It was four o'clock in the morning and freezing cold, but as I stood there shivering in the pitch black desert night, I was keenly aware that I was about to become an eyewitness to history. The date was March 6, 1990, and the place was Palmdale International Airport. The event - the final mission of a Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, delivering the famed aircraft to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. for permanent display at a future Air and Space Museum site to be built somewhere near Dulles International Airport. The flight was programmed to cross the continent between Ventura, California and Baltimore, Maryland which itself was no big deal. However, the projected time en route was a big deal, as it would establish a new world record that would probably never be broken by a manned aircraft. The time to fly between these two points? Only sixty-eight minutes!
展开▼
