. I held back, even though I was always the master of P.R. But then, I had a warm tingly feeling in my crotch as I heard Joe perk up right next to me and say (in a very confident voice I must add) that "our social graph API guarantees O(1) response time". Yes! That's the day Joey and I became a team. Sure it was a shot gun marriage before that point but now I knew I had a real partner in Joe. It still gives me a hard on to think about that day!
- matwood 16y agoGreat story! Those SR-71s were amazing machines in the air. On the ground was a different story. I remember reading about how they leaked all sorts of fluids on the ground because the body was designed to expand at the higher altitudes and speeds. Amazing engineering.
- alanh 16y agoSubmitted 7 months ago on a more readable, seemingly more original site. http://www.vfp62.com/SR-71.html http://www.vfp62.com/SR-71.html http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1247709 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1247709 (good amount of discussion)
- rudyfink 16y agoIn reference to the uniform voice of center controllers--the "Houston Center" voice, Tom Wolfe tells a related story about pilots in "The Right Stuff." He asserts that all of the test pilots of the era copied the slow, calm, and always subtly positive delivery of Chuck Yeager as the pre-eminent pilot of the day. Other pilots in turn copied the test pilots and so Yeager's voice floated down and became the mold for all American aviation radio communication. I'd guess that the author is correct in that the controllers copied the delivery of the voice of the space program from Houston, but those controllers were usually former test pilots or members of the military flight programs themselves, so we're probably still thinking of the same unflappable voice.
- po 16y agoHere's good audio of that voice. Listen to Capt Sullenberger calmly tell the tower "we're going to be in the Hudson" http://www.exosphere3d.com/pubwww/pages/project_gallery/cactus_1549_hudson_river.html http://www.exosphere3d.com/pubwww/pages/project_gallery/cact...
- joe_bleau 16y agoThe SR-71 flight manual is (mostly) online, if anyone is interested: http://www.sr-71.org/blackbird/manual/ http://www.sr-71.org/blackbird/manual/
- dfghjkhgbfd 16y agoThere is a similar one of an SR71 tooling around over Cuba at god-knows-what 1000s of feet being asked to move to make way for another airplane. A Concorde goes past, with people in shirt sleeves happily sipping their champagne.
- 16s 16y agoWalter spoke: "Los Angeles Center, Aspen 20, can you give us a ground speed check?" There was no hesitation, and the replay came as if was an everyday request. "Aspen 20, I show you at one thousand eight hundred and forty-two knots, across the ground."
- davidmurphy 16y agoThe SR-71 Blackbird went from LA to DC in around an hour. Imagine if (when) a passenger jet could go that fast -- it would transform our country. Pop over to the East Coast for the day, head home in time for dinner.
- nikcub 16y agoPeople aren't willing to pay extra for speed, which makes the planes uneconomical. And now with wifi, internet and an entire office on a plane, there is even less emphasis on getting there faster.
- evgen 16y agoCivilian aircraft are also not allowed to go supersonic over the continental US, which killed the Concorde for domestic routes among other reasons...
- newt 16y agoThe Concorde was fast, it just wasn't a commercial success.
- peteri 16y agostolen from http://www.pprune.org/tech-log/423988-concorde-question-3.html#post5884568 http://www.pprune.org/tech-log/423988-concorde-question-3.ht... Ancient tale. There's this SR-71 Blackbird stooging around Cuba on a top-secret mission, at FL500+ and Mach 2+.... when they get a call requesting them to change heading "because of traffic at your altitude". Traffic at THEIR altitude ?? Anyway, they comply, and shortly, yes, there's an Air France Concorde out of Caracas (Air France flew there in the early days) slowly sailing across their flight path. Just imagine... two guys in bonedomes and full pressure suits, in a cramped cockpit, watching something like a hundred people in shirt sleeves or summer dresses, sipping their champagne and maybe just starting on their smoked salmon hors d'oeuvres, flying at their altitude and nearly their speed....
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