That Time an SR-71 Made an Emergency Landing in Norway | Hacker News Reader

That Time an SR-71 Made an Emergency Landing in Norway

foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com

276 pointscurtis74 comments

It's funny how familiar this story is. I fly gliders and have landed in a few fields after being unable to make it back to the airport. There's the same desire to get back home if it's possible, and procedures drilled into you to make sure you don't push that too hard and get yourself killed. The alternate landing field is selected well in advance (although in my case, selected by eye some minutes before while I'm higher up). After landing, there's the same call back to base to tell them what happened and note the time. (We always want to track flight times, so the landing time is required for record-keeping.) There's the meeting of and with luck making friends with the locals. There's waiting for the cavalry to appear with your support equipment and whisk you away.

Obviously, their situation was about a million times more complex and interesting, but it's neat to see this sort of commonality from one end of aviation to the other.

Glider pilot here too.

I like the etymology of "bought the farm" wherein you used to owe the farmer whatever price he asked after damaging his field. Of course, an SR71 will probably involve 5 or 10 fields, but still.

I don't buy that etymology. http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/72850.html

From your link:

> There are a few suggested derivations for the phrase. One, put forward in a 1955 edition of American Speech, is the idea that when a jet crashes on a farm the farmer may sue the government for compensation. That would generate a large enough amount of money to pay off the farm's mortgage. Hence, the pilot paid for the farm with his life.

Etymology is tough historic recreation, but it seems as plausible as the others suggested by your article.

I don't believe that phrase means what you think, but I'm familiar with the situation.

When this happens, there are usually only two kinds of farmers. Those that comes running with a shotgun demanding compensation for destroyed crop. Then there are those that comes with a camera and just want a picture of them with the pilot that landed on their field.

I think this story needs to be mentioned (as usual when SR-71 links are posted): http://www.econrates.com/reality/schul.html

And that it and others can be found in the author's book "Sled Driver: Flying the World's Fastest Jet" which isn't really easy to find in print (though likely cheaper than an original copy of Ignition!) but whose scanned PDF is relatively easy to come by.

Do yourself a favor, open your browsers dev tools and uncheck the background-image property on the body tag.

or display it in a "reading view" (FF: small book icon in the urlbar)

I thought this was about the economic rates. $85,000 per flight hour per aircraft and 300 million per year for the fleet in 1990, from wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_SR-71_Blackbird#Initi...

Well, as every pilot knows, what makes an airplane fly isn't Bernoulli's principle or thrust or fuel. What makes an airplane fly is money. Furthermore, there is a pretty direct relationship between the speed at which the airplane flies and the speed at which the money is used (albeit with many confounding factors). So one could say that this really is ultimately about that $85,000/hour cost.

I never get tired of reading that one. Thanks for the share. =)

Always a favorite, that one.

My favorite: "what is the slowest you ever flew?"

http://www.planeandpilotmag.com/article/speed-is-life/#.Vuv5...

That was great! I hadn't read that before.

At 160 knots: "we weren’t really flying, but were falling in a slight bank"

That's 184 mph! Nearly the top speed of the only plane I've ever flown (Cessna 172). We never got near that speed, and I still thought we were going crazy fast.

Great story! Thanks for posting that link.

I had a few months of flying lessons in a Cessna 152 I was envious of the guys who flew the 172 all that glorious elbow room!

One of the best books I've ever read, courtesy of Hacker News.

http://www.amazon.com/Skunk-Works-Personal-Memoir-Lockheed/d...

I keep seeing this mentioned on HN and other places, I must have added it to my "to read" list about 3 times I think

It really is an excellent book. Buy it.

Is it $500 excellent?

It's $9.99 for Kindle excellent.

My favorite section in that book is when the Skunk Works guys trucked their stealth fighter prototype out to Edwards AFB for radar cross section testing. They stuck it up on a pole and then the AF guys in a radar van lit it up. And they could see it on radar just fine, and the Lockheed engineers were mystified, and the AF guys were giving them a hard time... until the vulture that had been perched on the prototype flew away and left nothing behind.

And then the skilled radar techs look really, really hard and see... the pole.

Totally agree. A great read. Ben Rich makes the material really approachable, even for non-tech folks. (I gave it to my mom to read and she really liked it!)

What a beautiful aircraft! I think that every time I see pics of the SR-71. Its as if nature wishes that the faster something flies, the more beautiful it should look.

It's most awesome plane ever built. Make sure you see one in person (I saw the one at the Hazy Museum in Washington DC). It looks fast even sitting in a hanger.

I actually touched the one that is/was sitting on the USS Intrepid (in NYC)! Granted to most its just an airplane, a hunk of old metal...but too me it was totally awesome; I touched something that - besides actual rockets - was the fastest thing that humans have ever built! (Yes, my wife loves me but totally called me a nerd that day! :-)

Rockets, and one manhole cover:

http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/Brownlee.html

> Later we were to see that if the hole is deep enough and the yield is high enough, an empty hole will close completely, allowing nothing whatsoever out except the initial light, which is not radioactive of course.

That is very cool. But I wonder. The "light" does include neutrons, I suspect. So neutron activation?

Neutrons are absorbed by air, so at some sufficient depth they'll all be stopped before they escape. I don't know what that sufficient depth would be.

People working on nuclear testing in the 1950s may not have been so strict about their idea of perfect containment, though.

I actually touched the one

I touched the end of one of the shock cones in front of the air inlets at Wright-Patterson. Literally sharp enough to kill a person who walks into it by accident.

I've seen the one at Edwards AFB. I used to go to that museum often when I was a kid. Since then I've always thought that it was the most beautiful aircraft ever.

Finally a benefit to being old: I've stood as near as the guards would allow while one was started up, and seen it take off and do a flyby. This was in the narrow window of time between the cold war hardware being super-classified, and it being withdrawn due to budget constraints.

Budget constraint and obsolescence. By the time it was withdrawn, the Russians had finally managed to get the capability to shoot it down.

The MiG-31 with the R-33/AA-9 missile could engage a blackbird. It interdicted soviet union overflights in the mid 80s. Modern Russian SAMs is probably also able to intercept it.

If the ability to penetrate the targeted air defences is taken away, you're better off just flying a jetliner crammed full of sensors around the target country or use satellite. Or drones (since they're disposable-ish when they get shot down.) The Open Skies Treaty also allows mutual airborne surveillance.

The SR-71 however, wins hands down on sexiness.

The engineers in the 60's were amazing. There was no StackOverflow or Google. You had to know your sh*t.

Let me tell you about ancient roman engineers

they didn't even have wheelbarrows.

Let me tell you about the Egyptian engineers.

They didn't even have wheels.

yeah, but how can you call yourself an engineer if you don't even have at least the urge to reinvent the wheel? :)

"Why are you doing that? Don't reinvent the wheel." "What's a 'wheel'?"

This is not entirely true, ancient Egyptians used chariots in warfare, which they originally picked up from the Hyksos [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chariotry_in_ancient_Egypt

This reminds me of a comment I responded to on reddit:

Back in the old days, before Foursquare, when you wanted to get together with a bunch of friends downtown, it took massive planning!

My response: Back in those days, we just called it, "planning."

I know Mach 3 is fast, but it still is amazing flying California to Russia and back in 10.5 hours.

> and back

That's what makes the actual difference :)

You can fly from California to Russia and back in less than 10.5 hours today, it's not that far from Alaska.

The difference is they were flying the long way, across the Atlantic, not the short way over the Bering Sea.

Here's the direct route:

http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=BAB-MMK

According to the article they passed south of Greenland, so they took a somewhat longer path. I assume that's because it helped them reach the tankers, or kept them within range of emergency landing spots or potential rescue forces.

Heck if you stand in just the right place, I've heard you can even see Russia from Alaska.

Can anyone explain why were they going from California?

It seems to make the mission much more complicated. Why not somewhere in North East USA, or even the UK (as they ended up doing anyway)?

Support base - all the logistics were out there including Lockheed contractors.

When you have missions all over the world and an aircraft that exists in small numbers and requires extreme expertise and specialized equipment, it can be easier to just fly them on long missions rather than re-base them.

For an even more extreme example, the B-2's home base is in Missouri. It has flown bombing missions into Serbia, Afghanistan, and Iraq directly out of its home base. Since it's not nearly as fast as an SR-71, these missions take a long time. The longest one took nearly two days. Fortunately for the pilots, it's a bit more comfortable than the SR-71 as well, with no space suits, and facilities for bathroom breaks and hot meals.

Hey, the SR-71 had a way to make hot meals, if you count heating a sandwich up using the cockpit windows as a hot meal.

Difficult to get that sandwich into your mouth through the space helmet.

Technically, I said nothing about eating them.

The SR-71 that is on display at the Smithsonian Air and Space facility at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles airport outside of Washington DC set an intercontinental speed record on its last flight (the flight it took to become a museum piece):

"On its last flight, March 6, 1990, Lt. Col. Ed Yielding and Lt. Col. Joseph Vida set a speed record by flying from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., in 1 hour, 4 minutes, and 20 seconds, averaging 3,418 kilometers (2,124 miles) per hour. At the flight's conclusion, they landed at Washington-Dulles International Airport and turned the airplane over to the Smithsonian." (http://airandspace.si.edu/collections/artifact.cfm?object=na...)

And rumors at the time were that it could have made the USA crossing significantly faster, but the military did not want to reveal the 'true' top speed of the aircraft.

I love hearing others stories after the event. Especially long after the event. It is touching to share first-person memories, even, especially, long after the event.

And admirable reflections of character that he didn't even contact the commanding officer of the Norway base until both the author had required and the mission/plane had been declassified. He believed in what he agreed to, and stood by it.

The Air Zoo Museum in Kalamazoo Michigan has a SR-71B on display, and it's even cooler in person than the pictures give it credit for. If you ever get a chance, I recommend you check it out.

http://www.airzoo.org/page.php?page_id=192

I will never cease to be amazed by stories like these of the SR-71, even though the essence of this one is benign in the grand scheme of aircraft stories: an important, sensitive plane had to emergency land in a foreign country.

But perhaps the most amazing part for me was the last paragraph, stating how two pilots ejected from an SR-71 after losing engine power! Can you imagine ejecting from an SR-71? I would guess you needed to sit there for at least a minute or two, just sort of flying through space until it slowed down to some speed that wouldn't immediately render you unconscious once ejecting. Will have to find out more about that.

EDIT: I'll add that I still can't imagine ejecting at even 100 MPH, a fraction of the speed the pilots probably ejected at.

> April 18, Capt. Brian Udell, an F-15E fighter pilot from Mountain Home Air Force Base, Idaho, will acknowledge the second anniversary of that fateful day. There will be no celebration, because he lost a friend and coworker - weapons systems officer Capt. Dennis White. Yet on that bitter-sweet night, Udell miraculously survived one of the fastest known ejections in history at more than 780 mph.

http://www.ejectionsite.com/insaddle/insaddle.htm

The SR-71 flight manual kind of describes it.

Pyro devices fire, yanking your boots backward onto a metal plate. (so that your feet will come with you) The canopy is blasted off.

A rocket launches you out.

Very briefly, you experience heat like a hot oven caused by the air being compressed in front of you. It's about 500 F. The suit mostly protects you.

A drouge chute gets you going feet first, head last.

More pyro devices fire, cutting some straps and then pulling a seat liner tight. This tosses you out of the seat.

I think more pyro devices... there were a lot. You end up with a survival kit dangling a few dozen feet below you and of course with a parachute above.

You get some dye, a gun, a raft, etc.

> We learned that many Norwegian fighter pilots received their initial training in the USA. We definitely were among friends!

This was a really surprising part for me.

Norway is, and has "always" been a part of NATO. Only one (I think) fringe (well, mostly, they flew high 6 or so years ago) party has really been opposed to Norways NATO membership.

Norwegian troops also train regularly together with other allied troops so learning that top trained pilots would wonder if they were among friends when they landed were.. weird.

Invasion by the Soviet Union was an ever present risk. Neighboring Finland has been repeatedly occupied by Russia. During WW2, the Soviet Union attempted to annex Finland.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finland%E2%80%93Russia_relatio...

Oddly enough, I think this is the first time I've seen reference that the SR-71 flew combat missions.

Lots of other good Blackbird stories: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22sr-71%22&sort=byPopularity&...

That was interesting. My physics teacher from high school told us that he used to be an SR-71 pilot, and flew missions near the Soviet Union, but couldn't tell us much more than that due to most of it being classified. It sounded like he really enjoyed that job.

Now I get to read about what sort of stuff he was doing. I see that his name is briefly mentioned in this article as an SR-71 pilot based at Beale AFB, so I know he wasn't just making it up :).

"Necessity is mother of invention" - if not for the cool war, there won't be billions that pour into the military /industrial complex to create wonderful machines like SR-71.

It seems the "progress" has been slow down after the cool war is over.

1950-1980 created far more interesting military innovations compare to the last 30 years, right or wrong?

Progress has shifted from big brawny machines and large troop formations to electronics and special ops squads.

Consider that these days you can fill the sky over the enemy with sats and drones without risking the life of a single pilot, and keep it going 24/7.

Also you can airlift a small team equipped with all kinds of sensor and kit to evade and disable, where before you would send in the grunts en mass in the hopes of overwhelming the target.

There was certainly a lot of neat military-related innovation, and a lot of it had great civilian applicability (e.g. the Internet), but I'm minded of the Mr. Eisenhower's speech: 'Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.' Every one of those dollars, had they been spent on the market's priorities rather than on the State's, would have done more to satisfy basic human needs.

That doesn't mean that we shouldn't have fought and won the Cold War — indeed, the fall of Communism was perhaps the only good thing to come out of the benighted, bloody, blinkered, blunderous 20th century — simply that it was costly. War is necessary for survival, but war is also a mis-investment, but the best investment in the world doesn't matter if one fails to survive. It's a tragic paradox.

The Evergreen Aviation Museum near Portland, OR has an SR-71, surely the most beautiful aircraft ever designed. It's worth the short drive if you're in the area. Those engineers were badass and didn't even use those new-fangled digital computers.

This museum also has the Spruce Goose, by the way.

A better bird from a better time.

Interesting article, but the stated pronunciation of Bodø as "Buddha" is wrong. Its more like "Boo-duh'.

How do you pronounce "Buddha"? If I were writing it out, I'd say it's pronounced like "Boo-duh."

That's how I currently pronounce "Buddha". This now makes me question how I pronounce "Buddha"...

The Buddha that can be pronounced correctly is not the real Buddha.

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