How come that an airplane can get to Friday night in California when it was flying on Saturday morning in Japan? One of the reports of former pilot David Peters in the lore of the SR-71 Blackbird still manages to walk into “Friday night happy hour” at Beale Air Force Base 17.5 hours before the crew had technically left Japan: a proposed flight out of Kadena Air Base in Okinawa at 10:00 a.m., a long distance reconnaissance path spliced with tanker tracks, and the arrival in Beale Air Force Base at 4:30 p.m. This was not fantasy but geography: that the International Date Line could be crossed at a speed exceeding Mach 3 so that a calendar was made something the plane could run.
The Blackbird was constructed to suit such an unconcerned relationship with distance. At cruise it was above weather, above most traffic and above normal timekeeping. Records of the aircraft that it is famous to have set, 25,929 meters (85,069 feet) of sustained altitude and an absolute record speed of 3,529.6 km/h (2,193.2 mph), set in 1976, were celebrated punctuation marks on a machine designed to do its task in long, quiet sweeps. At that speed and height, continents were of manageable size and the endurance never concerned only the crew. It was concerning systems that could withstand heat, fuel chemistry that could serve doubling as coolant, and navigation that was accurate in that a few degrees of error would not translate into hundreds of miles of error.
The airframe had to compensate its velocity with heat. Blackbird crew members explained that the cockpit windows consisted of what was referred to as oven glass and the engineering records indicate that the skin temperature rose far above the capability of aluminum. The titanium frame and expansion-tolerant skin panels were helpful, though they came with their own peculiarities, such as the popular ground leaks, which vanished as soon as the plane warmed up and the skin sealed during air travel. The color of even the Blackbird had a workload: the dark finish helped to radiate heat out when the plane was on long high-speed cruise.
Then there was the segment of the mission which seemed routine to the observer, and vital to the insider; of refueling, frequently right after landing.
This initial fill-up of fuel was not about filling the tank as much as it was about getting the airplane in a safe state of complete performance. Col. Richard H. Graham, a former SR-71 pilot, made it simple: we had to refuel immediately after takeoff with one reason only and it was not the case that we leaked with JP-7 fuel upon the ground. In the description, heating at Mach 3 caused fuel vapors to be extremely volatile and a complete in-flight refueling was used to push out any ambient air in the tanks to allow the nitrogen to occupy the ullage to suppress ignition. The maneuvers relied on the KC-135Q tankers, which used specialized planes and their crews had practised the manoeuvres of the Blackbird, and were even able to deliver JP-7 to distant fields should the necessity arise.
Prior to the “Friday to Friday” story by Peters, crews had been “beating the sun” in intercontinental legs. In a memoir passage by an early Pacific crossing pilot, Buddy Brown, SR-71, the flight out of Beale at 11:00 a. m. and into Kadena at 9:00 a. m., two hours earlier by the clock, is reported as having finished with the words, “We beat the Sun!” The calendar games were unforgettable; it was the infrastructure that was the actual constant.
Even survival equipment at altitudes of 80,000-plus feet made the distinction between aviator and astronaut very vague. The SR-71 community utilised S901 full pressure suits – protective assemblies with built-in breathing and pressure control designed to go in a cockpit, where a sudden loss of pressurization did not allow even a moment of improvisation.
The most startling thing about the anecdotes of the Blackbird and his anecdotes of time is their essential bravery. They deal with an aircraft designed to be so speed-hawky that even such “normal” details as tank inerting, tanker qualifications, thermal expansions, pressure garments were absorbed in the concept of getting to where you have to get by the time you have gotten there.