Greatest prank ever (area 51)

I stand corrected. Still a beautiful plane, and closely related.

Got to see a B2 do 5 or 6 passes low overhead a few years ago (the only benefit of playing soccer close to Indy on the day of the 500). You couldn’t really hear it coming toward you, but you could when it was leaving. I suppose for a bomber that is what matters since they have already dropped their load by the time you hear them. This was low, on a sunny day, in broad daylight, and I’ll say it was really odd to see this huge bird silently coming overhead. At altitude at night you would have no clue until it was too late.

I sat in the cockpit of one at Boeing Field and got close and personal at Evergreen.

Here… someone in the same area caught it on video.

I saw a B2 flyover at the EAA Sun & Fun fly-in in Florida back in the nineties. They had a mock air battle with WWII planes, then a B2 made a low pass with its bomb doors open while they set off gasoline bombs on the ground.

I know someone who traveled to Area 51 for work, but he died before this declassification so I wasn’t able to get any stories about the place.

I don’t care who you are, that’s funny right there! :smiley:

Are there any SR-71’s still flying at airshows or in any other capacity, or are they all mothballed?

They’re all out of service.

I thought NASA had one they used for testing?

Guess not.

I support using taxpayer dollars in some sort of national awesomeness fund to keep a few of them running. Our awesomeness level took a significant hit.

I guess satellite imagery improvements over the years spelled the demise of something like the Blackbird for reconnaissance photography. IIRC the Blackbird was exceedingly expensive to maintain.

It cost 250m a year to maintain the squadron, which might’ve been beyond their worth in recon value. There still is a need for aircraft recon though - satellites have predictable paths and often certain areas are only covered once every few days at known intervals. Which means you could arrange whatever you wanted to hide around it. We do still have U2s operational though (believe it or not). Some people speculate that we have some sort of super secret high tech recon aircraft that replaced the SR-71 but isn’t publically known yet.

Still, we could’ve kept those two test platforms flying for NASA. The SR-71 is one of those things where you can see one and say AMERICA! FUCK YEAH! That’s gotta be worth something, right?

Abso-fucking-lutely. I think at least a couple should be making the rounds at airshows. I know I would go just to see/hear one of those things fly.

One of these days I’m going to sell a body part and get an "18 - "24 model kit of the SR-71.

[Craig Ferguson]That would be AWESOME.[/Craig Ferguson]

And my neighbor has a bit of an Air Force museum in his basement, so I could donate it to him if/when I grew inured to its awesomeness.

Here is a story about how slow an SR71 can fly.
Awesome aircraft. One of my neighbors worked on it, and another neighbor who is now dead also worked on it.

Totally fucking awesome.

I had to google a bit to find it, but 15 minutes in in this video there’s Jeremy Clarkson getting all hypnotized by the blackbird.

You have your planes mixed up. It was not the SR-71, but rather the Bell P-59 that Jack Woolams flu with a Gorilla mask and was smoking a cigar over Edwards Air Force Base.

The subject came up about a month before this thread was started. I posted some quotes in that thread, which might be of interest to anyone wanting to know a little more about the Jack Woolams prank.

UFO stories:

Driving east one moonless night along I-40 in Southern California (about an hours away from the border CA-AZ) in February 1998, I note a tiger tails from a jet. That in itself isn’t surprising…what caught me off guard was the color–they were green. At first I thought it was the blue tint on the upper part of the windshield. But the object was located too low relative to the tint zone.

Whatever it was, it was 1) moving fast, 2) low to the ground, and 3) seemed to me that the pilot deliberately kicked in the afterburners just as he/she flew over the interstate just to screw with peoples minds.

Has anyone else see the “green”? I’ve only seen blue or yellow tiger tails