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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Antiaircraft and air defense missiles that they had to worry about were mostly on the ground having been warned that it is coming. The aircraft could fly far above and far away from these while doing it’s mission of taking pictures. If they detected incoming missiles they had time to hit the gas and outrun them once their automated warning system alerted them even if they were flying a bit slower from turning.
The SR-71’s cruising speed was just above mach 3 so was going faster than 2,223 mph normally when going mostly straight and even faster if a missile is inbound. While the exact top speed it flew hasn’t been released it is speculated to be about mach 3.5-4 with the fuel they used as the plane had been theoretically designed to go mach 6 on paper. Another reason you want to fly far above the ground when flying at such insane speeds so you don’t get distracted and crash into the ground.
85,000 ft is 16 miles above the planet’s surface. If the pilot looks down at his dashboard for just 5 seconds at mach 3 you have traveled 3 miles! That means if they were to all of sudden to pitch straight down it would only take roughly 30 seconds to crash into the Earth at it’s cruising altitude.
200 aircraft tried to intercept it and 4,000 missiles were fired at the SR-71 and none of them ever hit them, not a single SR-71 was taken out by enemy forces. During the SR-71’s lifetime we developed a missile that could go mach 5 ourselves that might have been in the bay of a few experimental SR-71 variants but when outrunning enemy missiles it didn’t have to go faster than their top speed even just stay ahead long enough for them to run out of fuel. I know it outran Soviet SA-2s SAM missiles fired by North Korea which could go mach 3.5 but maybe even some that were faster and this is great reason to stay far away from the ground.
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