Google Earth the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum on the carrier USS Intrepid in the Hudson River. How do you get an SR-71 for a private museum? 
Those who visit the USS Intrepid’s web site will read there that their Blackbird is on long term loan from the National Museum of the United States Air Force.
Should an SR-71 pose a greater difficulty to aquire than a freakin aircraft carrier? I think if you can get one, you have the means to get the other–both financial and otherwise.
It’s not an SR71 on the Intrepid, it’s an A-12 Oxcart, which was the SR71’s predecessor. They were taken out of service in 1968 and replaced by the SR71. This website list the known locations of all A-12s and SR71s.
If the larger question is how these once secret airplanes end up in a museum, it’s because they are sold and or donated after they are decomissioned.
Googling the museum’s Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum’s website leads me to believe that’s an A-12 Blackbird spy plane, rather than an SR-71 Blackbird.
Now that doesn’t invalidate your question, because the Strategic Air & Space Museum near Omaha is a 501(c)(3) organization, and has an SR-71A “Blackbird” hanging in its lobby.
Pretty plane, but I’ve no idea how they got it.
The big question is, how are they going to get the Big I to her new berthing now that they’ve discovered her propellers are stuck in the riverbed?
And why hadn’t they figured on that earlier? The Coast Guard (who’s overseeing the operation) presumably has divers, no?
Correction. The props became stuck after they tried to tow her.
AP story
Still. They could have figured on that.
Good point.
Whatever happened with that non-demilled F-16 that was on sale at ebay a couple years ago. Was the sale cancelled? Did someone buy the combat-ready fighter?
Salvage is a pretty inexact science. They probably knew it was a possibility, but whether she’d stick or not would probably not have been easily determined. They probably decided to take a punt on towing her over/through the mud before trying expensive alternate solutions.
How do they get the planes on and off the deck? Do they still have a working crane or something?
One of the stories about being aground said they had a Concorde that was taken to another museum for the move. There must be some very large dock side crane for that sort of thing.
They knew it was iffy. That’s why they drained the ballast tanks, dredged the river and waited for the seasonal high tide. Now its, Oops, whadda we do now? The December tide will still be a foot lower than the November tide.
The Intrepid has been a fiasco from the start. It was funded by fraudulant applications to HUD during the Reagan administration. During that time, HUD got looted of about $4 billion in taxpayer’s money. The Intrepid museum was just another player in the massive fraud. Now, another $60 million is going to be sunk into the renovation and I can’t believe that it is all coming from private funds.