SR-71 BLACKBIRD

摘要

The all-weather Blackbird is arguably one of the most famous and high-tech aircraft in the world. The '60s-vintage, Mach 3+, titanium-constructed machine continued to soldier on with NASA following Air Force retirement. The official U.S. Air Force name of the classic SR-71 is the Blackbird, but it also is known as "Habu" and "SR." The SR-71A is on record for having traveled at 2,193 miles per hour at an altitude of over 85,000 feet during a record-breaking flight. This translates into 361/2 miles per minute, or over three miles every five seconds. All SR-71s have a crew of two, the pilot and the RSO. It is powered by a pair of Pratt and Whitney JT11D-20B (J58) axial-flow bleed bypass turbojet engines with afterburners, each with 34,000 pounds of thrust. The engines had movable inlet spikes designed to vary the air inlet geometry. The aircraft inlets generated 50% of the engines thrust by design. In the event of an inlet unstart (50% loss of thrust on a side), an asymmetrical thrust developed, and the aircraft had to be banked 15 degrees into the working engine to counter the situation and break even. The engine inlet system had three redundant computers and moved nearly two feet axially from subsonic to Mach 3 flight.