The Spy Plane Too Fast to Shoot Down

[00:00:00]More than 4,000 missiles were fired at this aircraft. Not a single one ever hit it because when a missile came for the SR-71 Blackbird, the pilots didn't turn and they didn't dive. They pushed the throttle forward and left it behind.

[00:00:13]This was the Blackbird, a spy plane built to fly over the most defended airspace on Earth, photograph it and survive by doing one thing better than anything ever built, going fast. It cruised at over three times the speed of sound, 2,000 miles an hour, a mile and a half every single second and at the edge of space, 85,000 ft up. So high the crew wore full pressure suits like astronauts. It carried no weapons, it had no way to fight back. Its entire defense was speed. The moment a missile launched, the Blackbird simply accelerated and climbed away from it. In its whole career, not one was ever shot down by the enemy. Going that fast turned air itself into a weapon against the plane. The skin heated past 600° and the airframe stretched several inches in flight. The panels were built to seal only when hot, which meant that on the ground, cold and still, the Blackbird leaked. It sat in puddles of its own fuel before every flight. It was a plane designed to leak and only become whole once it was already flying. But the strangest secret was the metal itself.

[00:01:14]America didn't have enough titanium to build it. So the CIA set up front companies and quietly bought it from the world's top supplier, the Soviet Union.

[00:01:23]The ultimate spy plane was built from the metal of the very country it was made to spy on. It was retired in the 1990s and decades later, nothing has replaced it. The fastest aircraft of its kind ever flown still belongs to a machine that outran every missile ever aimed at it. Another file closed. Follow for the next one.