Had a neighbor at Seymour-Johnson AFB, NC in mid-80s who came from Beale and a tour with the Blackbird as a maintenance guy. Loved the SR-71; hated the F-4s he worked on at Shady J (a sentiment that was not uncommon in the Phantom maintenance community). After a couple of years, he got a chance to go back to Beale and the Blackbird. Said it took him about two seconds to make that decision.
After my tour at S-J, I went to OTS and wound up at Moody AFB, GA as an intel officer, at the end of the F-4 era at that base. During my stint at Moody, one of our fighter squadrons got a new commander; we looked at the guy’s bio and discovered he had done a couple of tours in the Blackbird and had more hours in the SR-71 than the F-4. He needed to be a squadron commander to make O-6, and the timing at Beale wasn’t going to work, so he would up at Moody.
That Lt Col (who later became the wing king at Beale) gave one of the greatest presentations I ever saw. One Friday, when flying ended early and beer call was on, he set up a screen and a movie projector in the squadron auditorium and showed some “home movies” taken from the cockpit of a Blackbird. You could see the curvature of the earth at the bottom of the screen and the darkness of space at the top of the frame. When someone asked his altitude at the time, he said 85,000 plus. Don’t know how much the “plus” was, but I’ve always heard the published capabilities of the Blackbird were very much on the conservative side.
That same Lt Col also had photo that was one of his prized possessions. It was a media shot of the Soviet leader Breznehv getting off the plane in Havana and being greeted by Fidel Castro. In the photograph, both Breznehv and Castro are staring straight up. What caught their attention was the distinctive double sonic boom of an SR-71, passing over Havana at 80,000+ and somewhere around Mach 3. The pilot of the SR-71 was the Lt Col I knew at Moody. After the “boom-boom,” Fidel had to tell Breznehv that the Yanquis were passing overhead, and there was nothing their Soviet-made air defense hardware could do about it.
Was the SR-71 the only aircraft that produced that double sonic boom? I seem to remember that most of the ones that I heard were that type (in the late 60's). I think that there were a lot of the B-58's flying at that time, and that's what I thought they were.