Why would the blackbird fly so high? I looked it up and it says they can fly up to 90,000ft.
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Altitude is just another means of defense for a warplane. The combination of being able to fly that high in addition to being able to fly well beyond three times the speed of sound means that to have any chance at all of intercepting such a plane, you have to know it’s coming and what route it will take.
Soviet interceptors had to sit on the runway and launch inside very short windows of time to have a *chance* of making the Blackbird deviate from its flight plan and perhaps fail its mission by getting in its way or into a position where they might have been able to shoot at it. Similarly, the higher you fly, the more time you have to react to a missile launched at you, and the air is very thin up at 80-90k, making it much harder for a missile to maneuver to hit you.
Also, height played a very big *offensive* role in the plane’s mission as well – the higher they flew, the more their high-definition cameras captured. The SR-71 never officially penetrated Soviet airspace, but by flying close to it (international airspace starts 12 miles off a country’s coastline, but the Soviets claimed far more) at extremely high altitudes, they could take pictures inside the Soviet Union several hundred miles inland.
Look up the Brian Shul “speed check” story on YouTube, you won’t regret it. In it, he talks about how over Arizona, he could see Downtown LA and all the way up the Rockies into Canada, as well as a whole host of other amusing recollections.
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