In all seriousness, I’ve always wanted a passenger ride in a Blackbird.

I know where you’re coming from, but in reality that would be extremely uncomfortable given the highly cramped secondary cockpit that was built into the Blackbird. It would be like sitting – not lying – in a coffin while wearing a spacesuit.

Lockheed, in the small chance that you might be reading this, please stop the f35 and give us the Blackbird 2.0.

You know what’s REALLY sad?

The technology used to build the Blackbird is from the 1960s, and was absolutely incredible for the time. You would think that with the advances made in the last 55-60 years, we would be able to recreate – not replace, just RECREATE – the Blackbird easily.

We can’t. It’s too hard to do. The original tools and techniques used to create the greatest aircraft ever made have mostly been destroyed. We’d have to redo it all from scratch.

I’ll give you a really simple example from Ben Rich’s superb book, Skunk Works. An engineer was drawing on a piece of titanium with a cadmium-based fountain pen, only to discover that the cadmium reacted with the titanium and ate through the metal like an acid.

Unless they remember their chemistry really well, many aerospace engineers might not realise this problem very quickly. And that’s before we get to the huge thermodynamic problems involved in keeping a cockpit cooled and operable while dealing with thousand-degree temperatures on the outside skin of an aircraft flying at such high altitude and insane speed.

(If you’re a fan of the Blackbird and the old Lockheed designs, get that book. I’ve read it like 10 times in my life. It’s absolutely brilliant. You’ll learn a lot about the U-2, the Blackbird, the F-117, and a lot of other projects that the Lockheed Skunk Works teams worked on over something like 40 years.)

The Blackbird was an absolutely incredible aircraft, maybe the high point of human engineering. I don’t know if we’ll ever see anything similar ever again.

Yep. Watching pianos falling out of the sky is always great comedy – or at least, it would be comedy if not for the fact that each crash is hugely expensive and potentially deadly.

while it’s not impossible for debris from the starboard impact to have ejected forward and then get eaten by the outboard port engine, my working assumption is that between the gear up landing and the port wing low landing position that the outboard prop was eating tillage.

Makes sense to me. If that’s the case, and the landing gear was affected by the collision, then I’m doubly impressed by the Herky Bird pilot. He did an amazing job under dreadful circumstances. Thank God no one died.

ps – i keep checking the box to save my name, it never does

I’ll take a look at the settings for comments, there may be some setting or stupid widget causing the issue.

That one’s going straight into the Monday compilation with full credits.

Lockheed, in the small chance that you might be reading this, please stop the f35 and give us the Blackbird 2.0. Or just fire the 17 layers of management that every mega corporation has and let the engineers do their thing.

while it’s not impossible for debris from the starboard impact to have ejected forward and then get eaten by the outboard port engine, my working assumption is that between the gear up landing and the port wing low landing position that the outboard prop was eating tillage.

that’s why the 4 remaining blades are all short. i don’t see how one piece of shrapnel could have destroyed all 6 blades, and a large quantity of shrapnel going right to left should have ripped a bunch of holes in the fusilage.

note also that Blancolirio is wrong in his assertion that 130J has 5 blade propellers. you can clearly observe all 6 blades on the inboard port engine right there in the youtube preview pic.

ps – i keep checking the box to save my name, it never does

https://youtu.be/KuuJr6i9mcA