Flying the SR-71 “Blackbird”
July 28, 2022
The SR-71 “Blackbird” is a legendary aircraft. It remains the world’s fastest airplane – a title it has held since the 60s. In this special episode of The Hermeus Podcast we chat with two former crew members of the SR-71 and get into some rather thrilling stories.
It was an honor to have Lt. Col. Tom Veltri and Maj. Gen. Robert Behler join us.
PODCAST GUESTS
Skyler Shuford – Founder, COO
Tom Veltri – Retired USAF Lt. Col.
Robert Behler – Retired USAF Maj. Gen.
Michelle Tyrlik – Sr. Flight Test Engineer
PODCAST GUESTS
For those who prefer to read, here’s a transcript of the entire episode:
Skyler Shuford:
Cool. We rolling? Rock and roll. Cool. So we'll start with some intros, just so everyone knows. I'm pretty excited about this one. I think we're going to have a fun time and we'll see if I can get you guys to embarrass yourselves, but probably not too many embarrassing things, just really cool stuff. So we'll start with you, a little background on yourself, introduce yourself, and go.
Tom Veltri:
Sure. Yeah. Tom Veltri, I was a RSO back seater in the SR-71. RSO is Reconnaissance Systems Officer, for people that aren't familiar with the acronym. Flew the airplane for about five years, I was at Beale for almost 10 years. I flew the KC135 first, the Q model that refueled the SR, and then I had an opportunity to move over to the SR, which was fantastic. Have over 600 hours in the aircraft and over 100 operational missions.
Skyler Shuford:
That's great.
Robert Behler:
My name is Bob Behler, I started this whole idea out when I was very young racing boats. And I decided at that time there are two things I want to do more than anything else, and it was all about loud noise and speed. And so few years later, I went to pilot training and became an experimental test pilot, and got qualified in the SR-71, and flew for about five years. And got about a million miles at above Mach 3, and about 1000 hours were in a space suit.
Skyler Shuford:
Awesome. What is the fastest boat you've driven?
Robert Behler:
My Hydro went about 65 miles an hour.
Skyler Shuford:
On the water, that's cooking pretty good. That's pretty great. Cool. And then we have a new face of Hermeus, a recent joiner.
Michelle Tyrlik:
Yeah. My name is Michelle Tyrlik, I'm a senior flight test engineer here at Hermeus, I graduated the national test pilot school and been in flight test for about 15 years.
Skyler Shuford:
Awesome. So yeah, basically all of our listeners are going to know what the SR-71 is, but for those that don't, the very small minority, who wants to take that one first and just give a high level overview of what the plane is and what makes it so special?
Tom Veltri:
The plane was built for reconnaissance missions to go out and basically take pictures and collect signals intelligence. The Air Force took the aircraft after the CIA flew it for a couple years, when they flew the A12, and then the SR-71 though was taken by the Air Force in 1964. The aircraft flew from 1964 until its initial retirement in 1990, and then we brought it back for three years, mostly with Bob's help. Brought it back for three years and we retired it again in '97.
Robert Behler:
Yeah, '95 to '97. That's correct.
Skyler Shuford:
Okay. So there aren't any SR-71s out there flying today, unfortunately.
Tom Veltri:
But the aircraft, we could fly over 80,000 feet. Our operation envelope was 80,000 feet, Mach 3 basically. You could fly for almost an hour at Mach. When you hear about a lot of aircraft that can go over Mach 2 and this kind of thing, they do it for minutes. Most fighter aircraft that can do it, they run out a fuel in what? About five minutes, 10 minutes? Not very much. We go an hour.
Skyler Shuford:
That's incredible.
Tom Veltri:
So do the math, you get a long way.
Skyler Shuford:
Start sweating a little bit, probably toward the end of that hour.
Tom Veltri:
I'll tell you, we had the pressure suit on, I felt like I was crawling back into the womb. It was so comfortable.
Skyler Shuford:
Oh, there you go.
Tom Veltri:
When you sat in the cockpit, and you had to pressure suit on, the airs flowing around you, there's no better feeling in the world.
Robert Behler:
Yeah, I'll add a couple other comments. The SR today, it still holds a record for the fastest high flying airplane, production airplane, ever built. And they set those records almost 50 years ago.
Skyler Shuford:
It's incredible.
Robert Behler:
It's incredible, but it's also sad certainly that this country hasn't been able to develop anything that can match that or exceed that. And that's what we need to continue to do is keep pushing the envelope so we can break those records.
Skyler Shuford:
Why do you think that is? Is this political, is this financing, is this technical? Or are there not enough people being trained on it? Where do you see the major issues that lead to this decline in speed really that we're seeing in aviation?
Tom Veltri:
Well, it's all the above. Definitely it costs a lot of money to build an airplane like this, and there's got to be a main reason to do it. The SR was built because of the challenges we had from the Soviet Union after they shot down a U2 aircraft, we had to have something that was semi invincible, which we did. If you look at the history of the SR-71, about 4,000 surface air missiles were shot at the SR, how many hit the airplane? Zero.
Skyler Shuford:
The old goose egg.
Tom Veltri:
We've never had an aircraft lost in combat in the SR-71, we've never had a pilot or RSO killed in the SR-71. There's been some engineers that on some test stuff they've had trouble when we were flying the D-21 Drone out of the back, which is something that probably a lot of the people listening don't know about that system, but it's quite remarkable. We talk about high speed drones today, we were doing it in the SR-71 back in the 70s. And when we'd launch a D-21 Drone off the back of the SR it would go out to Mach 3.5 at 100,000 feet and go a couple thousand miles, then the camera would come out and an airplane, the C-130, would pick it up.
Skyler Shuford:
Throw out some magnetic tape and get it intercepted.
Tom Veltri:
They had a big catcher in front of the C-130, just like they did with the satellite imagery. It would come down on a basket and they'd go and catch it.
Skyler Shuford:
That's a great reference vehicle that we look to a lot is the D-21. It's about roughly the same scale as Quarterhorse. Obviously, it's air launched, so there's no turbo machinery or anything like that we're going to have on Quarterhorse, but we take a lot from the use cases, especially as an ISR platform. And now that we can send data back, not as magnetic tape getting thrown out of the vehicle, it should be a lot more useful, especially as we start to field these systems. So you mentioned the Soviets. So can we talk a little bit more about the time period when this was being developed? Paint a picture for what the world looked like. Why did we need this so bad? I think a lot of our listeners are relatively young, myself included, help us understand the context in which the SR was flying.
Robert Behler:
Okay. Well let me start, and Tom, you can just fill in it with the blanks here, but the world was actually safer back during the World War.
Skyler Shuford:
Ooh, that's a spicy take. That's surprising.
Robert Behler:
And I'll explain why. We knew who the good guys were, and we knew who the bad guys were, and they were the two team leaders, and everybody went one side or the other. And nobody ever wanted the two big guys to come together and fight because that end the world. So as a result, the ones below that didn't get in the fight. Today, we're in another world whereas transnational terrorism in other countries that are going out on their own, look what's going on over in Eastern Europe right now. But back then, we needed to make sure we knew everything we could about the adversary. Where the submarines were, where the missiles were, where they were maneuvering, et cetera, et cetera.
Robert Behler:
And the one platform that could do that better than any, because satellites were too predictable, we had an airplane like the SR that was unpredictable, that could go pretty much anywhere they wanted in the world, and pretty much be safe and come back. We didn't have any weapons aboard, but we had data that went sometimes right to the President of the United States. So that was the importance of having this mission. Tim?
Tom Veltri:
No, I agree. It was more than just the Cold War though, too. If you think about it during Desert Storm, Desert Shield, the SR-71, Schwarzkopf actually asked for the aircraft. We had just retired it literally months before. I had just got to the Pentagon and so I was the SR guy on the joint staff, and we briefed it all the way up to Chairman Powell that, "General Schwarzkopf wants the airplane, how fast can you bring it back?" Just a matter of months we had it flying. It could photograph the entire synoptic coverage of the entire country of Iraq every day. One big picture of Iraq. To me, that's a pretty amazing capability. Why would you not want to have that? Now maybe that doesn't work in Afghanistan, but it certainly works in a lot of places.
Skyler Shuford:
Right. Yeah. That's something, I think that was pretty interesting when we first started having conversations with DOD and other government customers was that initially you think of speed as survivability, but it's really time to target, time to eyes on something. And that's where we're getting a lot more traction, especially when we talk about predictability of satellites and when war games happen, and those are the first things that go out when we're talking about strategic competition. That's what ended up more interesting is how do you deal with the tyranny of distance more? And that's where we're finding the most interest in what we're doing.
Tom Veltri:
Remember we did this in the pre space where space was everything. No GPS, no navigation, no weather capabilities like we have now.
Robert Behler:
Let me add to your story about bringing the airplane back. I happened to got sent to Harvard to school and this all happened as Desert Storm started. I actually got a call from Senator Glenn's office that asked exactly the same question, and they wanted me to answer him right there. Can we bring the SR back and so on? I said, "Yeah, but write a big check." But we did bring it back.
Tom Veltri:
It wasn't that big a check either.
Robert Behler:
Because the thing that we had going for us that maybe you need to do too, we had lots of J-58 engines sitting around, which was always the long pole in the tent when we were flying operation, we had all the airplanes we needed.
Skyler Shuford:
Yeah. Coming from the rocket world, especially with development programs, it's the engine that ends up being the long pole, and so being able to try and decouple that as much from the airframe or having the right redundancy. So that's why we have JD-5s strew about just to have some backups and to have some hardware ready to go.
Tom Veltri:
Yeah, I tell you about the capability of the optical bar camera. We just talked about capability to take wide area synoptic coverage. The OBC, the optical bar camera, was just retired from the U2. Was it last week?
Robert Behler:
Last week.
Tom Veltri:
Last week. So that capability right existed all the way through to last week. Now we could do a lot more area a lot faster, but if you have air superiority, U2 does a hell of a job.
Skyler Shuford:
Right. And when you have working technology. The B-52 is another example. It is a platform that's going to be around for a long time just because it's still working, and it's big, and people know how to use it. So Michelle, you recently joined us, and I want to hear your first take, it's been a few weeks now, how are we approaching the development process differently? And then I want to relate it back to the risk appetite of the SR-71 days, segue into there. So how are we doing things differently? What are you excited about on the development side and our risk posture?
Michelle Tyrlik:
Yeah. Well there are definitely a couple parallels between the SR-71 program and how rapidly that was developed and all the incremental capabilities that went into developing an aircraft that was so well tailored to its mission, to the point where some of that technologies is still being flown up until last week. So that in itself is really incredible that you step back and you look at some of the technical challenges that the team had to face. First use of titanium in an airframe, determining how to manufacture with titanium, working through all the sensors, technologies, and application equipment that didn't exist prior to the need of the SR-71, and then packaging all those technologies together and use them.
Michelle Tyrlik:
So technology development was also for propulsion, was what made that airframe possible. And coming into Hermeus and seeing our propulsion development process, seeing our airframe development process, we have a lot of, I would say, advantages over the high caliber team that got the SR-71 and its predecessor the A12 into the air. But the challenges of the flying environment are the same, we have the advantages of modern computing, the advantages of GPS, compact avionic systems that weren't present in the SR-71 days, but still the need for this type of capability and the advantage of having a small high caliber team set together to solve those problems, package them together, and work on a platform that's so well suited to its mission is really exciting.
Skyler Shuford:
Yeah. I think we talked about it briefly in the last podcast on the flight sciences one, but it's about knowing when to use the modern computation and then stop when it's no longer appropriate. And I think that's the balance.
Tom Veltri:
You guys still pause, slide rules once in a while.
Skyler Shuford:
Exactly. Yeah. All slide rules. Yep, exactly. Yeah. Punch cards. Yeah.
Robert Behler:
Let me pile on a little bit. So as I study the SR, and Skunk Works, Kelly Johnson, and everything, I see they had to overcome five major innovations. There were thousands of things because as Kelly said, everything had to be invented, but there were five really major ones that had to be squared away first. The first one was physiology. How do you keep the crew member alive at those extreme altitudes, temperatures, and speeds, to be able to eject at 80,000 feet at Mach 3 and survive, which we could, and we did. Other crew members have done that. So that was one, the second was-
Skyler Shuford:
Yeah. Our solution to that is just put them on the ground. At least the first.
Michelle Tyrlik:
One G straight and level.
Skyler Shuford:
Yeah, right.
Robert Behler:
Yeah. Then that's one. So number two would've been the whole, the Ram Jet to build the right propulsion system. It hadn't been done before. That's where the magic was. Ben Rich designed those inlet Ram Jet and it was just an amazing amount of genius that it took to do that. And that's where that was number two number three, of course the aerodynamics, the aerodynamics on that airplane, just looking at the SR it's a double Delta Way, and that was not by accident. I could get into the technology, but when you go transonic in the SR the aerodynamic center moves aft very quickly, up to about 45% to 50% mean aerodynamic chord, which causes a lot of loss of direct dynamic stability.
Robert Behler:
So that chimes went out there that moved it forward. And when you got the speed and altitude, the CG started moving aft, and the aerodynamic center started moving forward, and they met at 25 degrees, or excuse me, 25 degrees mean aerodynamic chord, which means there was basically no trim drag that allowed the airplane to fly that fast. That was another one of those remarkable things.
Skyler Shuford:
Yeah. That's pretty impressive for tuning when you're using slide rules or designing by hand and you're not using the computation. And even if you had the computation, this is something that we face is, how much can you trust it? How much do you want to really bet on, "Oh, it'll be here at this Mach number."
Tom Veltri:
Yeah. And it's not always exactly right.
Skyler Shuford:
Exactly. Well, it's never.
Michelle Tyrlik:
That was actually a change that came through in the flight test program. It's lowering the nose for about two degrees to fix the trim drag.
Robert Behler:
That's right. Number four was material science. How do you keep that airplane from burning up going that fast? The average temperature was over 600 degrees and the cockpit was 622 degrees, and I was right behind this little window that was 620 degrees. So the material sciences, how do you use titanium? How do you mill it? And all that had to be done from zero knowledge base.
Tom Veltri:
And the windows too.
Robert Behler:
Huh.
Tom Veltri:
Windows.
Robert Behler:
Windows were three or five inches thick. And from the sensor standpoint, the lenses on the cameras had to be preheated hours before the flight because of the thermal distortion that would occur as you fly faster. And then the last thing is-
Tom Veltri:
Well, talk about the tires real quick too.
Robert Behler:
The what?
Tom Veltri:
Tires.
Robert Behler:
The tires. Yeah. The tires was part of the material science thing because there was only six main wheels on touchdown and trying to dissipate 100,000 pounds of force inertia going down the runway and stopping was very hard. So these tires were made by Goodyear, mostly rubber, a little bit of gaseous nitrogen in there. But those were really quite remarkable to be able to withstand those kinds of heat dissipation.
Tom Veltri:
Well originally the tires, they didn't use an inert gas. And when it took off it expanded in altitude and blew up.
Robert Behler:
Blew up. Right.
Skyler Shuford:
Oh, that'll do it.
Robert Behler:
And then the fifth thing, I think was an innovation that had to be developed, is something that Tom had to use all the time. And that was the Astro Inertial System. We didn't have GPS, we couldn't use Tack In, Loranz, and all that. We had to be able to fly anywhere in the world and be able to stay on the black line. We could not deviate off that black line, that was a rule flying. And the A&S system was an Astro Inertial System that looked at three stars simultaneously and updated the INS system. And I've had missions where I'd fly from California, over the top of the pole, into the Mildenhall, we look at the INS and it's maybe a couple meters off, that's how good it was.
Michelle Tyrlik:
Better than GPS.
Robert Behler:
Better than GPS.
Tom Veltri:
Better than GPS. We had quarters in certain areas that we're maybe a mile to three miles to stay in international air space, and never had any problems.
Skyler Shuford:
Yeah. That's pretty awesome. And that's something that, especially as we're looking at this as a defense capability, GPS jamming is one of the easiest things, given how low energy a GPS signal is. So that is certainly something we're looking at, there're some partners out there that we're also discussing with because do we need to be experts at star tracking? Maybe not, but it's also my background in GNC, it gets me pretty excited, is to not rely on GPS and see what you can do in a PNT to night nav environment. But that's pretty exciting. So in a test program for something like this, what do you think led you down this path to where you ended up being the right choice for that, and how does someone when they're early in their career start thinking about a career in flying fast vehicles or very targeted pilot environment?
Tom Veltri:
Let me address that a little different way. I have talked to I don't know how many men, young men, boys, girls, who have told me the first model they ever built was the SR-71. Talk about an airplane that just captures the imagination. Nothing even comes close. And this is today. A guy just came up to me the other day at breakfast and found out I flew the SR and he goes, "My son, six years old, first model, Sr-71."
Skyler Shuford:
Yeah. I had a poster.
Tom Veltri:
Yeah. You had a poster.
Michelle Tyrlik:
That's why I became a flight test engineer.
Tom Veltri:
So why did we want to fly it? God, if everybody that built the first model, if they could make their dreams come true, they'd be flying SR-71s.
Skyler Shuford:
Right. So it's obviously the speed. I think there's a design aesthetic appeal too. So I guess, how would you, if you were going back and you were in Kelly Johnson's seat, how much do you turn the knob on design aesthetics? It's something we spend time thinking about because it does matter to some extent. And how much do you degrade performance for something that looks really good? Now, aerodynamics look good.
Tom Veltri:
That aircraft was designed for a mission. And you notice there's no right angles on it, it's all about the stealth technology. Radar bounces off it, radar observing paint for one thing, but then the radar bounces off in directions, it doesn't come back.
Skyler Shuford:
That by itself makes it [inaudible 00:22:11].
Tom Veltri:
I think the mission created the airplane.
Robert Behler:
Yeah. No, I agree. And the appeal of the airplane, and I think it's something that you have an opportunity to do, and Hermeus. I got inspired in technology watching the space program, the initial man flight. And I wanted to be just like those folks.
Tom Veltri:
I did too.
Robert Behler:
And that's what I geared my life from a very young boy skipping school to watch the space flights. I never told my parents about that.
Skyler Shuford:
It's the most wholesome reason. You're not smoking pot out back.
Robert Behler:
That was pre-pot. But I wanted to do that, and I was inspired to do that, so I focused myself to set my self up. I took the right courses in college, I did okay in high school, but I accelerated in college. I went to grad school, I went to pilot training, I went to test pilot school, I was focused on being an astronaut. And this SR-71 just came around. I said, "I want to do that because I want to fly in space, I don't want to ride in space." And when you're flying the SR at altitudes sometimes way above 80,000 feet, you are flying the airplane, you're not along for the ride.
Robert Behler:
And I remember when I'd fly missions, I'd always check to see if the Space Shuttle was up that day. And when it wasn't up, when I got to altitude, I'd tell my back seater, "We are the highest flying people in the world today." Now, it gives me goosebumps just thinking about that. The small number of people that were selected to go do that. Our selection process was every bit as hard as being an astronaut. I was the finalist three times an astronaut selection, and the SR-71 selection process was equally hard to just get in that, you had to be put into the simulator, had to prove that you had the talent to be able to grasp this technology that fast.
Robert Behler:
And we didn't teach people how to fly the airplane, you had to be a number one pilot from anywhere you were flying before we'd even talk to you. Like air refueling, we didn't teach people how to air refuel, we assumed they knew how to air refuel. Put them up there and make sure he could do it and then give them a check run. But the competition, anybody could be ordinary, and when I talk to young people about their lives and what they want to do I say, "Just imagine what you can do if you weren't afraid."
Skyler Shuford:
And focus.
Robert Behler:
And focus, and be able to expand your envelope. Going Mach 3 is cool, going Mach 5 is way cool.
Skyler Shuford:
Oh yeah. So I think what's really cool about that too is, you had the hyper focus to allow you to perform at the best of your abilities and really get far, but also knew when a side opportunity presented itself to take that other path. I think it can get easy when you're hyper focused to focus on that vision and that's the only thing for you. It's like, "I'm going the astronaut way and that's all there is." But bypass, or skip over something that's really exciting, that could be its own path as well. So how do you think about that balance? Or how do you philosophically approach that? Or if you're a young person coming up, maybe not even as a pilot, just as someone in their career with hyper focus, when do you know the right time to, maybe I should divert from this vision that I had?
Robert Behler:
I would say you have to have courage. You can stay in your little zone and be very happy in your life, maybe never even leave your own neighborhood, but it takes an extraordinary person to break out of that and have the courage. Being a leader, one of the characteristics you got to have is courage. You got to be able to put it on the line and know that you're right. And when you go through life, it's about branches and sequel, it's never a straight line. You can be here for a while, be there for a while. To go through and become a flight test engineer, you had to go through a bunch of this to get to that point. And your coursework, you had to get a job, you had to do this, you had to get experience, and then you get there and you go, "Okay, what do I do next?" And you got to keep moving, you don't want to stop.
Tom Veltri:
But like you said before, foundation is so important. Right from the time you're in grade school, stem classes, all that stuff, if you're going to move in this direction, if you don't have the foundation, then the opportunities don't present themselves. If you have the foundation and the opportunity comes along-
Skyler Shuford:
Then you're in the neighborhood of luck. That's something we always talk about is, "Put yourself in the neighborhood of luck and then take it when you have it." So that's something also that we spend a lot of time thinking about when we're hiring people is the fundamentals. Because the amount of people who've worked on hypersonics, or even high speed flight, the Mach 3s and above, there aren't very many of them, and so we can't rely on direct experience. And so the only way we can do that is the strong fundamentals and bringing people on who can expand it. So obviously the SR is the coolest plane, but is it your favorite plane to fly on?
Tom Veltri:
Without a doubt.
Skyler Shuford:
Is there any chance that it's anything else?
Tom Veltri:
No. You flew almost everything.
Robert Behler:
I testify, I flew a lot of airplanes. And a lot of them were good and a lot of them were really bad. But I would jump in Black Star SR-72 tomorrow.
Tom Veltri:
I would too.
Skyler Shuford:
Oh yeah. You could be on the next Top Gun.
Tom Veltri:
Yeah, I'd appreciate the [inaudible 00:28:05].
Skyler Shuford:
Well, we haven't seen too much about how real that is, but maybe it more real in the movie.
Tom Veltri:
For all the airplanes we've seen up until now-
Skyler Shuford:
That's the coolest one.
Tom Veltri:
Yeah.
Skyler Shuford:
That's the coolest one. All right. Okay. Well Michelle, what is your favorite? Not quite the SR-71.
Michelle Tyrlik:
My favorite airplane is always the airplane I'm working on. It's always the airplane I'm testing because I have to have so much system knowledge, so much team knowledge, so much environment knowledge that that aircraft just permeates everything you do when you're in the flight test program.
Skyler Shuford:
We really got you drinking the Kool-Aid. So that's great.
Michelle Tyrlik:
That's experience speaking.
Skyler Shuford:
No, that's great. So speaking of flying Mach 5, you guys say that mach 3 is great, but Mach 5 is even better. So what do you think about the Hermeus story? We've talked briefly about it. Where are we doing things right, and where are we absolutely stupid, and absolutely crazy, and we should really think about things more directly, I guess?
Tom Veltri:
I think your approach now is right, unmanned before manned, especially when you're going to that next level. And if you're thinking commercial, which you guys are at some point down in the future, you've got to really iron out every abnormality with all those things in the aircraft.
Skyler Shuford:
We got to have the chops and we got to have the data.
Tom Veltri:
You could put test pilots lives at risk. Because even in SR we knew there was a risk and we were more than willing to accept that risk. If I'm sitting back in row 42 C and I'm drinking a gin and tonic, I didn't buy any risk at all. I expected to take off and land where I was supposed to in an hour's time or something, and be halfway around the world.
Robert Behler:
Your approach is very laudable. I would recommend that you keep your team small, and keep your management, the ones who make decisions has to be very limited, and you need to keep going fast. Speed is important in development and flying it. Go back to the SR days, by time they got on contract and flew the first operational mission, which is only about three years. And so they built that airplane from A-12 designs, and they got that thing going in a couple years, and delivered their airplanes to the Air Force. Just from a background standpoint, the contract was for about six or seven airplanes, they finally built 32, but the price per airplane was 23 million a copy. And today's CPI, it's about 250 million a copy. That's still cheap for that airplane, but the fact is Kelly and it's Lockheed, they were moving fast and they didn't want any oversight.
Skyler Shuford:
Right. I think to your point as well about keeping people off of it during the development, especially for these early test vehicles, that's how we can really move fast and keep the cost down. Because we can take a different approach to risk than if there's a person on board, or even if there's not a person on board, if we're talking about a 500 million development vehicle, the risk posture has to be drastically different, and how you test it has to be different, and the redundancy, and then it adds more cost.
Skyler Shuford:
And so we were briefly talking about an SR-72, like capability that would have that hefty price tag. Well now you're also driving up requirements on speed. If you're going Mach 6, 7, 8, now you're in [inaudible 00:31:42] territory, you're into ceramic matrix composites for primary structure, which is still a little bit sciencey, a little bit less engineering. So that's at least the way that we're approaching this is, this is how you break the price is don't go as fast, pull back on the speed and then apply the small company resources and agility to really move fast and get something in the air.
Robert Behler:
So I would also make a statement here about testing. So the question really is to the flight test engineer, why do you test at all? And I would say that it depends on where you're sitting. You test to minimize the maximum regret.
Skyler Shuford:
I like that.
Robert Behler:
And it works every time. So if you're testing the Quarterhorse, what's your maximum regret? It doesn't take off, it crashes, and you learn from it and you move on.
Skyler Shuford:
You get embarrassed. And then we go again.
Robert Behler:
But from a crew standpoint, maximum regret is, that thing blows up when I'm flying it, that's my maximum regret. Or I'm flying, the ANS goes out, and I wind up flying over mother Russia and they shoot me down. That ain't good either. So you test to make sure that thing doesn't happen. Whatever it is, you have to decide where you sit, what is that maximum regret, and you test to make sure that never happens.
Skyler Shuford:
That's great. All right. Let's see. Let's talk some stories. Cool. Yeah Bob, we'll start with you. What's your most challenging SR-71 story?
Robert Behler:
Most challenging. I'd have to say that one of the first times I flew to England, I was a pretty new crew member, and we have a thing called a giant heater. We call them heater missions, where you take an airplane all the way over to where you're going to go. So it was a four air refueling mission, I took off at middle of the night out of Beale California, refueled. And it was nighttime. And then I accelerated. The way you do this, you get your fuel, you come off, you accelerate, and you do a dipsy about a 0.9 Mach number, then you bottom out, then you climb out and accelerate all the way up to Mach 3 plus. As I climbed out, the sun was just coming up in East. I was going Northeast, so the sun was coming up in East, so the right side had the sun left side was still stars, and I could actually see the shadow of the earth, which was pretty remarkable.
Skyler Shuford:
That's incredible.
Robert Behler:
And then descended back down over Nova Scotia to get another tank of fuel from a KC-10, which I've never flown behind before in the middle of the night, especially. And got the fuel there, it worked out. Flew off, went down over the ocean, Atlantic, in the Northern part of the Atlantic. The thing is we had to fly at max Mach number going across the ocean because at 3.0 you didn't have enough gas to make it. And you don't want to run on gas in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
Skyler Shuford:
Certainly.
Robert Behler:
So you went at 3.2, and the faster you go, the better the engine performed. Came down, and then I had to refuel before I went North to the Arctic Circle. And it happened to be in a thunderstorm and had to refuel the SR, not at 25,000 feet, but 30,000 feet. Now I'm getting into some technical detail here, but what happens is you run out of thrust while you're refueling. The airplane starts taking on fuel about 80,000 pounds, and when you get towards the end, you don't have enough thrust available at mill power, so you have to light an afterburner to stay on the boom. And that in itself is pretty exciting, but being in a thunderstorm made it even more exciting. And because I was so high, this is the first time I ever heard anybody do this, I had to light two afterburners to be able to stay on the thrust curve to do that.
Robert Behler:
And from there accelerated, went up North of the Arctic Circle, did a right hand turn, so you can see, went around the Bering Sea Kola Peninsula, came back, another area refueling. And then I had to land in England, which I've not done before either. So I refueled behind a KC-10 at night, I refueled above a thunderstorm, I went North of the Arctic circle for the first time in my life, I turned into the SAM sites, and landed back in England, and all my first mission to taking an airplane over in England.
Skyler Shuford:
And that's why they choose the best.
Tom Veltri:
That's true.
Robert Behler:
It was a big boy program. And so I would say that was probably one of the most memorable.
Skyler Shuford:
What's the time duration of something like that?
Robert Behler:
Well four air refuelings, it was about-
Tom Veltri:
About seven and a half?
Robert Behler:
About six and a half hours.
Tom Veltri:
Six and a half.
Robert Behler:
Six and a half hours.
Skyler Shuford:
That's a good amount of time of heightened focus. You're probably never coming down.
Tom Veltri:
He just flew halfway around the world basically.
Robert Behler:
Yeah. One thing I didn't mention is the preparation for that flight. Every flight, operational flight, we had to have a full physical by a flight surgeon. Training flight, just a NCL PSD person can do it. And then we had our breakfast, whatever we flew we already had breakfast, it was steak and eggs, high protein.
Skyler Shuford:
The astronauts did that too, right?
Robert Behler:
Huh?
Skyler Shuford:
Didn't the astronauts do that too?
Robert Behler:
Yeah, and they do it for a reason. You want to have very low residual when you eat that stuff, if you get my drift. But here's what happened. So when you get to altitude and you got to come down and refuel, refueling is a very hard thing to do, especially when you're in a thunderstorm. So you need energy. So what I would do, I don't know what you'd do Tommy.
Tom Veltri:
I'd usually sleep on refuels.
Michelle Tyrlik:
Back seaters.
Tom Veltri:
We had to do the rendezvous.
Robert Behler:
We could eat baby food, and it was tube food. And you could feed yourself in a space suit with a big extender. And I always used to take peaches and diluted Gatorade, I could get into more detail there, but about 15 minutes before I started coming down in the normal atmosphere, I'd do the peaches, Gatorade, come down, and then about the time I got to the boom, all that energy kicked in. And I could hang on the boom, and then when I got off the boom, I was totally collapsed because it was pretty hard.
Tom Veltri:
I had no idea this was going on.
Michelle Tyrlik:
Sugar rush is key to air refueling.
Tom Veltri:
Bob mentioned before about how hot the windows would get. We could take our tube food. If they had one, it was turkey and gravy. You could hold it up to the window for about 20 seconds, come back and had a nice warm turkey.
Robert Behler:
I also flew in the U2, and the U2, eating a meal was a ritual. So you had a heater and you'd take the first hour thinking about eating, and then you'd take your tube of food and you put it in your heater and it would take 15, 20 minutes to heat it. Then you'd take it and you open it up and you'd get your beef and gravy. Like Tommy said, just hold it for 10 seconds and you were done.
Skyler Shuford:
There you go. You got plenty of heat. There's no problem with heat.
Michelle Tyrlik:
It's a good use for speed.
Robert Behler:
The SR was not like the other airplane, the U2, because you never had time to do sighting. And the windows weren't very big anyway. You were continuously focusing on monitoring systems, make sure that you sure you were not off the black line, and about every two or three sweeps you'd take a look out the window for a second or two, "That's really cool." Then you come back in. That's about it from a sight seeing standpoint. So talking about it is probably more fun than actually sitting in there.
Skyler Shuford:
Than doing it. Yeah. So how do you see autonomy playing into that? Are you believers in autonomy or do you think there are certain things that a pilot or a human should be doing? And how much do you start turning up the autonomy? And when is the right time?
Robert Behler:
Well, if I could start. I'm a true believer in autonomous systems. If you look at what we did by sending Curiosity to Mars.
Skyler Shuford:
Incredible, the amount of complexity.
Robert Behler:
All by itself. As a matter of fact, we sent the software when it was about a year into the mission before it even had its software. We have airplanes now that can fly, we've proven with UAVs that we can fly those autonomously. Now I would only give you an example that machines, computers, can solve very complex problems very well. They don't get tired, they can crunch all the numbers. When it comes time to solve complex problems, complexity is what humans do best. They get tired and don't like to do the complicated, but when it comes to complexity, we can solve problems.
Robert Behler:
Good example, Neil Armstrong, first Apollo landing on the moon. If they were to let the computer do it, which was only a few, it wasn't really a computer at that time, it would've crashed in the wrong place. He took control because he knew with his experience this was not going to be a good day if we land here, and he moved it over to Tranquility Bay and everything. So there's a time and place for everything. Can we get to a point where we could have passengers in the back and machines in the front, we will get there.
Skyler Shuford:
Eventually.
Robert Behler:
We will get there. I think in the military, air fueling tankers, we are at a point now where we could put a tanker without any people inside and make it all autonomous. And as a matter of fact, the receiver can be autonomous too. That's a long answer to say.
Tom Veltri:
The big thing in military, the trigger puller should still be an individual.
Robert Behler:
That's a complex decision.
Skyler Shuford:
Because yeah, it's nuanced, it's hard, it's situational, there's a lot of context.
Tom Veltri:
It goes back to the complexity thing too. Do I pull the trigger now?
Robert Behler:
However, we'll launch a cruise missile and it'll fly for 1000 miles, and it'll decide whether or not to hit the target at the end. So we're there now, but I agree with you Tom, when there's a complex decision that has to be made because of geopolitical, whatever, at that time and that moment you may have to have someone go, "No, we're going to abort and go home."
Skyler Shuford:
Just so you have someone to blame.
Michelle Tyrlik:
Accountability.
Tom Veltri:
I wanted to add something. Back on when Bob was talking about being up in the Berings and all that. And one of the coolest things I wanted to add to what his flight, we had a flight up there in the Wintertime where you'd go through what they call the Terminator. That's a darkness to light. And we went through the Terminator and then we ended up flying through the Aurora Borealis. And talk about just cool.
Skyler Shuford:
In the brief three seconds after you look at your instruments and then you look back up.
Tom Veltri:
Well, I was looking out pretty much. But it was like flying through a lava lamp, that's only way I can describe it.
Robert Behler:
Wow. That's awesome. That's really cool. So let me give you another thing about flying up North of the Arctic Circle that can get you in trouble like Icarus flying too close to the sun. Normally the temperature, it gets constant at about minus 56 and a half degrees centigrade when you get to about 80,000 feet. When it gets much colder than that and you got to maintain a mach number, you got to fly higher. And we do what's called a W over Delta, which is a basically cruise climb. So as we get lighter, we go higher, and higher, and higher. So on a sortie I flew, that was called a Stimulator Mission, which you can imagine what that does, it was so cold that-
Tom Veltri:
How cold was it Bob?
Robert Behler:
Well, I got to altitude and my technique was to bring the throttles all the way back to min after burner and let it seek out Mach 3 whatever altitude. And normally it starts at about 78,000 and makes its way up to about 82 or three. Well it leveled off, it was probably more like 84, 85 at Mach 3 at min after burner and kept on getting colder, and my cruise client kept on taking me higher and higher until I got to, can I say this?
Tom Veltri:
I was over 90,000 in the same situation.
Robert Behler:
Well, I was up about 92,000 feet, and the mission I had to fly a high bank, high Mach. So I had to go accelerate to Mach 3.2 and go to 45 degrees, and turn into the threat and go through the-
Tom Veltri:
Not a lot of air up there.
Robert Behler:
So what happened is, I got so high that aerodynamically the airplane wasn't going to do. So the only thing you have to do to be very careful is two things, you don't exceed the keys, the non septivalent air speed, and the angle of attack, angle of attack is eight degrees. And if you go above eight degrees and you have an unstart, your airplane's going to pitch up and you're going to be swimming home or you're going to freeze to death. So in that turn, the only thing I could do with max AB was descend, and descending and turning into a threat is never a good idea because altitude and speed is life. And I finally came out and I lost probably 10,000 feet in that turn, but I was locked on the AOA gauge. So the thing will perform, but you got to be careful. The wings still have to have airflow, and it still has to create lift.
Tom Veltri:
That's why the keys are so important. That's what it's all about.
Robert Behler:
Yeah. And so one thing you need to be careful at going Mach 5, how high are you going to fly and how big are your wings going to be? And will you have to need reaction jets or something like that on their wingtips to get to the turn.
Tom Veltri:
The other thing though too, when you talk about, we used to call it making gas. You look at your fuel profile and in the situation just like Bob described, the higher you get the colder you get. Well you're way above the fuel curve. All of a sudden you're going, "Wow, we could almost make it back without ever refueling."
Robert Behler:
When you get your fuel off a tanker, what I used to think about, I might not see another tanker for 2,500 miles. And it may be over water and not over land. So when we're bingo fueled, sometimes were bingo fueled to a tanker, so you had to get the gas. There was no, "I don't feel good today I'm going to go land somewhere." Because there's nowhere to land. So making gas and having good techniques for fuel is really important. And I never did the flight manual throttle stuff because I always had my better technique.
Skyler Shuford:
See, that's the story for not having autonomy too early, because you have to figure it out, and that's what a human can do. And then at that point you can roll it in once you've figured out. Michelle, do you have any exciting flight test stories that you're allowed to say? Maybe not ones you're allowed to say.
Michelle Tyrlik:
Be careful with control system mode transitions. That's all I have to say.
Skyler Shuford:
Fair enough. Okay Tom, let's talk about June 29th, 1987.
Tom Veltri:
Okay. This question comes up when people ask me, "What was the highlight of your SR-71 career?" And I always say, "Well, it didn't happen while I was flying the airplane, it happened 30 years after I flew the airplane." And what I mean by that is, June 29th, 1987 we're flying a routine reconnaissance flight up over the Baltic, it was Soviet Union, then now it's Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, up into Soviet Union. And it's a Mach 2.8 sortie, and you're at about, again 80,000 feet, and just as we approached our turn point where if we don't turn we're going right over the Soviet Union. We tried to maintain international waters, 12 miles, but sometimes we were a little bit closer just depending on some of the targets and such.
Tom Veltri:
But the Russians claimed 100 nautical miles. So we were always in what they considered to be international airspace. So they'd file protests every time we flew, which the UN, but it was on deaf ears. So literally three seconds prior to when we were supposed to turn back to the South, and I know this for a fact because the back seater you'd always count down the last three seconds. Three, two, one, start turn. In case something would happen, in case the ANS kicked off, or the autopilot kicked off, or whatever. So we were always very careful on all our turn points. And it was three, two, bam. Right engine blows up and it felt like an unstart at first because unstarts can be pretty severe. So an explosion, an engine explosion, was not much different than an unstart to give you an idea of how dynamic an unstart could be.
Skyler Shuford:
Real quick, for the listeners who don't know what an unstart is, just if you want to give a quick 15 second overview.
Tom Veltri:
Yeah. You can't have supersonic air going through a compressor. So the air is bled around the compressors to create a ram jack effect, and if you lose that air flow-
Skyler Shuford:
It spits the shock out and then massive drag.
Tom Veltri:
It spits the shock, shocks gone. And then next thing you know the engine, we call it unstart because you call it started when the air flow was going the way it was supposed to be. And you always could tell which side of the airplane unstarted because your head would bounce off the opposite side. We had guys crack helmets, face plates, because the unstart was so brutal.
Skyler Shuford:
That wasn't even this.
Tom Veltri:
No.
Skyler Shuford:
A little bit more standard thing for pilots, but losing an entire engine.
Tom Veltri:
One thing nice, this was an explosion. When we got on the ground, you could walk through the hole in the cell. It was about six, eight feet around, just to give you an example of how big this was. But anyway, right engine explodes. Nice thing to know about the SR, because we're at 80,000 feet, not a lot of air. So you have an explosion, you have a fire, molten titanium, titanium's melting it's so hot. Fire goes right out. Not enough fuel to keep the fire going. So anyway, now we're in our descent, but just like any pilot realizes when you have an emergency like that first three things you do is fly the jet, fly the jet, fly the jet. So now we're going straight. Do we go over the Soviet Union? Do the math.
Skyler Shuford:
They're not around anymore.
Tom Veltri:
Yeah. Anyway. So we continue straight. And the SR, when you lose an engine like that, you'll fall about 40,000 feet a minute. So it's like those cartoons that you're watching the altimeter just going. So anyway, get control of the airplane, take care of the emergency. Dwayne Noble's my front seater, Dwayne says, "Hey Tom, give me a heading." I said, 1-8-0, let's get the hell out of Dodge." So we make a left turn, 1-8-0, we start heading towards Gotland Island. Now we don't have an ANS, all that's kicked off, there's no navigational capabilities at all. Fortunately we were VFR capable, I could see Gotland Island, and so I just gave him a heading straight over Gotland Island, which is Swedish air space. I figured Swedes were better than Russians, so let's go with that.
Tom Veltri:
So now we're level, leveled off about 25,000 feet, 380 knots, and we're headed over to Gotland Island when I look out to my left and I see two aircraft coming, two fighter aircraft. And I'm looking out to my left, we're headed South, I'm looking towards the Soviet Union and I'm thinking, "Okay, this is it." We'd already decided, Dwayne and I talked about it, we're not going to give him the jet, they can't force us to land. He said, "Well, you keep watching those fighters, if you see anything coming off the rails we're punching." He said, "I'll put it in a dive and we'll punch." And so as they got closer and closer, I'm watching them like a Hawk, and I noticed, those are not Soviet markings. They were Swedish Viggens. The Swedes used to try to run an intercept, they practiced intercepts so that if they ever had to go against a Mig 25 or ASU-31 or something, they would practice against us because we were going Mach 3 three and we would always come down the same exact quarter.
Tom Veltri:
We're telling them exactly where we are, and they still couldn't shoot us, they still couldn't intercept us. But anyway, so now they came around, they got on our wing and they escorted us out. And I didn't realize at the time, but when I got to the Pentagon, my next assignment after the SR was at the Pentagon on the Joint Reconnaissance Center on in the National Military Command Center. And the NSA guy told me, my very first day I was there he said, "I know you and I know about your mission." And all this stuff. And they didn't tell us this, we only had a secret clearance flying the SR, can you believe that? So when I got to the Pentagon, the guy said, "Did you know you had over 20 fighters launching at you that day, all with orders to force you to land? They wanted the aircraft or shoot you down."
Tom Veltri:
So if it wasn't for those two Viggen pilots. And also the Soviets are being told, "Stay with them, when those Viggen pilots run out of fuel, shoot them down." They sent up two more pilots on a quick reaction launch and they had weapons of board, whereas the first two, they were just on a training mission, they were unarmed. So they continued to escort us out until we got over Denmark. Now had Sweden been part of NATO, like they're about to be, we'd of just landed in Sweden, but they were a neutral nation so we were told we couldn't land there. So we headed over towards Denmark, Denmark's socked in, can't get in there. We ended up landed in West Germany in Northolt Air Base. And on top of everything else, since the right engine exploded, we lost our utility hydros, so we had to land without brakes or steering. The German's shut off the Autobahn outside the base. We had one application of breaks, I almost ran into the landing lights, but just stopped in time, and that was it.
Tom Veltri:
The reason I tell this story and 30 years comes in is that I looked for these guys. When I got to the Pentagon I said, "I got to find these Swedish pilots. I got to thank them. My God. They saved our life." Not only did they save our life, this was one week after President Reagan stood in front of the Brandenburg Gates said, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall." One week later, had we been captured, shot down, et cetera, after penetrating Soviets airspace, that wall does not come down in 1989. So that's the historic implications of this mission. That's what these guys did that day.
Tom Veltri:
So when I tell the story and everybody would say, "Oh my God." 30 years I'm looking for these guys. I stay there working after I got out of the Air Force, I'm dealing with congressional affairs, I'm meeting people from the Swedish Embassy, guys that worked SAAB. So every guy I talked to that was a pilot for the Swedish Air Force knew about the SR-71 incident. I said, "Well, can you help me find these four guys?" They said, "Oh yeah, I'll do it." They come back, I'd see them six weeks later, "I couldn't find anything out." Turns out we had classified the mission for 25 years, now it's declassified. The Swedes, because we penetrated Swedish air space, they had classified it for 30 years.
Skyler Shuford:
And so as soon as the 30 year marker came up you were able to-
Tom Veltri:
All of a sudden I get a call from this guy who was the squad a commander that day and he goes, "I think we ought to get together." It's the Swedish pilot. And we meet, it was at the Air force Association Meeting Convention, and we get together and I go, "Do you know these four pilots?" He goes, "Yeah, I was their squad commander that day. I'm the one that launched the other two aircraft." He goes, "Not only do I know these guys, they're all still living, and they all can't wait to meet you."
Skyler Shuford:
That's incredible. Especially so long afterwards.
Tom Veltri:
So with the help of the Air Force air staff and the International Affairs, we were able to vet the story, get it all put together, and we went over there and we presented these four pilots with the US Air Force Air Medals, which is almost unheard of to a foreign.
Skyler Shuford:
But just the massive impact, it's incredible.
Tom Veltri:
It's incredible.
Michelle Tyrlik:
Change the world.
Tom Veltri:
I just can't say enough about what those guys did that day. Saving me, that was great.
Skyler Shuford:
That's pretty nice.
Robert Behler:
That was pretty good.
Tom Veltri:
That was pretty good to begin with.
Robert Behler:
Let me add Tommy, you're humble, but this was quite a remarkable thing that Tom and Dwayne did. It's a good story, because he's talking about it, but they made a decision they were not going to give this airplane up, and they had committed to jump out and crash that airplane. And just think of the courage it did to have that conversation.
Tom Veltri:
Into the freezing Baltic. Here's the one thing I didn't know until I talked to these guys 30 years later. We just figured we'd punch out, probably die, we're going to die within minutes. The Russians and the Swedes both had rescue helicopters airborne waiting for us to ditch the aircraft. It was going to be a race to so you could get us first. Can you believe that?
Skyler Shuford:
Hot commodity.
Michelle Tyrlik:
Yeah. High value assets.
Tom Veltri:
Oh my God.
Robert Behler:
So you're a real hero Tommy.
Tom Veltri:
Well, they are.
Robert Behler:
Tom and I had to lunch together, we talked about the crew members, and to a man, they didn't have any woman flying, they should have, but to a man, every person was a solid citizen. You could trust your life with that person, it was your brother, and maybe we had a couple bad apples here and there, but for the most part they were all just like Tom.
Skyler Shuford:
Just Patriots.
Tom Veltri:
It's still a brotherhood. Yeah. I was in a fraternity in college, I went to Carnegie Mellon. I was a SAE, Sigma Alpha Epsilon, and I still keep in touch with a lot of those guys, but for a lot of those guys, that's the last time they had a brotherhood. The brotherhood of the SR-71 is 10 times as much connected. It's like the Band of Brothers you see. That's what we were, we were a band of brothers flying these airplanes. When you think about the Cold War, all my F-15, F-16 buddies, they were just drilling holes in the sky, it was all practice missions for them. We were flying a real operation.
Robert Behler:
We were flying combat missions.
Tom Veltri:
And that mission more than any shows exactly what the risk were.
Skyler Shuford:
The stakes will never be that high here, but building that culture is something that's super important to us. So when the stakes are high, I think it's a little bit more deep probably, but it's something we really do care about is building that, I'll say brotherhood, but the gender neutral specific one, but just the camaraderie, that team.
Tom Veltri:
Well, you guys are going to take such pride in this aircraft.
Skyler Shuford:
Oh, definitely pride, but it won't compare to what, what you two have done.
Robert Behler:
The other thing too is, when you come to the program you marry your back seater or the back seater marries you. And that was sure how it works, but you're stuck with them through that whole time. In Tom's case, he stuck with the first name, he had two front seaters both named Dwayne. One got ill and had a heart transplant thing. But my back seater, I was the best man in his wedding, and introduced him to his wife, still buddies. Because when you're out there on the ragged edge, which by the way, not a lot of people are, but when you go right to the abyss and you go in with somebody you trust, it's amazing-
Skyler Shuford:
What you can accomplish.
Robert Behler:
And what you feel to that person as a kindred spirit.
Skyler Shuford:
All right. So we'll do one more story and then I'll pass it off to Michelle to answer some questions from the audience. But I think we need to talk briefly about Nicaragua real quick.
Robert Behler:
Yeah, Nicaragua. That was probably like Tom's mission, probably my most important mission, or missions as the case would be. I'll do this fast. This was when we thought the Russians were sending MIG 21s into Central America and we thought they were going to Cuba. And so I'd flown what we call a giant clipper, which you take off at nighttime, you fly around the island down there, Cuba, and you do what you have to do. And when we came back, the intel guy said, "Well, that chip is not in Cuba." So they watched it in satellites and found out it was going around and it was coming into another country, Nicaragua. And of course that made President Reagan incredibly angry because of the Monroe Doctrine, he was trying to get reelected, same thing that Tom was talking. He was having better relations with the Soviets and all that sort of stuff.
Robert Behler:
So we got this mission put on and I was a backup crew, and there was a primary crew that was, Tommy, Bill Burke and his guys, he was the primary. And so it was such an important mission we had two SRs ready to go, Bill got on the runway, ran them up and had an engine malfunction. He had to come off the runway. And basically I was the lead now. And so my back seater, I said, "Ronald son, we're going." I knew we were going, but I didn't have all the details. You know how that is. So we got on the runway and basically Bill says, "Good luck Lorenzo." That was my super seeker habu nickname. And we blasted off, took gas over mountain home, run across the United States, came down into the Gulf, got fuel climbed back up.
Robert Behler:
And my mission was so unique because we're never allowed to fly big bank angles, large bank angles, which is 45 degrees. Not that much, but 45 degrees at high altitude you don't know what you're doing. And the reason why is, that eight knots having an unstart pitch up, not only that, we were only limited to 30 degrees bank at nighttime, and they wanted me to do a 45 degree turn at night over Nicaragua. And so being a test pilot, I thought about this, because I'd never done it before. I said, "There's got to be a way to do this without hurting myself." What I thought about was if I look outside I will get total vertigo, and it's dark in the cockpit, so what I decided, here's the cool thing, I'm going to turn every light in the cockpit completely bright as it can go so it'd be sitting like right here in a simulator. So I flew that turn like I was in a simulator.
Skyler Shuford:
So it saturates your vision? Is that the idea?
Robert Behler:
I didn't care about my night vision because I just wanted to be able to see the instruments. So I did that and it didn't really matter if my cameras were working, even though they were, what was important is we were sending a signal that we didn't think this was the right thing to do. And the Sonic boom went all the way down. And of course I blew out a lot of windows. And I've got the newspaper clippings from that day from Nicaragua that talked about the hoards from America coming down there to attack. And they truly believe that this was the beginning of a fight that the Sandinistas were going to go out and fight. Turn around, came back. I took off at 3:00 in the morning, landed after another air fueling at about 8:30, 9:00. So it was a pretty fast mission. And I could watch the news and I could see the news of all this happening that I just did.
Robert Behler:
And so normally you have about five days between missions because your blood is all messed up, your cockpit's at 26,000 feet, so there's all kinds of stuff going on. They want you to have enough time for your body recover. Two days later, we were up there doing it again because they wanted to make sure. So we got a picture of the crates, got it to President Reagan, he made his phone calls, and in the end the crates never left the boats. The boats left and never dropped the crates off. So I call this story, Habu Diplomacy, Habu Foreign Diplomacy. We were just waving the flag down there with that airplane and said, "You better not move these airplanes, we're watching you." And I was to do it the third time, but they took the crates and went home. But that was probably, I would say a series of the most important missions I did in that very short two week period of time.
Skyler Shuford:
I can't imagine many of them were not important, but that's awesome.
Robert Behler:
Everyone's got a story.
Skyler Shuford:
Yeah. All right, cool. Let's grab these questions here.
Michelle Tyrlik:
Out of the Hermeus hard hat. All right. Are there any black birds still flying around in secrets?
Tom Veltri:
No.
Skyler Shuford:
Oh yeah, we already covered that one a little bit.
Michelle Tyrlik:
We all wish.
Tom Veltri:
There's a lot of museums you can go see.
Michelle Tyrlik:
I know.
Robert Behler:
Only in my dreams.
Skyler Shuford:
Quarterhorse soon.
Michelle Tyrlik:
Yes, Quarterhorse soon. Absolutely. What was the journey like to become an SR-71 pilot? I think we talked about that one as well.
Robert Behler:
Yeah. My journey was, I wanted to be an astronaut, pilot training, flew airplanes for a while. Very young went to test pilot school, I was advanced manned vehicles, which was a space shuttle office down there at Edwards. And went down to the SR physical, and then I said to my boss, "I'm going to go be an SR-71 pilot." And he goes, "Yeah, when pigs fly." But it happened. I went out there, interviewed, went through the five flight eval, and boom, there it was. And like I told you about the speed boats and racing, that was only a very short period of time. I was 16. And when I got the start flying the SR I was probably less than 15 years later, maybe 20.
Skyler Shuford:
Wow. Rapid timelines. We like them here.
Michelle Tyrlik:
Yeah. Accelerate. Awesome. How about the process to become a back seater?
Tom Veltri:
Well Beale Air Force Base was my second assignment.
Robert Behler:
Yeah, how did you get in the program? I always wondered that.
Tom Veltri:
So I was in the KC-135 cube models and I made it known to a number of people that if there's ever an opportunity for somebody from the tankers squadrons to move over to the SR I'd be first to raise my hand. Well, it just so happened at that time, the 100th air refueling squadron, or wing, combined with the ninth reconnaissance wing to form one wing under the ninth, that's our Strategic Reconnaissance Wing. And so I was almost like a player to be named later. So to consummate the marriage of the two wings they put me in the plane. It was perfect.
Robert Behler:
It was great move. And one more thing about Tommy here is, the Q model, KC-135, were special tankers that refueled the SR because they could carry the JP-7, a normal tanker couldn't do that. And the navigators on that airplane, that at the time was one of them, they could perform miracles. I'd come down from 200 miles like a screaming eagle out of space, and I'd pull up at 25,000 feet look up and boom, there's a boom right in front of me.
Skyler Shuford:
Just the timing.
Robert Behler:
The timing.
Tom Veltri:
All timing.
Robert Behler:
It was pretty neat, Tommy.
Michelle Tyrlik:
Awesome. Oh, here's a good question. What was the most annoying thing about flying an SR-71?
Skyler Shuford:
Yeah. I guess everyone always asked about all the great things like flying fast. What sucked? What was terrible?
Michelle Tyrlik:
What can it do better?
Tom Veltri:
Let me address that. Because I had a guy come up to me at an air show. We didn't get to do a lot of air shows because the SR, to go and fly it during the air show, usually you'd have an arrival show. You'd come in the day before the air show and then you'd stick around until the day after the air show and then departure the show. So I'm in the air show and the guy walks up to me and goes, "What's the worst thing about flying SR-71?" And I go, "Wow, that's tough. That's a tough question, because everything's so good. The toughest thing? Someday they're not going to let me do it." I knew right then, someday they're not going to let me do it, and that's going to be the worst thing.
Skyler Shuford:
That's a cop out though because it's still a compliment to the plane. That's a little bit of a cop out. We wanted the hot heat.
Michelle Tyrlik:
An underhanded compliment.
Robert Behler:
There's a couple things that irritated me. One I don't want to talk about.
Michelle Tyrlik:
Oh, it's that good huh? We'll save that for not on the podcast.
Robert Behler:
The other one I'll talk about is the face plate on our space suit had gold wires through it that could heat the face plate because your respirations would fog it over and that wouldn't be good. So you had a little knob over here that you could turn the face plate heat up. And the annoying thing was, if you got it too hot your eyeballs would dry out, it would be so hot. And if you had it too cold, you'd just fog over. And each airplane was a little different. So that was annoying to me. Doesn't sound too annoying though.
Skyler Shuford:
Just finding the tuning?
Michelle Tyrlik:
It's those human machine interface.
Robert Behler:
What's that?
Michelle Tyrlik:
The human machine interface.
Robert Behler:
Human machine interface, right.
Michelle Tyrlik:
Human factors.
Robert Behler:
Yep, that's that's right. But you had to be able to see out the face plate.
Michelle Tyrlik:
It's important.
Skyler Shuford:
It's a really hard struggle when you go to an Airbnb and you don't know where to put the faucet on the shower for the right heat. That's a struggle I find.
Robert Behler:
It's the same thing.
Skyler Shuford:
It's a burden I confront with fervor.
Tom Veltri:
Our training stories are all out of Beale Air Force Base and in the Summer it can get pretty hot in Sacramento, just north of Sacramento. So 100 degrees, 120 on the flight line. And so you'd be out there, by the time you took off, even though you had air conditioning and all that stuff with the pressure suit, sometimes the sweat would just start pouring down your face. And you weren't supposed to open the face plate up because you knew Murphy's Law, if you opened a face plate up, that's when everything's going to go, you're going to rapid decompression, [inaudible 01:12:28] going to find a spot on the side of the aircraft, that's going to be it. But I can remember one time it just got too much for me. And you try to use the tube food, the tube, to try to scratch your nose.
Robert Behler:
That was annoying, by the way.
Tom Veltri:
You couldn't get it. And so finally you just open up and go, and closed it back up.
Michelle Tyrlik:
So no pressure suits, no space helmets, and [inaudible 01:12:52].
Skyler Shuford:
You got to be able to touch your face. Certainly.
Michelle Tyrlik:
Yeah, exactly. And not eat out of a tube. All right. So, well we talked about the feeling of unstart and engine failure feels pretty the same. What else have we got?
Skyler Shuford:
Everyone wants the same stuff.
Michelle Tyrlik:
I know.
Skyler Shuford:
What's that about?
Michelle Tyrlik:
What were the most memorable, important, or challenging moments?
Skyler Shuford:
Oh wait, we covered that too.
Robert Behler:
We covered that.
Michelle Tyrlik:
Wow. We are comprehensive. I love this. Okay. Best airplane you ever flew in? Got that one too. Was the flight suit comfortable?
Robert Behler:
I loved the flight suit. The cool part about it is you could inflate it manually, it had a little knob right here. And so you're sitting there for a long time flying these missions, sometimes it gets a little sore, you could inflate that and your whole body would just lift on an air cushion.
Skyler Shuford:
Just like an air mattress.
Tom Veltri:
Well the other thing too, the helmet weighed about 40 pounds, and after a while with it sitting on your shoulders, that bar got to be pretty heavy, but like Bob was saying, you just inflate it and that helmet just come up a little bit and take that pressure off it.
Robert Behler:
And the other thing, the palms of your hand, when you're going to go refuel and your hand gets sweaty and stuff like that, there were little air vents that came out of the suit over your palm to keep your palms dry. It's really comfortable. And you could adjust the temperature, pressure.
Tom Veltri:
They took us out to the airplane, it was in a bread truck. It was refurbished with two lazy boy loungers to take you out to the airplane because they didn't want you to walk from the lockers out to the airplane in a pressure suit and carrying that air conditioner and all that.
Robert Behler:
They had a little air conditioner you could plug in.
Tom Veltri:
So you go in and sit down in the La-Z-Boy, and I'll tell you if we had any delay or anything, Id go right to sleep. That pressure suit was so comfortable. And you can't hear anything. And you just hear that shh, the air conditioner around you.
Robert Behler:
You can hear yourself breathe. So if you have any tendency to be claustrophobic, it would be intensified in a suit. We had crew members that after their first tour, They came back and they said, "I can't get back in that suit."
Tom Veltri:
We had guys that would come through the interview process, and that was one part of the interview process was putting on the suit. And there were guys that went and got the suit on and that's it.
Robert Behler:
Yeah. They couldn't handle it, it's claustrophobic. And I loved it. I loved it so much when I came back and put my mask on to go out and fly a 38 I'd go, "What's this thing on my face? I don't want this."
Michelle Tyrlik:
The oxygen mask?
Robert Behler:
Yeah.
Tom Veltri:
Did you notice on Top Gun they never wear their mask, never wear their gloves?
Skyler Shuford:
Not too cool. You can't look cool.
Tom Veltri:
But not even the gloves. I mean, God.
Robert Behler:
That's because when you're flying a boat you don't wear gloves.
Tom Veltri:
Oh, there you go.
Michelle Tyrlik:
Navy versus Air Force?
Tom Veltri:
No, he means real boats.
Robert Behler:
No, I mean aircraft carriers.
Tom Veltri:
Oh, you don't wear gloves?
Robert Behler:
No you don't, because they're too slippery. You have to talk to a Navy guy.
Michelle Tyrlik:
All right. What was the most Gs you pulled in an SR-71?
Tom Veltri:
The aircraft was only actually-
Robert Behler:
Three.
Tom Veltri:
I thought it was two and a half.
Robert Behler:
Well three Gs, two and a half at 45 degree, but you can pull three Gs, but unfortunately when you pull three Gs, you're so close to the stall that you have a stick shaker and then a stick pusher, so it starts shaking.
Tom Veltri:
And you would never do that at altitude, of course, at that speed. That would only be in the pattern or anything. We had a Thunder Bird pilot, after he flew Thunder Birds he came and flew the SR, and then at an air show at Mildenhall.
Robert Behler:
I was the DO.
Tom Veltri:
You were the DO then. He over G'd the aircraft, bent the aircraft. If you think about it, the SR-71 is what? 70 feet long.
Robert Behler:
It's 70. Yeah.
Tom Veltri:
Yeah, 70.
Robert Behler:
No, it's 170 feet long.
Tom Veltri:
170. Okay. And you think about it, all that space from the back seat all the way to the back of the engines, that's all fuel in there, and so you pull a couple Gs, that's a lot of stress on that aircraft.
Robert Behler:
Yeah. And I don't if you know this one, but when you pull Gs like that and you try to light the afterburner, the fuel doesn't go in the right place and you wind up with explosions in the back of the airplane.
Skyler Shuford:
A little hard start?
Robert Behler:
Yeah. And I got a picture of that thing.
Tom Veltri:
Ask Dougie and Mike.
Skyler Shuford:
Oh, just because asymmetric fuel in the AB?
Robert Behler:
During the AB, if you pull over three Gs, then when the fuel comes out, you have that [inaudible 01:17:41] thing going on. And what happens is you get these big explosions out the back. And actually we have pictures of them doing that. And I was in the tower when it did that.
Skyler Shuford:
A little 4th of July celebration there.
Robert Behler:
It was not pretty. It was pretty, but it wasn't meant to be pretty.
Skyler Shuford:
Not fun times.
Michelle Tyrlik:
Not for the right reasons.
Tom Veltri:
It makes for good posters. I still see that airplane.
Robert Behler:
I know.
Michelle Tyrlik:
That's awesome. Well, that's it for our fan questions.
Skyler Shuford:
Awesome. Tom, Bob, this has been great. I think the people listening will really appreciate it. Thank you for your service. Thank you for flying that fast airplane and doing those really high stakes, really important missions for the country.
Tom Veltri:
Well, we'll be watching you guys. What you guys are doing is incredible. I wish you the all the best, and I hope you're out there real soon. Mach 5, Mach 6, and above.
Skyler Shuford:
Oh yeah.
Michelle Tyrlik:
That's where we're headed.
Skyler Shuford:
Awesome.
Tom Veltri:
All for it.
Robert Behler:
Thank you.
About Hermeus
Hermeus is a startup developing hypersonic aircraft to radically accelerate air travel. At Mach 5, more than twice the speed of the supersonic Concorde, passengers will be able to cross the Atlantic in 90 minutes. On the path to hypersonic passenger aircraft, Hermeus is partnering with government agencies including the US Air Force and NASA to develop a series of autonomous aircraft that derisk the technology and solve urgent national security challenges. These products provide the data and confidence necessary to certify, produce, operate, and maintain safe and comfortable commercial aircraft. Hypersonic aircraft have the potential to create trillions of dollars of new global economic growth per year, unlocking significant resources that can be utilized to solve the world’s greatest problems.