SR71 waits for Concorde

reply to post by dowot


I remember of them, 111Sqn Hunter F.6's, but I'm evidently not as prehistoric as you

Guenter

buster2010
Sorry but the Concorde doesn't even come close to the SR71 in terms of speed. The Concorde is about half as fast as the SR71. In fact the Concorde can't even match the altitude of the SR71 so it sounds like your story is just that a story. Because why would the SR71 have to wait for a plane that is slower and has to fly lower?

Also the SR-71 has an 85,000ft ceiling vs. 60,000ft on the Concorde, the question is if the SR-71 really needed for Cuba all its 85K ft. So the scenario with the proximity of Cuba and Venezuela is plausible. The 85,000ft were intended for airspace defended by much more sophisticated SAM systems and others. Cuba for sure did not have that. So why bother climb all the way to max alt?

And lower is better for photographing the beach babes, and whatever else.

originally posted by: Guenter


Also the SR-71 has an 85,000ft ceiling vs. 60,000ft on the Concorde, the question is if the SR-71 really needed for Cuba all its 85K ft. So the scenario with the proximity of Cuba and Venezuela is plausible. The 85,000ft were intended for airspace defended by much more sophisticated SAM systems and others. Cuba for sure did not have that. So why bother climb all the way to max alt?

Cuba received several surface-to-air missile systems from the USSR during the Cold War, of which the SA-5 had a maximum altitude high enough to take down an SR-71. Despite Fidel Castro lining parts of the northern coastline of Cuba with SAM systems, no SR-71s that entered Cuban airspace as part of Operation Giant Plate were ever shot down.

That said, have you had the chance to meet and interview SR-71 crewmembers who overflew Cuba and Nicaragua during the Cold War? If so, did you ask them the following questions:
1. If they recognized Fidel Castro as a heartless tyrant after hearing about Fidel executing his political opponents by firing squad or reading speeches by Che Guevara that were peppered with anti-capitalist and anti-American rhetoric.
2. If they got repulsed by Bernie Sanders' comments in a 60 Minutes interview in February 2020 complimenting Fidel Castro's educational services for rural Cubans as offensive to not just Cuban-Americans and other freedom-loving Americans but also people in Central and South America who had loved ones murdered by Fidel and Che's minions in the 1960s.
3. If they approve of Joe Biden's reversal of the damage to Obama's normalization of relations with Cuba inflicted upon by Donald Trump, since Obama's presidency teaches us that just because there's no political change in Cuba doesn't mean you squeeze the island's economy because doing so forces Cuba to spend extra sums of money to ship non-agricultural commodities and spare parts for vital infrastructure from the former USSR, East Asia, and the Middle East.

Link:
www.washingtonpost.com...

a reply to: Potlatch

The SR-71 was capable of outrunning missiles.

It amuses me that some came in quoting max numbers for the 71 and never question that they received a call from ATC, this means they were not flying over cuba they were outside cuban airspace and were low enough to be under atc control, so more than likely were on their way back or to but have not hit the parameters of the mission that would require 3+ and 80k+.

Here's a YouTube clip of SR71 & Concorde flying together. Real or Fake?

"https://www.youtube.com/embed/B6M64X5La9U"

a reply to: flyxwire

Fake. It’s DCS.