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- Hacker News
- welsh and bragg killed the progam. all support equiptment trashed scrapped. too costly to get in the air now. but when i saw it last i told the sr71 rso they will need it again. my dad was a chief engineer on the yf12a and u2 p3 p2v. we saw the last one land at burbank together. kevin dad was wh ferguson ww2 korea airforce. adp manager of er2 nasa missions.
- Neither the SR-71 nor F-14 will fly again without significant funding, and not for any economically-viable use.
The SR-71 won't because there's no JP-7 supplier, no flyable KC-135T, and no parts.
- I’m sure it’s been mentioned a few times in the older thread that came up the other day but I can only recommend the book by Ben Rich, Skunk Works, if you want learn more about how this plane came to be.by willyyr
- In the 90s, NASA refurbished and extensively modified a mothballed supersonic Soviet-era Tu-144. The modifications included fitting different (Tupolev) engines. The total cost was $350M. It was used as a flying laboratory.by taffronaut
- Recent and related:
NASA asked several former SR-71A staffers to help secret restart - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49890733 - Sept 2026 (401 comments)
by dang - I wonder for such abandoned projects with non existent supply chain/know-how/documentation, whether there is any benefit of trying to revive them instead of starting from scratch.by whatever1
- A handful of the surviving planes are in museums. If you're at all interested in aviation and have the chance to see one, do. There's something special about them that doesn't come across in pictures.
- I almost skipped the videos embedded in this article, but they are well curated gems. A few tidbits I found amazing:
- 800°F (and above) was the temperature of their cooling air
- the engine ran too hot for electronics, so they designed a hydraulic mechanical computer responsible for regulating various inputs
- the roar from the two external 400 cubic inch Buick V8 engines originally used to start the aircraft was so irresistible to the hotrod enthusiasts running them that they sometimes neglected to disconnect in time before the starter engines overran RPM limits and "puked their guts out under the airplane" - they had to buy up so much replacement stock as to deplete every single junkyard across the USA of that particular model (so the story goes - probably hyperbole but a fun tale!)
by rkagerer