Sorry to ride the SR-71 farther away from the OP, but I found 2 Blackbird anecdotes a while back that make me smile.
Brother pilots will appreciate #1…
QUOTE:
We trained for a year, flying out of Beale AFB in California , Kadena Airbase in Okinawa , and RAF Mildenhall in England . On a typical training mission, we would take off near Sacramento , refuel over Nevada, accelerate into Montana , obtain high Mach over Colorado , turn right over New Mexico , speed across the Los Angeles Basin , run up the West Coast, turn right at Seattle , then return to Beale. Total flight time: two hours and 40 minutes.
One day, high above Arizona , we were monitoring the radio traffic of all the mortal airplanes below us. First, a Cessna pilot asked the air traffic controllers to check his ground speed. ‘Ninety knots,’ ATC replied. A Bonanza soon made the same request. ‘One-twenty on the ground,’ was the reply. To our surprise, a navy F-18 came over the radio for a ground speed check. I knew exactly what he was doing. Of course, he had a ground speed indicator in his cockpit, but he wanted to let all the bug-smashers in the valley know what real speed was ‘Dusty 52, we show you at 620 on the ground,’ ATC responded.
The situation was too ripe. I heard the click of the RSO’s mike button in the rear seat. In his most innocent voice he startled the controller by asking for a ground speed check from 81,000 feet, clearly above controlled airspace. In a cool, professional voice, the controller replied, ‘Aspen xx, I show you at 1,982 knots (2282 mph) on the ground.’ We did not hear another transmission on that frequency all the way to the coast.
AND;
In April 1986, following an attack on American soldiers in a Berlin disco, President Reagan ordered the bombing of Muammar Qaddafi’s terrorist camps in Libya . My duty was to fly over Libya and take photos recording the damage our F-111’s had inflicted… Qaddafi had established a ‘line of death,’ a territorial marking across the Gulf of Sidra , swearing to shoot down any intruder that crossed the boundary. On the morning of April 15, 1986 I rocketed past the line at 2,125 mph (1845kts).
I was piloting the SR-71 spy plane, the world’s fastest jet, with a Marine Major as the reconnaissance systems officer (RSO). We had crossed into Libya and were approaching our final turn over the bleak desert landscape when the RSO informed me that he was receiving missile launch signals. I quickly increased our speed, calculating the time it would take for the weapons, most likely SA-2 and SA-4 surface-to-air missiles capable of Mach 5, to reach our altitude. I estimated that we could beat the rocket-powered missiles to the turn and stayed our course, betting our lives on the plane’s performance.
After several agonizingly long seconds, we made the turn and blasted toward the Mediterranean. ‘You might want to pull it back,’ the RSO suggested. It was then that I noticed I still had the throttles full forward. The plane was flying a mile every 1.6 seconds (2250mph, 1953 knots), well above our Mach 3.2 limit. It was the fastest we would ever fly in a mission. I pulled the throttles to idle just south of Sicily, but we still overran the refueling tanker awaiting us over Gibraltar…
You have to love a plane that will coast 1,200 miles at idle and still be going too fast to meet your buddies…
