Let me be a little more specific (or less specific really). What’s the highest altitude an aircraft has achieve whose engine(s) rely on outside air for an oxidizer rather than having an onboard oxygen tank or other oxidizer? It does count if it managed to coast beyond the point at which its engines stalled out but it can’t use buoyancy or anything besides engine thrust to propel itself.
I think a MIG-25 reached 124,000 feet about 30 years ago.
Wikipedia tells me:
So Icerigger was off by 477 ft and 5 years?
I hate people giving out bogus information.
Once. For twenty minutes.
Man, why did James Cameron have to go & ruin that joke?
I think if we had really put our minds to it, we could have put a stop to the whole affair.
It’s not too late, we can send a robot to the past to kill his mother…
So over 20 miles, not bad. What’s the barometric pressure like up there?
Accoring to this rule of thumb equation, around 5Pa.
Look at this if you want to see a pretty good dramatization of Chuck Yeager’s attempt to set an altitude record in an F-104 Starfighter. I’m not sure how much dramatic license was allowed, but the flight, and the crash, really happened. Unfortunately you have to skip past some unrelated scenes to see much of it. The final part of the climb starts around 14 minutes.
I knew what that was going to be before I even clicked on the link. Great movie.
But, not applicable for this thread. The real accident occurred in an NF-104, which was a modified version of the F-104 to train pilots for the X-15 and X-20 (cancelled) programs. The NF-104 had a small rocket motor installed at the base of the tail, and reaction controls jets for attitude control at high altitude.
The SR-71/A-12 family holds the level flight record, maintaining altitude in level flight at 80,000+ feet. You can get higher if you do a parabolic flight plan, peaking at the tip of the parabola - this may be how the Mig-25s breached 120,000+ miles.
120,000 miles? That’s a hell of a flight.
The Mig-25 doesn’t have any reaction control system from what I can tell. What happens in a MIG25 if you start to spin in the middle of a zoom climb up where there’s nothing for your control surfaces to work with?
D’oH!
Feet, not miles.
You might get 120,000 miles if you mount the Mig on an ICBM.
Point holds, though, it’s one thing to get to peak height via parabolic flight versus getting to 80,000+ feet and maintaining level flight.
I don’t think even the Space Shuttle can get to 120,000 miles; that’s halfway to the moon. I’d be surprised if you could get an ICBM to 120,000 miles at all, especially not with anything left in the tanks to control a descent.
And yes, to stop nitpicking, I imagine that the SR-71 could top out much higher than those MIGs in a parabolic flight path.
Apparently not, the SR71 was made to go very high and very fast in straight lines, it was not maneuverable at all and apparently could not perform a zoom climb maneuver.
That’s amazing that they’re able to fly that high, even 80,000 feet, without the engine stalling out. Great answers.