WI :- SR-71 shot down
This is interesting (to me anyways) reading..
When his SR-71 Disintegrated, This Pilot Free Fell From Space & Lived to Tell About It - CHUCKYEAGER.ORG
During the early days of testing for the legendary SR-71 Blackbird there were some harrowing mishaps, the details of which have rarely come to light. On January 25, 1966, test pilot Bill Weaver and Lockheed flight test reconnaissance and navigation systems specialist Jim Zwayer experienced their...
How many ejections from a combat damaged aircraft at Mach 3 did this source have access to in order to asses that?
This is interesting (to me anyways) reading..
When his SR-71 Disintegrated, This Pilot Free Fell From Space & Lived to Tell About It - CHUCKYEAGER.ORG
During the early days of testing for the legendary SR-71 Blackbird there were some harrowing mishaps, the details of which have rarely come to light. On January 25, 1966, test pilot Bill Weaver and Lockheed flight test reconnaissance and navigation systems specialist Jim Zwayer experienced their...www.chuckyeager.org
Thats the same story from the first link. Note the pilot mentions specifically waiting to eject until their speed reduced to a manageable, survivable one.
The link in my other post speaks to the low air density at those altitudes requiring a drouge chute to stabilize an individual who has bailed out at those altitudes to avoid damage by excessive G forces due to un controlled spinning, so I am inclined to believe that ejections at those heights and speeds could in fact have been survivable.
That is not how I read it... My take on the account was that the SR71 disintegrated at high speed and high altitude before the survivor could decide to eject.. It also specifically speaks to air density at high altitude being in sufficient to prevent a human from tumbling..
How many Mach 3 air craft have actually been damaged in combat ? For that matter how many actual Mach 3 combat missions besides SR71 and Mig 25 overflights have actually been flown ? I doubt the sample size is big enough to draw meaningful conclusions about ejections from combat damaged air craft at Mach 3.
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It says that they planned to wait until they were at lower altitude and slower speed, but that the vehicle actually disintegrated at high altitude and speed, forestalling that option. Specifically,
Likewise,
In other words, initially they intended to descend to a lower altitude and speed. But they could not actually control the aircraft well enough to do so, and as a result of the loss of control and aerodynamic buffeting that resulted, it broke up at high altitude and speed, throwing the crew members free of the aircraft. Yet they survived.
For another example, one could look at the ejection from the M-21 that followed its collision with the D-21 drone after a launching attempt. The collision and subsequent ejection occurred at Mach 3.25 and 80 000 feet; both crew members survived ejection, but one drowned after splashing down. The evidence is clearly that a high-altitude, high-speed ejection from the SR-71, while obviously dangerous, is entirely survivable. Therefore, the crew members of the SR-71 in this thread certainly have a chance of successfully ejecting and landing in Soviet territory.
Errolwi
Monthly Donor
And it's impossible for a missile to damage a SR-71, causing it to lose speed and altitude before an ejection is attempted?
Nick P
Donor
Does it have to be Kamchatka and the USSR?
What about a flight over Tehran during the Hostage Crisis or the Iran-Iraq War and an AIM-54 equipped F-14 Tomcat managing the shootdown?
Or even such a flight being forced north into the Armenia/Azerbaijan region and being shot down there?
What about a flight over Tehran during the Hostage Crisis or the Iran-Iraq War and an AIM-54 equipped F-14 Tomcat managing the shootdown?
Or even such a flight being forced north into the Armenia/Azerbaijan region and being shot down there?
marathag
Banned
That's different than a Blackbird peppered with shrapnel from near 500 pounds of HE from a SA-5 Gammon exploding nearby
And? So what? The point of the examples is to show that it is possible to survive being ejected from an SR-71 at Mach 3+ and high altitude, which they do. I never claimed that it was certain that the operators would survive, only that it is plausible because they actually did survive ejection at similar speeds and altitudes.
Besides, I fail to see how being "peppered with shrapnel" is necessarily worse than your aircraft going out of control and literally disintegrating around you or hitting another aircraft a large fraction of your own size while you're both traveling at Mach 3+.
Yeah it seems unlikely to me (but probably not impossible) that the crew members would survive such an event. The Soviets recovering the body (or bodies) of dead air crew is also a possibility.
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If said shrapnel punctures a pressure suit (or suits) I suspect the air crew are unlikely to survive. Shrapnel from SAMs is typically intended to penetrate targets, whereas the effects of a disintegrating aircraft or a collision are probably a bit less predictable.
Sure. And the operators are sitting in a large aircraft that has a pretty good chance of stopping such shrapnel from reaching their pressure suits (especially if the missile doesn't explode particularly close to the cockpit). In the case of the aircraft disintegrating, the aircraft itself is trying to kill them.
What makes you think the Swedes could shootdown an SR-71? I doubt they could shootdown a MIG-25 on a recon flight. In the early 80's Israel couldn't shootdown Syrian MIG-25's on high altitude recon flights.
So 6 MiG-31s form a circle around the SR-71 and then fire their long range missiles into the centre of the circle. What could possible go wrong? I hope those MiGs have robust IFF.
I doubt they zoom climbed to 90,000 ft. and dove on an SR-71 flying like a bat out of hell, at Mach 3.2 at 85,000 ft. The only aircraft I know of that could do that would be a rocket powered F-104, or an X-Plane like the X-15. If anyone can think of anything else I'd like to hear about it.