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NASA appears to be pulling the fastest plane ever produced —the SR-71 Blackbird — out of retirement as the Trump administration suggested it’s working on a new generation of hypersonic surveillance jets.
Former NASA and Air Force engineers confirmed that they had been recently offered jobs to get an old Lockheed SR-71A Blackbird back in the air nearly 27-years after its last flight, Aviation Week reported.
Mike Relja, a former test engineer for the Blackbird — which is capable of reaching speeds of Mach 3.3, 2,200 mph — said NASA reached out to him last month to get the neglected plane up and running, but added that he was now too old for such a massive undertaking.
“I told the guy, ‘You know, I’m too old to be doing this,’” Relja told Aviation Week. “‘I wish you well. I’d like to see you make it. It would be interesting. But I just don’t think you can get there from here.’”
“I do know they’ve got people working on it,” Relja added. “But again, without equipment, it’s beyond me what they’re doing.”
The specific Blackbird at the center of the project appears to be Tail No. 884, which was on display at California’s Edwards Air Force Base before suddenly disappearing in May.
That SR-71A had been at the base’s Armstrong Flight Research Center since Oct. 9, 1999, where it marked the final flight of any Blackbird in the US.
The old jet is likely full of sand and water from its time on display, and its engines have likely not been lubricated and rotated since the 1999 flight, with its $600 million worth of spare parts destroyed back in 2007.
While Relija seemed skeptical that engineers to fix the Blackbird’s broken wings and learn to fly again, he admitted it was not impossible given the vast resources at NASA’s disposal.
“If you got a ton of money, maybe you can make it happen,” he told Aviation Week. “They went to the Moon, you know.”
The aircraft, which debuted 59 years ago, still holds the achievement for fastest crewed jet-flight on public record.
At Mach 3.3, for example, it could fly from New York to Los Angeles in a little over an hour — compared to about 5 hours and 30 minutes for a commercial airliner.
Retired NASA employees also confirmed that other Blackbird engineers were contacted over the summer to do work on the jet.
During the interviews with the former engineers, however, NASA allegedly brushed aside all questions on why exactly it wanted to put the SR-71A back in the sky.
The agency has yet to make any public comments on the alleged project.
Speculations about the Blackbird have been on the rise this month after NASA head Jared Isaacman teased development on a new generation of hypersonic surveillance jets.
Isaacman is billionaire aerospace buff who owns the world’s largest private air force.
“In the service of the first A [aeronautics] in NASA, we are rebuilding our X-plane fleet. The X-59 is researching quiet supersonic flight, but it’s just the beginning,” Isaacman said at the tech-focused All-In Summit in Los Angeles.
The X-59 Quesst is an experimental aircraft that is testing whether it’s possible to achieve supersonic flight without a thundering “sonic boom.”
“It will not be long before NASA is once again flying as high and as fast from decades past — and then even more,” he vowed.
When a Blackbird-like image came up during a live interview immediately afterward, Isaacman added fuel to the mystery by asking, “You sure that’s a Blackbird?” He offered no further clarification.
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