Last Tornados out of Afghanistan. (Short vid.) Man those are big ass tails.
For real. I have a theory the team that designed that bird was only informed it was supposed to be a plane very late in the dev cycle - they must have been working on a sailboat design the entire time 
Steatopygotic engineering.
Ancient examples, courtesy of Metropolitan Museum.
Ok, but does it have an OSHA compliant backup beeper?
Substantially all fighters have air brakes. More properly termed “speed brakes”; deployable panels to markedly increase drag and produce rapid deceleration. They’re brakes, and they work against / on / in the air. 
Notice how incredibly short those birds are?
Your choice:
Small tail way out back (see airliners)
Huge tail just aft the canopy (see in military birds and really bad homebuilts)
The point is leverage - you want to be able to pull out of a spin, you need a rudder with enough force to whip the nose around (I’ll let you decide why you use the rudder).
Same with elevators - up/down right now means a great deal of force - how long of a lever do you have?
Good points. There’s quite a bit in terms of combat that doesn’t happen as much anymore but could still be relevant at that important, decisive moment when your army can turn the tide, if only you had the ability to do a bayonet charge (training, plus having bayonets in the field), or turn your ship to broadside your enemy with your huge main guns. Hope you didn’t scrap those guns.
It’s sort of like how commercial airline pilots train for hours every year to handle maybe-once-in-a-lifetime incidents like landing on an ice field or dodging mountains in a 747 with one working engine and a damaged rudder. Many pilots will never use those skills. But nobody knows which pilots are going to face that situation, so everyone has to get trained.
Two too-true sayings in our business:
“I’m not paid for what I do; I’m paid for what I *can *do.”
and
“I earn my year’s pay in about 30 minutes’ work. The rest is just waiting for those 30 minutes.”
Nice.
Great pilot-led tour of SR-71 cockpit. At 8:30, rear-view mirrors that don’t view the view. Ditto navigator section. Suit check only.
ETA: they flank the whiskey compass. What’s a whiskey compass?
It’s a standby compass that is liquid-filled. The liquid was alcohol-based (maybe it still is; I dunno), so pilots and mechanics BITD started calling them “whiskey compass”. The term is still used today by plenty of us in aviation.
And of course, this leads to a great aviation philosophy question:
If American aircraft have a whiskey compass, do Russian aircraft have a vodka compass?
I think it’s just from an abbreviation for Wet Compass. They are usally filled with kerosene, but Whiskey is NATO phonetic for W.
They did. But the ground crew drained it to drink it, comrade Ops Officer.
The Cessna 150 had a mirror in the cockpit - made it easier to check rudder operation and remain on the runway line on takeoff
Brian
SR-71 actually had a periscope that could be raised to look aft. The reason was to check and see if the aircraft was leaving contrails.
Whiskey compass got it’s name, apparently, because at one time the fluid the compass ball floated in was alcohol, not whiskey though. This is around WW1 or so IIRC. The result was the mechanics were very popular with airmen. This has never, as far as I can tell, been documented, but it makes for great hanger talk.
Yes, the periscope is shown and fiddled with also in the video. The navigator recon specialist had all the good views.
On basic instruments, on knowing which way is up:
- Sorry to be stupid, but what about the other compasses, and analog and electronics equivalents thereof? Judging by that W compass position, it’s the last "everything else is gone instrument? The last thing you see when you hit eject?
Civilian jets have what?
- Watch in the vid where he explains an add-on request for pilots having trouble finding the horizon in night flights. Huh? So they say install this laser on the side of the cockpit, which shines a visible straight line (natch) laser that the pilots simply line up horizontally across their dashboard. I don’t understand the purpose of this in addition to the ball; yes, having a beam of sunlight nicely lined up to orient but not blind you even to me seems helpful, but what is going on here that every jet pilot at night wouldn’t love to have (and have)?
Modern avionics have done away with most of those instruments, replacing them with a glass panel. Like flying by looking at a TV screen displaying the info. The SR-71 has the whiskey compass, and a gyro compass. The former was used to set the latter as the latter was subject to a degree of drift on long flights.
I didn’t watch the entire video but I’ve seen others where the navigation system was explained. it was a computer (so to speak) that knew the position of many of the brightest stars and would, day or night, almost instantly once the aircraft taxied out of the hangers, lock on to 3 of these stars and compute the plane’s location. The pilots talk about tracking the “black line” (the selected route of the flight) to within several hundred yards using this celestial navigation.
The SR-71 is truly amazing considering it was made at a time when slide rules, not computers, were used for design. TEB ignition, special JP7 jet fuel, hydraulic fluids designed specifically for 2000 mph flight, tires that could withstand high touch down speeds. Absolutely amazing engineering.
One of the best videos features Brian Shul (a Habu) telling about the first time the Blackbird was displayed at a public event. Brian stood there, in front of his Blackbird, surrounded by armed guards, as the Russians stood in amazement looking at the airplane they could not catch, shoot or compete with. Eat your heart out Ivan, you can’t catch us. 
Here’s the link to Brian vs. the Russians at the air show.
Time on the video where this starts. 30:20
Here’s a whiskey compass: Airpath C2200-L4 Cessna Compass TSOd | Aircraft Spruce For size reference the glass window is about 1" x 1.5"
And here’s the “whiskey”, which is basically fancy paint thinner: Airpath Compass Fluid ( 1/2 Pint & Quart ) | Aircraft Spruce
(Simplifying a bit …) All fancy aircraft have back-up systems harking all the way back to the pre-WWII days. When you’re down to your last electron it’s nice to still be able to sort-of fly.
The SR’s cockpit equipment was nothing out of the ordinary for a 1960s military airplane. The cockpit would look totally familiar to anyone who’d flown a fast twin like a USAF F-101 or F-4, or USN A-3, A-5, A-6, or F-4. Other than having two sets of engine gauges it’s be totally familiar to guys from the USAF F-100, F-102, F-104, F-106 and the USN F-8, A-4. Most of those instruments and some of the controls are present in USAF & USN basic jet trainers.
The only thing that made the SR special was how fast and how high and how long it went. Which was plenty. It was a bleeding edge air vehicle with a boring humdrum cockpit. Until you looked outside and saw … space.
And they left a note on the compass housing that read (in Russian): “What’s good for Comrade Minderbinder is good for Mother Russia.”