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I couldn't disagree with you more. I am presuming you have neither read the history of SR-71, nor have a good understanding of the trade of engineering. I am ex-Lockeed employee and even though SR-71 was a distant historical project when I was working there, there were internal discussions about the engineering excellence behind the plane's performance. I worked in stress analysis team where we frequently joked about how we don't need to deal with thermal expansion like in the SR-71.

You can choose to call it "Slapped together" and brush over the sheer ingenuity of the technologies that made SR-71 successful, or you could try to read up on the insane amounts of __engineering excellence__ that took to make it achieve its mission as a recon aircraft. Its mission wasn't to be a commercial aircraft, its mission was to go as high, far and fast as possible - Reconnaissance and to return safely by literally outrunning missiles. Therefore, refueling and leaking fuel are appropriate trade-offs.

Skunkworks engineers were perfectly aware of the trade offs you mention - that is integral to __any__ engineering discipline from semiconductor to aviation. That __does not__ imply the lack of engineering excellence.

Leaking fuel is __the__ most popular fact about the SR-71. But you omit or you are unaware of the ingenuity that went into making the Ramjet engine, material science, hypersonic regime that was completely new and nothing had flown at that speeds before, etc...there is just so much to say, I am having a hard time coherently replying :-) I apologize if my response was a bit harsh - I am just passionate about this topic!

If we're defining "engineering excellence" as the craziest, most amazing thing you can possibly build, then the SR-71 absolutely qualifies. So do top fuel dragsters (though obviously the SR-71 was way more difficult to achieve).

What I meant by "not engineering excellence" was in relation to the original post, comparing how to manage production servers with the SR-71. Nobody should regularly operate their servers like an SR-71 or top fuel dragster. It's great to fly really really fast, but most people should probably not be doing that, because it requires making exceptions like leaking fuel. You actually want to run your server like a big slow complicated comfortable redundant jumbo jet on autopilot.

Hopefully you get my meaning. I apologize if I made their accomplishments seem minor. I meant no insult against the Skunkworks engineers or the SR-71, and your response was not harsh at all.

Yes, the SR-71 was a remarkable achievement. Ben Rich's book about the Skunk Works describes the project. It's amazing that thing ever worked. It's not, however, engineering minimalism. It's money is no object R&D. There are many exotic technologies used in the SR-71 never seen before in aviation and seldom used again. Large parts made of Invar, a zero expansion alloy normally used only for watch springs, for example. The price of all this was a high-cost, high-maintenance aircraft.

A good plane to look at for production minimalism is the Boeing 747. A huge aircraft even today, it was designed as a commercial product to be produced in quantity and used intensively over a long life. About 1500 were built and many are still flying after 40 years. It's reliable, maintainable, safe, and profitable.

It's not exotic. There are some new things in it, but not that many. It's mostly upgrades to technologies known at the time. Better flight controls, better navigation, better autopilot, better hydraulics, better tires, better engines, etc. But little that hadn't flown before at smaller scale. The emphasis was on eliminating the weak points during design. The B-747 has four hydraulic systems, for redundancy.

It's worthwhile for people in software to read the pilot's manual for a large commercial jetliner.[1] They're not that complicated. If operating your system is more complicated than a jetliner, you're probably doing something wrong.

[1] http://www.aviationforall.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/AOM...

Engineering is ultimately all about solving problems. Operational consistency at acceptable cost is an important problem that the 777 or a LAMP reference infrastructure provides.

The SR-71 solved a different problem — people at the top of the chain of command lacked information, and the potential impact was devastating. Delivering information at any cost was critically important, and that operational cost and the risks associated with operations were high!

> What I meant by "not engineering excellence" was in relation to the original post, comparing how to manage production servers with the SR-71. Nobody should regularly operate their servers like an SR-71 or top fuel dragster. It's great to fly really really fast, but most people should probably not be doing that, because it requires making exceptions like leaking fuel. You actually want to run your server like a big slow complicated comfortable redundant jumbo jet on autopilot.

Engineer here. It appears you've mixed up some pretty basic but unrelated concepts. Engineering projects are based on use case scenarios and design requirements. You've presented your personal and very specific usecases and design requirements and somehow assumed that they were shared by another project or that they even made sense. If your main requirement is performance and all other requirements are minor in comparison then the optimal design wont be a workhorse, but a race horse.

Exceptions from known best engineering practices happen all the time on production servers. Heck, the entire concept of a "NoSQL" key-value database violates best practices for database normalization in pursuit of faster performance. Anyone running MySQL in less than an ACID-compliant configuration? Yes? (Like, almost everyone?)

I'm not sure you and the parent disagree much.

"Engineerings excellence" might well describe a product that performs its function reliably with a minimum of intervention or fuss over a long period of time. When something "just works" like this, it's an achievement.

"Engineering excellence" might also describe the "sheer will" combined with expertise and carefully chosen tradeoffs that makes something as unlikely and amazing as the SR-71 possible at all. The parent seemed to exclude it from excellence, perhaps on the grounds that it doesn't meet the criteria I describe in the previous paragraph, but it seems to me they're talking about the project with respect for what they were able to accomplish, and if so, this is essentially a semantic point about whether any engineering operation worthy of respect fits in the box of engineering excellence, rather than a question of whether the SR-71 was amazing.

Disagree. The SR-71 represented a pinacle of engineering, not because it did everything right but because it made appropriate tradeoffs. Leaking fuel on the ground was an appropriate tradeoffs for dealing with the constraints of materials science. It traded efficiency for speed. It traded nearly all else for speed because that's what the mission profile called for, and it did it dang well.

Agreed. I have read a bit about Skunkworks and they are really good at building planes quickly but the SR 71, the U2 and F117 are all very difficult to.maintain and/or tricky to fly. Not suitable for mass production and use.

It’s funny you mention the U2. If I’m remembering right, the U2 went from idea to flying in 18 months. That is my benchmark for what 18 months of development by a talented team looks like. And yes, you’re right, it’s not an airplane for mass production, but it filled a niche and did a damned good job of it.

To restate the point that a lot of people are making here, engineering is about trade offs. If it wasn't it would be science.

If the requirements for something are highly specialised, you're only going to make only a small number of them and you have a hard deadline to do it by then you shouldn't be wasting time on mass production considerations.

That's a trade off and I think they dealt with it correctly.

The AK-47 is built to be mass producible and reliable in the field. It's a great success in those terms.

The U2 and SR-71 are build to different criteria but are also great successes.

The U2 is still flying today, albeit for a different mission, and the USAF is having a hard time fielding anything that comes close in capability.

The blackbird failed because something else could do its job better and cheaper (satellites). We still don’t have simply means we still don’t need (at the high cost where it is possible).

> we still have no airplane as fast as one built in the 1960's.

Either that or we got very good at keeping secrets, getting stelthy, or the need for this “form factor” was depreciated with the advent of space based tech.

Heck there’s probably a Robocop-style human brain in that CIA space plane[0].

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37

> Fwiw, the SR-71 was not engineering excellence. It was slapped together to do what needed to be done.

For whole industries, this is the definition of engineering. Anything that is done but is not needed is frivolous extravaganza.