The US government had to purchase a lot of that, probably using bogus companies," said Merlin. The initial aircraft were flown completely unpainted, showing a silver titanium skin. They were first painted black in , after the realization that black paint -- which efficiently absorbs and emits heat -- would help lower the temperature of the entire airframe. The "Blackbird" was born. Same plane, different names. The A was soon evolved into a variant that was designed as an interceptor -- a type of fighter aircraft -- rather than a surveillance plane.
Effectively, this meant adding air-to-air missiles and a second cockpit, for a crew member to operate the necessary radar equipment. This new plane, which looked identical to the A except for the nose, was called the YF A third variant was produced around this time, called the M, which had a pylon on its back for mounting and launching one of the first unmanned drones. Two were built, but the program was halted in after a drone collided with its mothership, killing one of the pilots.
Project Habbakuk: Britain's secret attempt to build an ice warship. The final derivative of the A, with a twin cockpit and larger fuel capacity, was called the SR -- for "Strategic Reconnaissance" -- and first flew on Dec. This is the version that would go on to perform intelligence missions for the US Air Force for over 30 years, and a total of 32 were built, bringing the final tally for the Blackbird family to The double cockpit of a Lockheed SR Stealth before stealth.
The fuselage of the SR included some of the very first composite materials ever used in an aircraft, which made the plane harder to spot for enemy radar. Flying at a higher altitude than anti-aircraft fire could reach, faster than a missile, and barely visible to radar, the Blackbird could enter hostile airspace practically undisturbed.
Once the briefing was concluded, it took about 20 minutes, everyone went to the four winds to do their job. The back-up crew went out to pre-flight your airplane the primary crew would go undressed, get into their long john cotton underwear to get into the suit. Prior to that they've already taken a physical, a little mini physical, blood pressure, eyes, nose, ears, throat, when you went to bed, what time you woke up, what your meal was the night before, all these parameters.
If you didn't pass the physical, the back-up crew would come in and fly the mission. Blackbirds ended the Yom Kippur War: "An average mission was probably three-and-a-half to four hours. A long mission would be eight or more. Through the whole history of the programme, through 22 years, we had 13 sorties that were over 11 hours; very, very long missions.
But they were very rare. The President wanted to find out whether the Arabs and the Israelis had really moved back from the front line like they said they did. We went over there, took the imagery, came back and showed photographic proof they were both lying about where their forces were. He called both countries and said, 'Get them back, I've got proof you're not where you're supposed to be. Beware the Soviet MiG "Normally you wouldn't be aware of one, but it takes a perfect storm to see this.
I was cruising up to a place called Petropavlosvsk, it's at the end of the Kamchatka Peninsula. Up there the Soviet Union had a major nuclear facility and also a nuclear sub pen. And we'd go up and image the southern part of the peninsula. On the way up, we'd refuelled off the coast of Japan, I'm climbing back up, cruising at Mach 3, and I look down. Probably miles km off the nose I could see — because it was a nice clear day, which you normally don't get — there were no clouds and they were contrailing.
It was a perfect storm that I could see them contrailing. They were three MiGs in a clockwise orbit. As I got closer, probably miles km out, I'm up at 75, feet 23km , they're down here at about 30, feet 9km , I saw them come off trail and they're contrailing in a straight line. Now they're in a trail formation about 10 miles 16km apart. From then on, I saw that the contrail stopped which I assumed they had lit their afterburners and they're trying to intercept me.
All three went right by underneath me. No problem at all. Windscreens doubled as make-shift ovens: "We took up a drink of choice, it came in a squeeze bottle like you see with marathon runners and cyclists, and the tube would fit in the right hand side of the helmet - there was a little iris.
You push the tube through there and you could squeeze out the water, Gatorade, iced tea, whatever your drink of choice was.
That's how you stayed hydrated. To stay nourished during a long flight you could take up tube food, and the tube food came in giant size toothpaste dispensers, if you will. My favourite I took up for dinner was macaroni cheese and beef and gravy, and butterscotch pudding and vanilla pudding for dessert. And it worked on the same principle. You squeeze a feeding tube into each container, push it through the feeding port and squeeze the food into your mouth, and that kept you nourished during flight.
If I took that tube and jammed it against my window in the front windscreen — which at the outside is F C at Mach 3. And if I gave it about a minute and a half on both sides and squeezed the tube to nominalise the temperature, it went down a lot better warm than it did cold.
You improvise up there, and that was my in-flight oven. If you would like to comment on this article or anything else you have seen on Future, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.
The Lockheed SR Blackbird — the two-cockpit training model is seen here — is the fastest air-breathing aircraft ever put into production. Copyright: Getty Images. The SR was designed to provide intelligence using cameras and electronic listening devices was able to fly at Mach 3.
Copyright: Stephen Dowling. Any oxygen or nitrogen leaking in will ruin the process, so this has to be done in relatively small batches in a sealed vessel.
Once this process is complete, we have Titanium Chloride. We then need to purify the Titanium Chloride from any impurities in the titanium ore through distillation. This Titanium Chloride vapor is fed into a stainless steel vessel containing molten magnesium at kelvin.
Titanium is highly reactive with oxygen at high temperatures, so the vessel also needs to be sealed and filled with argon. Here the Titanium Chloride reacts with the magnesium, which itself is an expensive metal, to form titanium and magnesium chloride.
This reduction reaction is extremely slow, between 2 and 4 days. Once the reaction is complete we need to let the product cool. Before removing the magnesium chloride products through high-temperature distillation once again.
The magnesium and chlorine are recycled with electrolysis, another energy-intensive process. At this stage, we have titanium sponge, which needs further processing still. Typically a porous metal like this would be simply heated and compressed into rolls of sheet metal.
O some other form of the useful end product. So the titanium sponge is compressed into an electrode along with any alloying alloys needed. Heat is then generated through an electric arc current inside another sealed vessel. This form of heat needs no oxygen. This melts the electrode to form a large titanium ingot. The engineers of the SR were among the first people in history to make real use of the material. In that process, they ended up throwing away a lot of material, some through necessity, some through error.
At times the engineers were perplexed as to what was causing problems, but thankfully they documented and cataloged everything, which helped find trends in their failures. They discovered that spot welded parts made in the summer were failing very early in their life, but those welded in winter were fine. They eventually tracked the problem to the fact that the Burbank water treatment facility was adding chlorine to the water they used to clean the parts to prevent algae blooms in summer, but took it out in winter.
Chlorine as we saw earlier reacts with titanium, so they began using distilled water from this point on. They discovered that their cadmium plated tools were leaving trace amounts of cadmium on bolts, which would cause galvanic corrosion and cause the bolts to fail.
This discovery led to all cadmium tools to be removed from the workshop. However, the largest wastes were caused by the lack of appropriate forging presses in the United States. Titanium alloys require much higher pressure to deform during forging than aluminum alloys or steel alloys.
Clarence L Johnson, the manager of Skunk Works at the time pleaded for the development of an adequate forging press. He stated it would need to be a ,ton metal forming press. Because of these inadequacies in forming capabilities, the final forging dimensions were nowhere near the design dimensions and much of the forming process had to be completed through machining.
When your raw material costs this much, this kind of waste really hurts. To add insult to injury. Drill bits and other machining tools were being thrown away at a rapid pace. Titanium is a difficult material to machine, precisely because of its qualities that made it suitable for use in the SR The skin panels were fastened to the underlying structure with oblong holes which would allow the skin to expand and contract without the fasteners causing buckling.
And the skin over the wing was also corrugated to prevent warping during expansion, this is actually quite noticeable, you can see the sections that are corrugated quite clearly here. Machining materials produce a lot of heat that can damage the tool and cause unfavorable material properties in the titanium, like hardening.
This means the metal under the fresh cut is now harder, and therefore even more damaging to the tool. To deal with this lower machining speeds need to be used along with high volumes of coolant, which is also expensive.
This slows the rate heat is generated and increases the rate it is removed. This slower machine speed makes the process incredibly slow, but this is offset by taking larger cuts in each pass, which has the added benefit of cutting under the work-hardened layers.
Machinists refer to metals like this as being gummy. They tend to form long chips that can clog the work area and cause all sorts of problems. If not properly managed they can ruin the work surface and damage the tools. The engineers at Lockheed gradually learned these lessons and developed better tools for the job.
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