me: idk what to do while sick
youtube: do you want to watch an hour long professionally animated deep dive into explaining what makes the lockheed sr-71 blackbird so cool
me: wellllllllll shucks i reckon i could be inclined
I swear I love the SR-71 so much and it's only made cooler because they made it in a cave with a box of scraps. I really need to get my shop open so I can post up tribute items, retvrn to the wireframe blackbird apparel. concorde would be lovely as well
I have a soft spot for it as well. My family is big into aviation, and we went to see the “Bye Bye Blackbird” exhibit when they finally completely phased it out.
Planes were a big thing for us. I even went to aviation camp! But that got REALLY militaristic really fast 😬
yeaaaah doesn't surprise me it got so militaristic. this is the problem with liking planes and i think it's a big part of why i liked miyazaki's "the wind rises" so much because he aimed to explore that contradiction
Yeah, I was super young and thought it would be more like commercial and small plane piloting. But it was on a military base and we had speakers coming in saying “ask yourself if you’re going to be ok with knowing you’ve killed civilians” and I was like NOPE CAN’T DO THAT
Miyazaki is such an interesting (though certainly not singular) case of an artist who clearly just LOVES military hardware but abhors war. That man just adores drawing vehicles bristling with machine guns
This was 10 years ago and the SR-71 could have been a bit more visible, but I think I stood and stared at it for an hour until my family made me move on.
also you know it's funny thinking about it now, recently i saw a construction sign for SR-71 (as in california state route 71) but i, having the brain of a child, laughed to myself about it.
if i ever go to that museum i’m going to take the dumbest selfies with the 367-80 because everyone probably takes selfies w the blackbird i have to be the most esoteric bitch at the air and space museum
Now I'm trying to think of your callsign & what you'd pilot, hypothetically.
I'm thinking a Chinook and your callsign could be Miracle. Alternatively, maybe the Viggen, as those are apparently a lot of fun to fly. Yeah.. ace pilot Mara "Miracle" Wilson.
*shivers*
At camp my callsigns were “Mermaid” and “Chewie”. “Chewie”
because of some Star Wars-related trolling my crush and I had
pulled in a chat room, and “Mermaid” because… IDK, I liked to swim, maybe?
It was great, but it was also on an Air Force Base and shit got very intensely rah-rah America. Which, even as a preteen with a family history of military service, felt a little weird to me.
my dad was very into planes and we were space nerds, but supersonics were always so rad. I wanted space camp too but my mom passed immediately followed by challenger and it was like, welp. the fact a kid robot named DARYL flew a blackbird in a movie though, it was some kind of cosmic connection
I assume that what I heard was true, that because it expanded so much as it got hot, it was built to leak fuel a bunch of fuel on the ground/until it got up to speed.
There was a fun story from the Skunk Works book about building the stealth fighter.
They made a smaller scale version and mouted it on a pole to test how stealthy it was. It was so stealthy that the pole was throwing off their numbers, so they had to design and build a stealth pole.
They’ve had a couple different static SR-71s at Pima Air & Space Museum, among my very favorite planes also. They had a big todo when they set up a display, a panel of pilots that flew them talked about how wild it was. Excuse the quality of the photo from ~2006 taken with a slider phone potato cam.
Somehow I have no photos of _me_ on the rig or of the cockpit cause cell phone photos in 2006 reasons I guess but we got to like _look in one_, it was extremely cool. Pima Air & Space is so good, cannot recommend it enough if you’re in the burning desert anyway.
