And probably the definitive answer to the OP.
This chart is the SR-71 double engine out windmilling glide distance. It shows what amounts to a maximum of 120 nautical miles of glide before the plane is out of height, speed, and control.
I posted this yesterday. Don’t know where it went.
From here: http://www.barthworks.com/aviation/sr71libya.htm
We had crossed into Libya and were approaching our final turn over the bleak desert landscape when Walt 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,” Walt suggested. It was then that I noticed I still had the throttles full forward. The plane was flying a mile every 1.6 seconds, well above our Mach 3.2 limit. It was the fastest we would ever fly. I pulled the throttles to idle just south of Sicily, but we still overran the refueling tanker awaiting us over Gibraltar.
That’s coasting about 1,200 miles at idle. Imagine using all of Wisconsin to get up to speed in your VW Camper, throwing it in neutral as you pass Chicago, and coasting to Miami. Or Key West!
Sounds like a job for Mythbusters!
Some interesting bits there, thanks. See this essay on a 1966 test-flight loss of a Blackbird: http://www.barthworks.com/aviation/sr71breakup.htm
Off topic, but I can’t resist posing this link (found via ducati’s link) which is a first-hand account of an in-flight SR-71 breakup. Quite a story.
Gee, I sure wish I’d posted that. Like, right before you did. 
The story about seeing airbursts after the Libya raid was clearly written by Brian Shul, there is a briefer version of the same story in his book “Sled Driver.” (Which is a truly beautiful book, not very technical, but the pictures, most taken by Brian, quite breathtaking.)
One notes that the linked story about a double engine out does not claim that the plane made a dead stick landing. Only that the plane has suffered a double engine out. Sine the engines can be restarted in air, there seems no reason to imagine that, assuming the rest of the story to be true, the plane managed a successful restart and landed normally.
Some SR-71 stories, some of which may have been sweetened a bit for the retelling.
It looks like an SR-71 has almost half the wing loading of an F-104 if all fuel was jettisoned. The SR-71 is also a slow starter, accelerating for a long time to get up to super-sonic speeds where the afterburners become efficient. That’s an indication that it has some good low speed handling characteristics. The chines on the fuselage of the SR-71 are also supposed to generate vortices that increase lift at low air speed. Somewhere it mentioned a normal approach speed of 200kts and landing speed of 155kts. And it has a drag chute to help stop it. So if the controls still worked, maybe a Blackbird could survive a deadstick landing.
Sorry - dunno why I didn’t see it.
I guess this is they key thing the flight manual is quite specific on. The controls won’t work.
An aircrew attempting such a landing, even if they succeeded, would probably be subject to a lot of very hard questions. The pilot is clearly endangering not just himself, but his RSO, the ground personnel and people in the flightpath. Getting it wrong could kill quite a few people. Pilots at this level are not idiots.
Thanks for the answers. I’ve emailed him the remarks and the links, and told him I concluded it’s a ‘sea story’.
Per my back of the envelop calculations, that would translate to Mach 3.35 at 90,000 ft. IIRC that is the max airspeed the aircraft can tolerate for short periods.
Christ. How fast and high were the SAMs that forced retirement of the Blackbird?
As badass as the Habu or Sled was, killing it is still nothing compared to intercepting a MARV moving ~10,000 MPH and maneuvering, which SAM/ABM systems such as the S-200, (SA-5 Gammon), S-300 (SA-10 Grumble and SA-12 Giant/Grumble were designed to do. (O.K., maybe reliably hitting a MARV is out of their league, but they’d still be able to hit an SR-71.) If you can see it, you can kill it, and while the SR-71’s semi-stealthy planform (ballpark 10 square meters, RCS), manueverability, and ECM suite helped, it wasn’t invisible by any means. From the limited reading of excerpts of Shul’s book I’ve been able to find (it would be nice if Sled Driver were available to read for less than a few hundred bucks.), defeating the SA-5 was done through route selection which minimized exposure time to the the SAM’s flight envelope, repeated maneuvering to defeat predictions of the Sled’s course and position, and (probably) judicious ECM spoofing.
One area of emission the SR-71 they never bothered to suppress: the infrared.
You’re kidding? Wow. I picked mine up about 20 years ago in the UK when I was just looking about in a bookshop in Cambridge. As soon as I saw it it was sold, and is a favourite of mine.
This seems about it. Shul isn’t very technical in the book, and he glosses over operational specifics as well. He does relate how a careful tweak of the throttle could be used to make interception essentially impossible once the track of an interceptor was known, but this doesn’t address SAMs. I’ll pull it out again and have another read to see if there is anything more concrete.
Suppressing this sort of signature would be challenging, to say the least. Not sure how you could do it, other than maybe introducing a substance within the exhaust that would absorb IR at the frequency range of your typical IR seeker and then re-radiate at a typically unobserved portion of the IR spectrum. There’s no way you’re cooling that exhaust to anywhere near ambient.
In practice, was IR ever used as a means of long range search and location? Or was it primarily a means for terminal guidance, in which case other means for defeating the seeker can be used? (flares, broad-spectrum emission jamming—a la the “Disco ball” ALQ-144.) I suppose you could modify and boost an IR laser to raster the area you think the missile is coming from, and so flood the seeker that way.
I haven’t seen the price of Sled Driver on Amazon for anything less than $150, and usually it’s in the $300+ range. Doesn’t stop me from looking for it in used book stores though. Our library in town has a copy of Shul and Watson’s, The Untouchables, that I need to go check out. I’m always eager to read more about the SR-71.
What are the chances the OP’s story is true, but with the caveat that only one engine went out, only to have the second engine fail near the landing site?
Not very good, according to post #30. At pattern & landing speeds, loss of the second engine means the flight controls stop working.
You might get by with it if the failure happened just as the main wheels were touching down.
You could toss the exhaust, the plane itself would still shine like a birthday candle in a dark room in the IR region when flying @ Mach 3+. The plane itself is cooking from air friction (especially the leading edges) in the hundreds of °C against a background of a cold sky.