Conversation with a spy-plane pilot |
| Category: Uncategorized | 2009-03-22 |
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| On a cross country flight a while back, I had the pleasure of meeting a very interesting United Airlines captain. I am not sure whether he wants me to use his name, so I will just call him Captain John in this blog. |
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| Captain John was returning home to San Francisco. After exchanging greetings with the flight crew, Captain John and I took our seats in Economy Plus, and started chatting almost immediately. |
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| Captain John told me that while he is a pilot for UA, his primary duty was to ferry each of UA's Airbus A320 from Airbus' Toulouse headquarter back to the US for United Airlines. According to Captain John, he usually arrive in Paris from the US, and sometimes was able to make the trip along with his wife. They would be able to spend a few days in Paris, and then travel to Toulouse in Southern France to pick up the brand new Airbus narrow-body aircraft. On some occasions, the co-pilot for the ferry flight also bring his wife, and the four of them would have a mini vacation before flying back to the US. I am not sure whether the interior was already completed on the Airbus, but would assume that the spouse could at least fly in jump-seats if the passenger cabin is un-finished. |
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| These Airbus planes probably were ferried back to the US by Captain John. |
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| One our six hour transcon flight, Captain John told me some interested aspects of his career before joining United. Captain John was one of the few pilots that flew the SR-71 spy plane, probably the closest to being an astronaut without going into space. |
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| For those of you that are not familiar with the SR-71 Blackbird, this plane can travel at speed more than 3 times the speed of sound, over 2200 miles per hour. At this extremely high speed, the air passing over the titanium and stainless steel fuselage heats it up so much, that the aircraft lengthens measurebably. The significant change in dimension severely affects the fuel tanks, and they were designed to leak when the aircraft is cool, and sealing properly when traveling at high speed and with fuselage heat up. Therefore, Captain John said that usually begin a SR-71 mission with minimal fuel, take off from the air force base, accelerate to supersonic speed in order to heat up the fueslage, and then slow down to join up with a refueling tanker. Depending on the mission, they might have to refuel again before reaching full mission fuel status. The flight profile on some missions looks like a couple large loops over the US main land rendezvous with the tanker before dashing to the USSR |
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| An Air Force KC-135 tanker refueling aircraft. |
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| The flight deckof the KC-135 |
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| A KC-135 refueling a state-of-the-art flighter. |
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| View from a F15 just before hooking up with the refueling probe of the KC-135 tanker |
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| Before Captain John left the Air Force, he was responsible for training his replacement pilot. This replacement SR-71 pilot subsequently was selected to the Space Shuttle program, and flew on a number of shuttle missions. |
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| He invited Captain John to watch the shuttle's night time launch, and Captain John said that the launch was probably one of the most spectecular sights he had even witnessed. |
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| Before we arrived in San Francisco, we had some time to work on a problem that I always wanted to solve: I have heard that at supersonic speed, it takes the width of an entire state for an aircraft to perform a U-turn. Captain John did some cocktail nakpin math, and using formulas such as Acceleration = V2/R, and I think we arrived at a figure of somewhere around 160 miles to make a U-turn. |
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