SR - 71

Last week was the 47th anniversary of the launch of my favorite plane - the SR - 71, known as The Blackbird.

This photograph was taken at the US Airforce Base in Mildenhall, Cambridge in England.  It's a notoriously difficult plane to photograph and my attempts on the couple of occasions I have tried have not come out too well. It had a top speed of over 2,000 miles per hour although the actual top speed was never published.  Back in the late 60's stories circulated of this black dart of a plane leaving Cambridgeshire in the early morning and then returning by lunchtime.  It had been to Washington D.C. and back!  It made the trip across the US once in 64 minutes!  I have seen two of them up close; one at the Dryden Flight Museum out in the Mojave Desert, and the other on display at the March Air Museum near Riverside.  The plane was finally retired in 1998.  If you want to learn more this site will tell you. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SR-71_Blackbird