The History and Impact of the SR-71 Blackbird

Chuck Yeager made his historic flight to break the sound barrier in 1947 flying the Bell X-1, an aircraft designed by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and the US military to conduct research on supersonic travel. From that moment forward, aviation has been focused on harnessing that energy for practical application. The United States government would go on to commission an aircraft that operated faster than the speed of sound and higher than radar detectability in order to perform various cold war missions at a critical phase of history- one of the most notorious aircraft to come out of this supersonic fever was the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird. In the last century, most research on supersonic speed has been conducted in a military setting, with some notable successes in civil operations, such as the Concorde, the Tupolev Tu-144, and more recently with the development of the Boom Overture aircraft. The engineering that went into the creation of the Blackbird provided groundbreaking innovation throughout the designing and testing process that set it apart from other aircraft of its kind and continues to inspire aerospace engineers working on the high-speed travel of our future.