Posted on 07/25/2021 12:39:31 PM PDT by DUMBGRUNT
The SR-71 Blackbird remains to this day the only aircraft rated to run in full continuous afterburner.
Designed to sustain Mach 3 speeds at over 80,000 ft, the Pratt & Whitney J58 turbojet engine powered the whole Blackbird family: the Lockheed A-12, YF-12 and SR-71. An engineering marvel, the J58 had a single-shaft rotor design with a novel compressor bleed bypass when in extreme high-speed operation. What made this engine so unique is the six bypass tubes, which directed airflow from the compressor stage directly into the afterburner. This allowed the Blackbird to operate at a much higher fuel efficiency than other afterburning jet engines when in full afterburner (AB).
Sheffield Miller recalls about how another SR-71 Blackbird pilot reacted after a long flight; ‘I interviewed Colonel Shelton about his 13 hour flight during the Yom Kippur war. And he said that after a long flight like this his adrenaline was hyped up so high that he was unable to sleep even though he was exhausted. ‘To help with his adrenaline being on overdrive he would go for a long walk to settle down.’
(Excerpt) Read more at theaviationgeekclub.com ...
Some cool stuff!
I keep saying we should take a trip to Dayton O.
A friend says that is the closed one to visit???
Any day now?
Yeah, well the KC-135 was basically a Boeing 707 and I don’t think they were supersonic! LOL!
I was stationed on Okinawa in ‘77 and ‘78.
We called it “Habu.” It would fly around the island once a day from Kadena airbase. You could hear it where ever you were on the island. It was common for the Japanese to confiscate some of the negatives if you happen to bring them in for developing, even in the PX. Happened to me many times.
Tested the engines to Mach 4 plus? Heat entry into interior of the aircraft probably the limiting factor on sustained speed.
—”SR-71 Speed Story.”
Fantastic!!!
I have read of this, but to hear it from the source!!!
And he is a very good storyteller.
Thank you.
That ramjet high-mach operation is being evaluated for some new hypersonic engine applications.
That engine alone is an endless marvel for when it was designed.
Pretty hard to underestimate the accuracy of a journalist...
Makes it a bitch having to dig so fast to get them...
There was one outside, touchable, at Ellis AFB Florida museum.
Fairly sure the “continuous afterburner” operation was really psuedo-ramjet operation, not an afterburner mode as used in regular turbojets.
—” not an afterburner mode as used in regular turbojets.”
Same thing only different?
“The Pratt & Whitney J58 (company designation JT11D-20) was an American jet engine that powered the Lockheed A-12, and subsequently the YF-12 and the SR-71 aircraft. It was an afterburning turbojet with a unique compressor bleed to the afterburner which gave increased thrust at high speeds. Because of the wide speed range of the aircraft, the engine needed two modes of operation to take it from stationary on the ground to 2,000 mph (3,200 km/h) at altitude. It was a conventional afterburning turbojet for take-off and acceleration to Mach 2 and then used permanent compressor bleed to the afterburner above Mach 2. The way the engine worked at cruise led it to be described as “acting like a turboramjet”.[1] It has also been described as a turboramjet based on incorrect statements describing the turbomachinery as being completely bypassed”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pratt_%26_Whitney_J58
That had to be an 11 on the scale of excitement. 10 hours on afterburner. Zooks.
Hahahahahaha
What am I seeing here!
Looks like nano-bots playing under an electron microscope.
Seriously though, we live close to Wright Pat and people (not me) see these and a saucer shaped craft flying around.
My buddy and I go out of work and drove 12 hours to Dayton to go to the museum once, and we got there too early, so we parked in a nearby parking lot and went to sleep, with empty Dorito bags, depleted soda bottles, and other detritus of a long overnight trip all over the dashboard.
I woke up with muck-mouth and my hair all pushed over to one side, and looked up to see well dressed families with young children staring into our car a they passed. It was Sunday morning, and we were in the parking lot of a church...:)
Oddly, there are so many impressive things in that museum-you would never guess which one made the deepest impression on me...
It was a table cloth that General Jimmy Doolittle's wife had used over the years, and they were apparently big entertainers, throwing parties all the time in their house for the elites of the aviation community.
When people would visit, she would have them use a magic marker and sign their name on the tablecloth. Then, she would embroider the signature with black thread. For posterity. Looking at it was a Who's Who of aviation (and political) history. I recall seeing Orville Wright's signature on it.
It gave me the same feeling I got a few years ago when I went to a small museum in Concord, MA and they had one of the lamps that had shined from the Old North Church in Boston to let Colonials in Charlestown know that the British were sending troops by boat on their way to Lexington and Concord, preceded by Paul Revere on his way to warn them the morning of April 19th, 1775.
That was...history. There was something so real and palpable about it that it filled me with an awareness of the reality of it, just gazing at it.
I have had to unlearn SO many things because I thought journalists had a clue. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
The trick is the SR71 at speed is effective power by ram jet... I’ve heard Kelly Johnson used to said it was his Nacelles design not the j58 that power the SR71 at MACH 3
Here is an interesting page on the SR-71. We used to refuel those things out of Beale AFB.
http://roadrunnersinternationale.com/transporting_the_a-12.html
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