I Know You Got Soul: Machines With That Certain Something
Blackbird
In the mid sixties an RAF fighter pilot was cruising down the east coast of England in his Lightning when he saw something unusual. ‘It looked exactly like one of those sci-fi Airfix kits that I’d had as a boy in the fifties,’ he told me, years later.
Opening the taps a little on his fighter, he came up behind the mysterious plane for a better look. The USAF markings identified it as friendly so he pulled alongside to wave at the pilot. But he never got the chance because when the Americans saw him coming: whoomph. With an explosion of noise, they, and their astonishing machine, were gone. ‘I simply could not believe how fast it was,’ he said.
Back at base his colleagues were sceptical. ‘I see,’ they said, ‘so you saw a huge black plane that spewed circular blue flame out of its engines and rocketed away so quickly you couldn’t keep up.’ It did sound absurd because, at the time, everyone knew, with absolute certainty, that just about the fastest plane in the sky was the Lightning.
Everyone was wrong. Because what the RAF pilot had seen was the SR-71. The Blackbird. And it wasn’t just the fastest plane in the world then. It’s the fastest plane in the world now too.
At the time it was top secret, only taking off and landing when it was dark. And the reason why those Americans never saw our friend coming until he was alongside is that it flew with everything turned off. A black shadow in the sky. A streak that left almost no electronic mumbo-jumbo in its wake. It had the same radar signature as a fruit fly.
This was a plane built for spying. It carried no missiles and no guns. Its job was to climb, at enormous speed, to a height of 90,000 feet, from where it was neither visible nor audible to anyone on earth. 90,000 feet is 17 miles. It’s 60,000 feet higher than a commercial jetliner goes. It’s 30,000 feet higher than Concorde flew. Any more and its mighty ram-jet engines would be sucking on the vacuum of space.
Once there, in a world it could truly call its own, it would go even faster, moving up past 2,000 mph to three times the speed of sound. And from that far up, at that kind of velocity, its ability to cover ground was staggering. In just one hour it could survey 100,000 square miles of the earth’s surface.
And it was almost completely unshootdownable. I spoke once to one of its pilots, who said that if by some miracle he was detected in enemy air space, he still had absolutely nothing to fear. ‘We’d see the MiGs coming up to get us, but when they hit 60,000 feet we’d have gone and they would fall out of the sky.’
Even if a MiG could get itself in front of the Blackbird and fire off a missile, there was almost no chance of a hit. ‘Think about it,’ said the pilot. ‘The missile’s going at Mach 2. We’re doing Mach 3. That’s a closing speed of five times the speed of sound and no computer at that time could have worked things out fast enough. Believe me, we were up there with complete impunity.’
The key to this height and speed – speed that saw a Blackbird once get from New York to London in just under 1 hour and 55 minutes, including a spot of in-flight refuelling – is its power.
The figures the engines produce are as vast as they are meaningless. But there is one that gives pause for thought. Flat out, just 20 per cent of the thrust is produced by the basic engines themselves. 80 per cent, then, is coming from nowhere at all. So how is this possible?
Well, in essence, those big pointy things that stick out of the intakes steer most of the air into escape channels that never go anywhere near the blades. This air is simply compressed and then, as it gets to the exhaust, ignited. And the more air you push in, the more thrust you get.
In other words the jet gets you up to a certain speed, but from that point onwards there are no moving parts. You simply burn the air and watch the speedo climb. Quite literally, the faster you go the faster it goes.
It may be simple but the spectacle that results is heavenly. On full throttle, two giant blue plumes are left in the Blackbird’s wake, each framing a series of perfect blue balls of equally perfect energy. You watch it and you think, ‘God almighty. How did man ever create a sight like that?’ And then you think, ‘Crikey. It’s all very well making power like that but how, in the name of all that’s holy, do we tame it?’
The simple answer is, we don’t. Occasionally one of these engines will suffer from what the pilots call an unstart. You’ll be flying along when it will suddenly ‘burp’, ejecting air not from the back but from the front. This is bad news, because all of a sudden you have full thrust from one side of the plane and full drag from the other. The result is a spin, and the result of that is a quiet and undignified end for the two men on board. Quiet because the crash won’t be reported – how can a plane crash if it officially ‘doesn’t exist’? – and undignified because when you hit the ground in an SR-71 they don’t bury the remains so much as hose them into the nearest drain.
Apparently, before an unstart there are tiny, audible warnings that you can just about hear if you’re really concentrating. But this makes the Blackbird not very relaxing. You have to keep your ears open, constantly, for the slightest hint that one of the jets is about to break wind. And you then have to think what you might do about it…
When the second Blackbird ever made crashed in Utah in 1963 two farmers who arrived on the scene were told by the military personnel that the plane had been carrying atomic bombs. This was a lie but word got round, and as a result none of the locals turned up to poke around in the wreckage. The press was later told that the locals had got their wires crossed, that there were no nukes on board and that the plane was an F-105 Thunderchief. That was another lie, but it’s how the accident is still catalogued today.
Of the 40 Blackbirds made, 20 have crashed, killing all sorts of Lockheed engineers and CIA operatives who were sitting in the back. But amazingly, when you think of the speed they’re going when they bale out, not a single USAF pilot has ever died at the wheel.
Perhaps the most astonishing crash happened in 1966, when it was decided the SR-71 would make an ideal launch platform for a new kind of reconnaissance drone. This pilotless jet would be launched from a mounting platform on the Blackbird’s back. Brilliant. Except for two things.
Why fit a supplementary spying device on the back of what was already the perfect espionage tool? And how was this ‘mini Blackbird’ supposed to penetrate the ferocious shockwave coming from the mother ship’s nose? No one seemed to have thought about that. And no one did until the drone took off and ran slap bang into what may as well have been a wall.
Unable to get through, the pilotless aircraft dived and smacked straight into the Blackbird, cutting it clean in half.
Both crew members survived the impact, and both survived the ejection and parachute descent, but one, Ray Torrick, died when he landed in the Pacific Ocean and opened his visor. His pressure suit promptly filled with water and he was drowned.
This is very sad, and yet it pales into insignificance alongside the destruction of the SR-71. That makes me angry. How could they have let this drone, this bastard infant son, turn on its mother? What were they thinking of?
I hate to think of a crashed Blackbird. It causes me physical pain. Because I’ve actually been to its natural breeding ground, Edwards Air Force Base, in the high desert of California, and let me tell you: this is so much more than a collection of exotic materials paid for by a paranoid nation and designed in an overgrown schoolboy’s wet dream. The SR-71 feels, looks and, most importantly of all, sounds like it’s alive.
When I walked though the door of its hangar the first thing to take me by surprise was the size of its engines. They’re actually wider than the fuselage of the plane. The second shock was the feel of the titanium airframe. Even in the chill of a desert night, it felt warm and soft to the touch; not at all like metal. More like moleskin, in fact.
But the most eerie sensation was the noise. When a Blackbird flies the friction is so massive, and generates so much heat, that the whole plane grows by a foot. Then, after it lands and begins to cool, it shrinks back down again.
The plane I was pawing had not flown for six months but you could still hear it creaking and groaning. And there was a constant drip-drip-drip as its oils and fuel leaked out of the tanks, their seams distorted by the shrinkage.
The nose, however, would never go back to its original shape. After two hours at 2,250 mph it became all wrinkled, and the ground crew would have to smooth it into shape again using blowtorches. It was, said one pilot, like ironing a shirt.
Inside the tiny cockpit it is mind-boggling. You have, oh, about 2,000 dials, none of which is a speedometer, and, because this was designed when the world thought blenders were space age, there are no computer screens. You have a sense that all is mechanical in there, rather than electronic. And that helps reinforce the sense of Blackbird being a living, breathing being.
No computer has a soul. You have no sense that a wire and a microchip are alive because they don’t actually do anything. But when you pull a lever and hydraulic fluid causes a part to actually move, that’s different. And that’s what happens in the Blackbird, a product of the fifties that could still cut it right up to the last ever flight in 1999.
This was the most successful spying device ever. In the early days the U-2 was too slow, and too low. Gary Powers would testify to that, since his was shot down by a surface-to-air missile in 1960. Worse still, he failed to activate the self-destruct button and, when captured, he was disinclined to swallow his cyanide pill. Maybe the Russians learned something from him. Maybe they didn’t, but either way, two years later another U-2 was shot down, and the pilot killed, over Cuba, right in the middle of the missile crisis.
Shortly after that the space race began, but early satellites were no match for planes. They had physically to drop a film canister back to earth, which would have to be retrieved and sent to Boots. Only when it was learned how to watch ‘real time’ footage did these eyes in space start to make sense. But they’ve rather lost the point in the modern age.
They were fine when Russia was the bad guy, but where do you put them now? Over Iraq? Iran? Syria? Libya? Afghanistan? You can never tell where the trouble will come from next. And it’s the devil’s own job to move one.
The Blackbird would solve all that. It can go wherever it wants, taking as many pictures as it wants, of whatever takes its fancy. It was the perfect solution in 1966, and nothing’s changed.