The SR-71 Blackbird was a Reconnaissance aircraft designed for the CIA to operate at high speeds and high altitudes to avoid enemy air defenses. The blackbird had also seen operations with the Airforce and NASA. It achieved speech of Mach 3.2 and altitudes above 85,000 feet so, with a combination of jamming made it an extremely difficult plane to target with surface-to-air missiles. In total 32 SR-71s were built but not a single one was lost due to enemy air defenses. The SR-71’s role as a surveillance aircraft today has been replaced by satellites and UAVs.
The SR-71 program was needed to replace the slow U-2 surveillance aircraft and aimed to fly higher and faster, while also having a lower radar cross-section. Most of the airframe was built of titanium due to the high heat it would face at extreme speeds. Due to such drastic differences in materials from usual aircraft manufacturing, there was special tooling and processes to create such a large and complex aircraft out of titanium. Also due to the extreme heat, it would have at such speeds large thermal expansion cracks had to be built into the airframe, this caused the SR-71 to leak fuel on the runway until it reached proper speeds that would allow it to seal. Due to the large amounts of titanium necessary to build the SR-71s the CIA had to set up shell companies that would acquire the ore from the USSR in third world companies before shipping it to the United States for processing. The SR-71 also features advanced engines that could change an inlet cone depending on the speed to allow the engines to slow down the supersonic air that the engines received. Supersonic flights could only last around 90 minutes before the aircraft would need to find a tanker to refuel.
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