WASHINGTON (States News Service) -- They were officially retired from active service years ago, but NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center keeps finding ways to send up the world's fastest aircraft - the SR-71, nicknamed the Blackbird. Its last scheduled flight is due within a week, but there is no doubt that the sleek, twin-engined craft will be going up again soon after.
"It has a lot of fans," Dryden spokeswoman Leslie Mathews said.
Capable of speeds over Mach 3 and altitudes of 85,000 feet, the SR-71 is the fastest aircraft in the world today, and the fastest jet plane ever built. The speed and altitude records are still held by its contemporary of the late 1960s, the X-15, which flew over Mach 5 and reached the edge of space.
Although the SR-71 cannot match the X-15's feats as a near-spacecraft, it is working to make such technology feasible and cheaper. Dryden planned the four flights to determine how well the plane could fly carrying a large "canoe" on its back, Mathews said.
The canoe is a test fixture, originally designed for the linear aerospike engines of the X-33 program, but only used during ground tests in the past.
"You can put anything inside of it," Mathews said, turning the SR-71 into "a real wind tunnel," more accurate in terms of temperature and density then a ground-based, simulated wind tunnel.
NASA pilots first took the canoe up on the Blackbird on June 30 of this year, the first flight of any SR-71 since October of 1998. On that flight, the plane went only Mach 2.25.
"By the third flight they made it to Mach 3 and it handled wonderfully," Mathews said. "It wanted to go faster. Nothing's going to slow that baby down."
The plane is a favorite of aerospace employees in the Antelope Valley area around Dryden, Mathews said. It was developed there, in the same area that was home that to the X-15 and its predecessor the X-1, the first plane to break the speed of sound.
"All the employees come out to look at it, every time it goes up," Mathews said. "It's been doing great."
Both military and private programs working on supersonic technology have expressed interest in using the SR-71 as a test bed, Mathews said, insuring future flights.
The first experiment will probably be a test of the Pulse Detonation Engine, a supersonic engine with fewer moving parts and greater efficiency then current designs. It will be tested at a wind tunnel at Glenn Research Center in Ohio first, and will then be flown to Mach 3 on the Blackbird. Live fire tests are scheduled for 2002.
advertisement
