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Here’s another awesome copy-pasta about the SR-71: The speed check story https://www.thesr71blackbird.com/Aircraft/Stories/sr-71-blackbird-speed-check-story ht

• shagie 4y ago
  Another story - Buzzing the tower at Sacramento as told by Pilot Maury Rosenberg - https://youtu.be/xTJYNq4GQAE https://youtu.be/xTJYNq4GQAE
• mckirk 4y ago
  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.
  • fmajid 4y ago
    My favorite SR-71 story is how the CIA set up shell companies to buy Soviet titanium for it because US production was insufficient. https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/crazy-story-how-russia-helped-build-sr-71-blackbird-187431 https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/crazy-story-how-russi...
    • KennyBlanken 4y ago
      More specifically, we could mine it and refine it, but Russian titanium metallurgy was far superior.
      • dredmorbius 4y ago
        Titanium is actually surprisingly abundant in Earth's crust. I'm not sure what the limitations on actually extracting and refining it are.
        • philipkglass 4y ago
          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. Reducing aluminum chloride with sodium is how aluminum was produced before direct electrolysis, and it too was a much more expensive process: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_aluminium#Early_industrial_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_aluminium#Early_ind... A company named Metalysis has been working on an electrolytic process starting with oxide for a long time: https://www.enterprise.cam.ac.uk/news/metalysis-successfully-produces-titanium-powder-directly-from-ores/ https://www.enterprise.cam.ac.uk/news/metalysis-successfully... 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.
          • dredmorbius 4y ago
            Thanks!
          • fmajid 4y ago
            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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument#Aluminum_apex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument#Aluminum_a...
• TimTheTinker 4y ago
  I think that's an excerpt from Brian Shul's 1994 book Sled Driver: Flying the World's Fastest Jet.
  • stevenjgarner 4y ago
    Brian Shul is such an inspiring speaker and photographer about both the SR-71 and other things "Over the Rainbow" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wigZsFypdyI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wigZsFypdyI
• stevenjgarner 4y ago
  Yes here is the original LA Speed Check Story, told by Brian Shul: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wigZsFypdyI&t=3350s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wigZsFypdyI&t=3350s
  • beachy 4y ago
    That guy sure can tell a story.