November 6, 2024 • 10 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, in 1966, an SR-71 "Blackbird" disintegrated at 78,000 feet. The pilot's first thought was "No one could live through what just happened". Therefore, I must be dead."
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
And we continue with our American stories. And our next
story comes from a man whose YouTube videos are followed
by hundreds of thousands of viewers of all ages, and
he's simply known as the History Guy. In nineteen sixty six,
and SR seventy one Blackbird disintegrated at seventy eight thousand feet.
The pilot's first thought was, quote, no one could live
(00:35):
through what just happened, Therefore I must be dead. Here's
the History Guy with the story of the SR seventy
one Blackbird disintegrating at altitudes unknown to most men.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
There's an old airplane story that's called the LA speed
Chack can go something like this. A pilot of a
single engine Cessna calls the Los Angeles Era Control Center
and asks for a speed check. Wants to know how
fast he's going. Center tells him he's going about ninety knots.
Immediately thereafter, another pilot, someone in say a twin engine
beach craft, trying to make fun of how slow the
(01:08):
Cessna goes, asks for a speed check, and the center
tells him that he's going around one hundred and twenty
one knots. But almost immediately thereafter, another voice chimes in
and This is a Navy pilot who's flying in an
F eighteen Fighter Chat and he doesn't really need to
know how fast he's going. He's got an air speed
indicator inside his cockpit. He's just trying to prove to
everybody out there on the frequency that he's flying the biggest, baddest,
(01:30):
fastest jet in the world and show all those cessna
on beachcraft owners how fast our plane really flies. And
the LA Center radios back that he's going an impressive
six hundred and twenty knots. And you think that would
be enough to win this little contest. When another voice
casually asks, this is Aspen three zero, can you give
us a speed check? And after a moment, the Center responds,
(01:54):
Aspen three zero, we have you going one thousand, nine
hundred and ninety three knots. That story, which was related
in Brian Schul's book Sled Driver Flying the World's Fastest Jet,
shows how we extreme the world's fastest air breathing manned
jet aircraft in history. The Lockheed SR. Seventy one Blackbird
(02:18):
really was. But you know, if you fly in an
airplane that can go more than three times the speed
of sound and almost into outer space. One thing's important.
You don't want to fall out, and if you did,
it would be history that deserves to be remembered. In
late nineteen fifty seven, the CIA approach to the defense
contractor Lockheed, asking them to secretly design an undetectable spyplane.
(02:41):
Luckheed's Advanced Development Project unit was called the Skunkworks, a
nickname it had gotten since the original facility had been
built near to an old plastics manufacturing plant that produced
awful smells. In nineteen fifty five, the Skunkworks had gotten
a CIA contract to build an ultra high altitude spyplane
designed for flying over the Soviet Union and photographics sites
of strategic interests. The plane was the Lockied U two,
(03:04):
a plane able to fly at such a high altitude
that it was thought to be outside Soviet radar capacity
and invulnerable to Soviet fighter aircraft and ground to air missiles.
The new request was for a plane that could go
even higher and faster than the U two. The plane
ended up with the designation SR for Strategic Reconnaissance seventy one.
Painted a blue so dark that was almost black to
(03:26):
camouflage the plane against the night sky, it earned the
nickname Blackbird. The SR seventy one was designed for flight
at over Mock three with a flight crew of two.
Traveling at supersonic speeds meant that the outside of the
aircraft would get very hot more than six hundred degrees,
so Loki could not use aluminum. The plane was ninety
two percent titanium inside and out, but most problematic is
(03:47):
that the ore needed to make titanium is rare and
in short supply in the United States. The major supplier
of the ore was the Soviet Union. The US surreptitiously
worked through Third World straw buyers to acquire there. The
plane was designed to reduce its radar cross section and
early version of stealth that, combined with its speed and altitude,
made the plane virtually invulnerable to countervasures. There were also
(04:10):
challenges given the plane's altitude ceiling above eighty thousand feet.
A normal pilot's mass cannot provide enough oxygen for a
pilot above about forty thousand feet, and breathing becomes impossible
above forty nine thousand feet as the pressure at which
the lungs excrete carbon dioxide exceeds outside air pressure. At
sixty two thousand feet some eighteen plus kilometers, the pressure
(04:31):
reaches something called the Armstrong limit. The Armstrong limit represents
the altitude above which atmospheric pressure is sufficiently low that
water boils at the normal temperature of the human body.
Simply put, a human cannot survive above this limit, as
their blood would literally boil to asteand the conditions. Aircrews
(04:51):
for high altitude craft have to wear pressurized suits. In
the Terrible scenario where an air crew had to eject
at extreme altitudes, the suit had a built in oxygen
designed to keep the suit pressurize. Of just thirty two
SR seventy one's built twelve were lost to accidents, and
the first of those accidents occurred during the plane's testing phase.
On January twenty fifth, nineteen sixty six, the plane, tail
(05:15):
number nine five to two, took off from Edward's Air
Force Base at eleven twenty am. The pilot was Bill Weaver,
an experienced Lockheed test pilot. Jim's Wayer, a Lockheed flight
test reconnaissance and navigation system specialist, was in the rear.
The two were investigating procedures designed to reduce trim drag
and improve high mock cruise performance. Weaver increased the plane
speed to mock three point two and climbed to seventy
(05:37):
eight thousand feet. Several minutes later, the right engine automatic
inlet control system failed, requiring a switch to manual control.
This was common in the early test phase of the aircraft.
But as Weaver took the plane into a scheduled thirty
five degree bank turned to the right, the right engine
suffered a dreaded inlet unstart. The resulting asymmetric thrust caused
(05:57):
the plane to roll further right, increasing the bank to
sixty degrees and pitch up. Knowing the chances of surviving
an ejection at mock three point one point eight and
seventy eight eight hundred feet was not very good, we
were hoped to be able to get the plane to
a lower altitude and speed to allow a safe ejection.
He yelled for zwere to stay with the planes attempted
to gain control, but the G forces were so strong
(06:18):
that the words came out garbled and unintelligible. The radical
G forces were beyond human limits, and weaverin's wayar lost consciousness,
neither able to activate the ejection system. SR seventy one
tail number nine five to two disintegrated in mid air.
Back at Edwards, the plane disappeared from radar and they
lost radio contact. The initial assessment was was that the
(06:39):
flight crew could not have survived such a violent breakup
at that speed in altitude. When Bill Weaver woke up,
he thought he was having a bad dream. His next
thought was, no, one could survive what just happened. Therefore
I must be dead. But as he became more aware,
he could hear rushing wind what sounded like straps flapping.
He was alive and had somehow separated from the aircraft
(07:00):
despite not activating the ejection system. In fact, he had
been thrown clear in the accident. His ejection seat was
still with the wreckage of the plane falling to Earth
at that very moment. The flight suit had apparently done
its job with the oxygen tank that was attached to
the parachute harness, inflating the suit to keep it pressurized.
That was itself astounding given the violence of the plane's breakup,
(07:20):
and it was a good thing otherwise Weaver's blood would
be boiling. But the visor on his helmet was iced
over well. I could tell that he was falling. He
couldn't see the parachute system was supposed to initially deploy
a small chute that should keep him from tumbling, but
he couldn't be sure that it had deployed, as he
had no idea how long he'd been unconscious. He didn't
know how far up he was or how long before
(07:41):
he might experience the rapid deceleration caused by colliding with
the earth. But the small chute had deployed and he
was falling vertically. The main chute should open automatically at
fifteen thousand feet, but it could not be sure the
automatic systems were functioning. He tried to find the manual
activation for the chute, but his hands were numb by cold,
and with the suit inflated, he couldn't find it. But
just then he felt the reassuring sudden desceleration caused by
(08:04):
the opening of the main chute. He lifted the faceplate
on his visor, only to find that the latch was
broken and he had to hold it up. Given the
plane speed, he couldn't even be sure which state he
was going to land in, and the ground below looked desolate.
He could see the burning wreckage of the airplane on
the ground some miles away, and most importantly, he was
reassured to see Jim Zuayer chute open some distance off.
(08:25):
Despite being an experienced test pilot, we were never actually
jumped out of an airplane before. This was his first
parachute landing, and he said it went okay, despite nearly
landing on what appeared to be a very surprised antelope.
Given the size that the search area must be, he
figured he'd have to figure out how to survive the
night before he could expect rescue. But on that count
he was wrong. He was busy trying to collapse his
(08:46):
parachute while having to hold up his faceplate when he
heard someone behind him say, can I help you with that?
It turns out the plane had broken apart over a
New Mexico ranch owned by Albert J. Mitchell Junior, Mitchell
and several ranch hands where Brandon colts, and they heard
a noise and saw parachutes descending from the sky several
minutes later. Mitchell was a pilot and owned a small
Hughes three hundred helicopter and had immediately flown to where
(09:09):
Weaver had landed. After helping Weaver collapse the shote, Mitchell
flew to where Jim Zuweyer's shoot had landed, only to
find that Zweyer was deceased. His neck had apparently snapped
when the airplane broke up. After the accident, Weaver found
out that the flapping noise that he'd been hearing as
he was falling was because the heavy nylon straps that
had strapped him into the aircraft had been shredded by
(09:30):
the accident, and that shows how impressive it was that
his flight suit held together through all of that. But
he also found out that the oxygen tank that connected
to his flight suit was connected by two tubes, and
one had torn loose and the other was barely hanging on.
If that second tube had torn loose, then the flight
suit would not have inflated and he would have died.
Albert Mitchell flew Weaver to the nearest hospital, which was
(09:50):
into them carrying New Mexico, and Weaver remembered being terrified
because Mitchell kept the little helicopter speed above the red
line for the entire trip, and Weaver was thinking how
ironic would be that if he survived falling out of
an SR seventy one at seventy eight thousand feet only
to die in a little helicopter on the way to
the hospital. The Air Force retired the SR seventy one
in nineteen ninety eight, and NASA retired THEIRS in nineteen
(10:12):
ninety nine, but there are persistent rumors that the skunk
Works is working on a successor to the SR seventy
one that some people claim will be twice as fast.
In its thirty three years of service, Jim Sware was
the only SR seventy one crew member to die in
a flight accident. Bill Weaver was back flying SR seventy
one's within a week and eventually became Lockeed's chief test pilot.
(10:35):
He retired and lives in Carlsbad, California.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
The man who survived the disintegrating Blackbird his story Bill
Weavers here on now American Stories
And we continue with our American stories. And our next
story comes from a man whose YouTube videos are followed
by hundreds of thousands of viewers of all ages, and
he's simply known as the History Guy. In nineteen sixty six,
and SR seventy one Blackbird disintegrated at seventy eight thousand feet.
The pilot's first thought was, quote, no one could live
(00:35):
through what just happened, Therefore I must be dead. Here's
the History Guy with the story of the SR seventy
one Blackbird disintegrating at altitudes unknown to most men.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
There's an old airplane story that's called the LA speed
Chack can go something like this. A pilot of a
single engine Cessna calls the Los Angeles Era Control Center
and asks for a speed check. Wants to know how
fast he's going. Center tells him he's going about ninety knots.
Immediately thereafter, another pilot, someone in say a twin engine
beach craft, trying to make fun of how slow the
(01:08):
Cessna goes, asks for a speed check, and the center
tells him that he's going around one hundred and twenty
one knots. But almost immediately thereafter, another voice chimes in
and This is a Navy pilot who's flying in an
F eighteen Fighter Chat and he doesn't really need to
know how fast he's going. He's got an air speed
indicator inside his cockpit. He's just trying to prove to
everybody out there on the frequency that he's flying the biggest, baddest,
(01:30):
fastest jet in the world and show all those cessna
on beachcraft owners how fast our plane really flies. And
the LA Center radios back that he's going an impressive
six hundred and twenty knots. And you think that would
be enough to win this little contest. When another voice
casually asks, this is Aspen three zero, can you give
us a speed check? And after a moment, the Center responds,
(01:54):
Aspen three zero, we have you going one thousand, nine
hundred and ninety three knots. That story, which was related
in Brian Schul's book Sled Driver Flying the World's Fastest Jet,
shows how we extreme the world's fastest air breathing manned
jet aircraft in history. The Lockheed SR. Seventy one Blackbird
(02:18):
really was. But you know, if you fly in an
airplane that can go more than three times the speed
of sound and almost into outer space. One thing's important.
You don't want to fall out, and if you did,
it would be history that deserves to be remembered. In
late nineteen fifty seven, the CIA approach to the defense
contractor Lockheed, asking them to secretly design an undetectable spyplane.
(02:41):
Luckheed's Advanced Development Project unit was called the Skunkworks, a
nickname it had gotten since the original facility had been
built near to an old plastics manufacturing plant that produced
awful smells. In nineteen fifty five, the Skunkworks had gotten
a CIA contract to build an ultra high altitude spyplane
designed for flying over the Soviet Union and photographics sites
of strategic interests. The plane was the Lockied U two,
(03:04):
a plane able to fly at such a high altitude
that it was thought to be outside Soviet radar capacity
and invulnerable to Soviet fighter aircraft and ground to air missiles.
The new request was for a plane that could go
even higher and faster than the U two. The plane
ended up with the designation SR for Strategic Reconnaissance seventy one.
Painted a blue so dark that was almost black to
(03:26):
camouflage the plane against the night sky, it earned the
nickname Blackbird. The SR seventy one was designed for flight
at over Mock three with a flight crew of two.
Traveling at supersonic speeds meant that the outside of the
aircraft would get very hot more than six hundred degrees,
so Loki could not use aluminum. The plane was ninety
two percent titanium inside and out, but most problematic is
(03:47):
that the ore needed to make titanium is rare and
in short supply in the United States. The major supplier
of the ore was the Soviet Union. The US surreptitiously
worked through Third World straw buyers to acquire there. The
plane was designed to reduce its radar cross section and
early version of stealth that, combined with its speed and altitude,
made the plane virtually invulnerable to countervasures. There were also
(04:10):
challenges given the plane's altitude ceiling above eighty thousand feet.
A normal pilot's mass cannot provide enough oxygen for a
pilot above about forty thousand feet, and breathing becomes impossible
above forty nine thousand feet as the pressure at which
the lungs excrete carbon dioxide exceeds outside air pressure. At
sixty two thousand feet some eighteen plus kilometers, the pressure
(04:31):
reaches something called the Armstrong limit. The Armstrong limit represents
the altitude above which atmospheric pressure is sufficiently low that
water boils at the normal temperature of the human body.
Simply put, a human cannot survive above this limit, as
their blood would literally boil to asteand the conditions. Aircrews
(04:51):
for high altitude craft have to wear pressurized suits. In
the Terrible scenario where an air crew had to eject
at extreme altitudes, the suit had a built in oxygen
designed to keep the suit pressurize. Of just thirty two
SR seventy one's built twelve were lost to accidents, and
the first of those accidents occurred during the plane's testing phase.
On January twenty fifth, nineteen sixty six, the plane, tail
(05:15):
number nine five to two, took off from Edward's Air
Force Base at eleven twenty am. The pilot was Bill Weaver,
an experienced Lockheed test pilot. Jim's Wayer, a Lockheed flight
test reconnaissance and navigation system specialist, was in the rear.
The two were investigating procedures designed to reduce trim drag
and improve high mock cruise performance. Weaver increased the plane
speed to mock three point two and climbed to seventy
(05:37):
eight thousand feet. Several minutes later, the right engine automatic
inlet control system failed, requiring a switch to manual control.
This was common in the early test phase of the aircraft.
But as Weaver took the plane into a scheduled thirty
five degree bank turned to the right, the right engine
suffered a dreaded inlet unstart. The resulting asymmetric thrust caused
(05:57):
the plane to roll further right, increasing the bank to
sixty degrees and pitch up. Knowing the chances of surviving
an ejection at mock three point one point eight and
seventy eight eight hundred feet was not very good, we
were hoped to be able to get the plane to
a lower altitude and speed to allow a safe ejection.
He yelled for zwere to stay with the planes attempted
to gain control, but the G forces were so strong
(06:18):
that the words came out garbled and unintelligible. The radical
G forces were beyond human limits, and weaverin's wayar lost consciousness,
neither able to activate the ejection system. SR seventy one
tail number nine five to two disintegrated in mid air.
Back at Edwards, the plane disappeared from radar and they
lost radio contact. The initial assessment was was that the
(06:39):
flight crew could not have survived such a violent breakup
at that speed in altitude. When Bill Weaver woke up,
he thought he was having a bad dream. His next
thought was, no, one could survive what just happened. Therefore
I must be dead. But as he became more aware,
he could hear rushing wind what sounded like straps flapping.
He was alive and had somehow separated from the aircraft
(07:00):
despite not activating the ejection system. In fact, he had
been thrown clear in the accident. His ejection seat was
still with the wreckage of the plane falling to Earth
at that very moment. The flight suit had apparently done
its job with the oxygen tank that was attached to
the parachute harness, inflating the suit to keep it pressurized.
That was itself astounding given the violence of the plane's breakup,
(07:20):
and it was a good thing otherwise Weaver's blood would
be boiling. But the visor on his helmet was iced
over well. I could tell that he was falling. He
couldn't see the parachute system was supposed to initially deploy
a small chute that should keep him from tumbling, but
he couldn't be sure that it had deployed, as he
had no idea how long he'd been unconscious. He didn't
know how far up he was or how long before
(07:41):
he might experience the rapid deceleration caused by colliding with
the earth. But the small chute had deployed and he
was falling vertically. The main chute should open automatically at
fifteen thousand feet, but it could not be sure the
automatic systems were functioning. He tried to find the manual
activation for the chute, but his hands were numb by cold,
and with the suit inflated, he couldn't find it. But
just then he felt the reassuring sudden desceleration caused by
(08:04):
the opening of the main chute. He lifted the faceplate
on his visor, only to find that the latch was
broken and he had to hold it up. Given the
plane speed, he couldn't even be sure which state he
was going to land in, and the ground below looked desolate.
He could see the burning wreckage of the airplane on
the ground some miles away, and most importantly, he was
reassured to see Jim Zuayer chute open some distance off.
(08:25):
Despite being an experienced test pilot, we were never actually
jumped out of an airplane before. This was his first
parachute landing, and he said it went okay, despite nearly
landing on what appeared to be a very surprised antelope.
Given the size that the search area must be, he
figured he'd have to figure out how to survive the
night before he could expect rescue. But on that count
he was wrong. He was busy trying to collapse his
(08:46):
parachute while having to hold up his faceplate when he
heard someone behind him say, can I help you with that?
It turns out the plane had broken apart over a
New Mexico ranch owned by Albert J. Mitchell Junior, Mitchell
and several ranch hands where Brandon colts, and they heard
a noise and saw parachutes descending from the sky several
minutes later. Mitchell was a pilot and owned a small
Hughes three hundred helicopter and had immediately flown to where
(09:09):
Weaver had landed. After helping Weaver collapse the shote, Mitchell
flew to where Jim Zuweyer's shoot had landed, only to
find that Zweyer was deceased. His neck had apparently snapped
when the airplane broke up. After the accident, Weaver found
out that the flapping noise that he'd been hearing as
he was falling was because the heavy nylon straps that
had strapped him into the aircraft had been shredded by
(09:30):
the accident, and that shows how impressive it was that
his flight suit held together through all of that. But
he also found out that the oxygen tank that connected
to his flight suit was connected by two tubes, and
one had torn loose and the other was barely hanging on.
If that second tube had torn loose, then the flight
suit would not have inflated and he would have died.
Albert Mitchell flew Weaver to the nearest hospital, which was
(09:50):
into them carrying New Mexico, and Weaver remembered being terrified
because Mitchell kept the little helicopter speed above the red
line for the entire trip, and Weaver was thinking how
ironic would be that if he survived falling out of
an SR seventy one at seventy eight thousand feet only
to die in a little helicopter on the way to
the hospital. The Air Force retired the SR seventy one
in nineteen ninety eight, and NASA retired THEIRS in nineteen
(10:12):
ninety nine, but there are persistent rumors that the skunk
Works is working on a successor to the SR seventy
one that some people claim will be twice as fast.
In its thirty three years of service, Jim Sware was
the only SR seventy one crew member to die in
a flight accident. Bill Weaver was back flying SR seventy
one's within a week and eventually became Lockeed's chief test pilot.
(10:35):
He retired and lives in Carlsbad, California.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
The man who survived the disintegrating Blackbird his story Bill
Weavers here on now American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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