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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I love the sr71. This is my favorite YouTube of a “speed check”. Not about the altitude but gives a since of the over US soil speed and you can expand that to cold war spy needs.
In addition to what others have said about air speed defense, because the SR-71 is a reconnaissance aircraft, the aircraft is able to collect a lot of reconnaissance data very quickly and a board area.
There were three main reasons. First, you simply can’t fly that fast unless you’re up high enough that there’s practically no air. Your aircraft would heat up and burn. Even so, they got pretty hot at 80,000 feet. Second, the SR-71 was faster than any missiles of the time, but if someone fired a missile in front of it, they still might hit it before it could turn away. At 90,000 feet (that’s 17 miles up), it was beyond the range of a lot of missiles, and even the few that might reach it were slow enough that they could turn and run away long before the missile reached them. Third, at 90,000 feet, the horizon is 368 miles away, so if you have the proper cameras, you can take pictures pretty far inside the Soviet Union without actually crossing into their airspace (or maybe just crossing over a little bit, due to “navigation errors.”)
That all combines to let you know the locations and capabilities of their aircraft and missiles, as they try intercept you. You can also see what kind of air defenses they’ve sold to places like Libya by watching what kind of missiles they fire at you as you fly past.
A couple reasons:
It was a spy plane. Not only are they designed to be hard to pick up on radar, flying so high made them VERY difficult to see, and if they were detected, they were so high up, it was really hard to get to them to do anything. (Very very expensive planes, not to mention, don’t want to lose whatever intel they gathered)
Second, wind resistance. The higher in the atmosphere you go, the “thinner” the air is. If you wanna go SUPER DUPER fast, you want as little air to push against as possible. The top speed of the SR71 Blackbird was 2,193 mph (3,529kph), or at least that’s what I can find. To go so fast, high altitude, while not a requirement, REALLY helps.
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.
Heating of fuselage necessitated a special fuel with higher flashpoint. You could toss a lot match into a catch tray full of fuel and it wouldn’t ignite.
Oooo I love SR-71 related stuff. The reasons why it flew high are easy. They flew so high because it generally put them above most active radar. In addition to that no other planes could fly as high so it’s hard to intercept an aircraft that’s flying much higher than you. Another reason is the air is less dense up there, so less wind resistance.
Basically that aircraft was designed to fly high and fast with an incredibly small radar profile so that nothing could really contest it to take it down. If you managed to get something to lock onto it, the SR-71 will just speed up and out run it. With its difference in distance from anything launching at it and how fast it could fly, anything shot at it even if it was faster wouldn’t be able to catch up to the SR-71 before running out of fuel and falling to the ground.
Long ago soviet rockets don’t have enough accuracy and range to hit anything flying 9x the sped of sound at 90,000ft. let alone chase it with their own aircraft
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