SR-71 Cockpit Checkout

Okay, here we have the forward

cockpit

for the sr-71 pilot seat on top. I'll point it out here and this is the attitude indicator, much like a standard attitude indicator, any aircraft right below that is their HSI for all your navigation and below that I'll have to move the stick next to this is our map projector, it runs on continuous sixteen millimeters, the old sixteen millimeters of stuff we used to have a long time ago, four slides, and it's our map projector in its entirety. The flight path is contained here all the time and that's what the pilot uses more than anything.

Up here we have an airspeed indicator that becomes useless once you go supersonic and particularly up to Mach two and three and beyond and we use that as our measurement. of merit and we get up supersonic, this is called our TDI triple display indicator because it's displayed at the top, we have the knots and the keys, the equivalent airspeed, so we have our altitude here, right now it's reading 61 160 1100 feet and below is reading Mach 1.8 so this is our TDI is what we use supersonically as far as our Merit measurement in terms of speed, altitude and Mach number and right here we have the fuel flow meters specialized in fuel flow in thousands of pounds per hour, so right now these we're reading about five thousand, this is a reading of fifteen thousand pounds in normal crews, each of these fuel flow meters reads about twenty-one thousand pounds per hour and they also have a digital readout above as well as the analog one, here we have the oil pressure in psi for the left and right engine here we have hydraulic pressure for the utility system called L&R.

This is a hydraulic surface pressure called a and B, so it has double redundancy in both the utilities and the hydraulic system of the aircraft beyond the right here, if you bring the envelope, look at the light before we have the indicator of fuel right now, it's reading a total of twenty-one thousand one hundred pounds, but you see the gauge going up eighty thousand pounds of gasoline below, that's our CG as we burn. fuel these are the six main tanks on the aircraft number one two three four five and six going backwards is a fuel that burns in the correct sequence the CG will slowly move further back than half backwards and once it reaches the maximum limit of 25% that we want to reach during the day, anything beyond that, then the plane will become very unstable, beyond 25%.

Down here we have a pressure in the fuel tank because we use nitrogen. Here are our liquid nitrogen leaders. There are three tanks. There are two tanks here. and here is the gauge for the third tank they added later so the nitrogen pressure is used as head pressure and the six fuselage tanks to provide a positive psi of about 3 to 4 psi all the time in the tanks of fuel, nitrogen is used to inert the fuel tanks, the internal fuel of the plane will reach approximately 350 to 375 degrees Fahrenheit, that is the fuel internally, so it must be kept inverted so that volatility is possible, an explosion with the fumes and everything we inertize the tanks with nitrogen. exclude them if you want to move the CG forward, the CG is too far back and we want to move it forward, we put fuel in this tank number six and we move it forward to tank one and this is the transfer switch that you just move. the up switch says previous transfer now the fuel will now be pumped back and move forward and you will see the CG needle go down, turn it off if you have seen the CG too far forward and want to go next. optimal cruise performance from about twenty-five twenty-six you turn on the manual transfer F, so you have to hold it down, it will take fuel from tank one and move it - tank six to increase the center of gravity - the However, apply this switch as if it were alone had a spring because a forward CG is not an unstable condition, the plane simply will not be as efficient, but an aft CG can cause a lot of problems, so they designed this one that way. you have to hold it down, it has a spring.

I have to hold it and look at it all the time, as soon as I let it go it stops transferring, so this one they made it so you can't forget it, whereas this one you can forget it. Go ahead, it doesn't really matter much about this one, you have to hold it down, ah, let's see. I'm going to switch to this panel here, to this entire subpanel here. I called the environmental panel, it handles the collected temperatures. These are the bases. outside the plane here is the gear handle to raise the gear non-slip braking runway whether wet or dry Automatic temperature face temperature cabin temperature there is your suit heat temperature your landing light here down on the left here more yes you have more light in there those are the throttles, my hands are around the bottles right now, I will bring the throttle forward that starts the engines in the first notch and then when you go to full military power for takeoff, you will accelerate to full speed f2 and it will stop, that's full military power, so when you want to go into afterburner, you have to lift the throttle and then go forward to the firewall and now that's full afterburner, we cruise in full afterburner with book bottles and the pilot flies everything time and feel that there is a small ridge. here so that it doesn't come out of the afterburner again, you can feel a little bit of tension there so as not to fall back into the non-afterburner region, so you fly the plane all the time moving in and out flying the afterburners to maintain the speed of the air is the same throughout the mission when you are ready to descend for descent, we stay in afterburner the entire time we cruise at Mach 3 or more, then we prepare for descent, you accelerate back to 100% military and then slowly bring them back and then start going down decently at a given schedule, we have to maintain a schedule in rpm and, for example, on the way down, ah, let's see what else these little temperature counters are that you can see right here. for tetraethyl drilling tetraethyl drilling is a liquid chemical that we use for ignition system tetraethyl drilling is a liquid chemical when exposed to the atmosphere at this time it goes kaboom, it explodes automatically, it is also inert with nitrogen in a tank mounted on the fuel engine the kelie built for this jp-7 aircraft has such a high flash point that it is impossible to ignite it with normal jet engine spark plugs like the ones we use on airlines or in the military the spark It's not hot enough to ignite the jp-7 So Kelly put his engineers to work and said come up with a way to ignite the fuel and they came up with the liquid chemical, it's all a pint and a quarter pipe and I'll come back to put the accelerator on the limit when I move. this throttle forward if the correct rpm is the signals from the crew chief and the RPM is turning the engine.

I put the throttle forward and that puts a Smasher to matter. This tab throws it into the turbine section and it goes kaboom and that in turn goes out. the jp-7, if you can see down here, there's a little counter called Temporary Conner, this would be set to 16 before the start, which is 16 right now and every time you accelerate ahead of time, it clicks up to 15 now. if I take the throttle and turn it up to afterburner it will click down one more time and now it says 15 so every time you use a tab shot you get each of these tab collars for each engine you get 16 shots per engine.

Now let's see up here, I'll upload these little mirrors that we used up here. A lot of people think we like to comb our hair in flight, but they're actually used to look at yourself in the pressure suit because once you put on the pressure suit to see where the power ports are, all the connections, this is all you need to do. you have to be able to look around and see where everything is, these two mirrors up here, I go up a little bit higher, we have our whiskey compass. which every airplane should have and you'll see a little bit higher up it says lock that's our periscope the periscope is now out of the wind stream but as soon as I push this up it's a little bit safe right now to push that the periscope is now exposed it appears in the airstream up to that distance and I can turn left and right and with prisms I can see left and right outside, we use it for several things, number one, if I had an engine fire, let's say in - In flight I can open the periscope and see the gravity of the left or right engine.

If I thought I might be counterbalancing at 70 or 80 thousand feet, I might check with a periscope to make sure I'm not overbalancing. I also use it to unload fuel, but the determination, obviously, when you turn on the fuel unloader, pump that at 4000 pounds per minute and you'll see it on the gauge go down and when you turn it off, you can confirm that as well by looking at the periscope to make sure it's also is off, that's the basic use of the periscope and then you can put it back down it's out of the wind stream to the left, go to the right side here they're called, we call them bat wings, but they fall off.

Below these are sun visors that move anywhere the sun enters it is so bright at seventy five eighty thousand feet that as you enter the curve, when the sun crosses the cabin on a curve, it blanks out all the instruments to the point in that I can barely read them, they are very very difficult to read as the Sun moves through the front cabin, so we use these bat wings to chase the sign so it doesn't enter the cabin. You see, I mean, they open, they close. and then put them aside this little device something that was added around 1977-78 we started flying more and more night missions in the sr-71 until then the plane is basically a day VFR plane you had to have good weather in the area lens to get the images because it's what I call wet film photography.

Well, we finally got a radar nose that took radar pictures day or night. The weather didn't matter because it's a radar image. There was no difference, so we were flying a lot more at night and we were starting to get a little nervous about flying the plane at night. The clouds, there is no closed night, the sky, the stars with which they are mixed, like the East China Sea and the. Fishing boats down there can't distinguish between the sky and what's above, so we asked Lockheed to come up with an invention that would help us maintain orientation in the

cockpit

.

They invented this PVD, it has a peripheral vision device, it's a laser. it has a cannon connector that goes back here to very precise pitch and yaw sensors, it sends information to this laser and it emits a beam up here that then shoots into the cockpit and draws a line across the cockpit. Any other laser beam then projects a line across the cabin a very bright line, you can move it up or down as needed, you can know its position. I always kept my line going through here all the time and what it does is the plane turns with this line.

You, if you pick up the line, tilt up and down if you reach the pitch or tilt limits, that line flashes to alert you that you are reaching the limit and what you do during night flight gives you another orientation towards the horizon. It's not meant to be flown as an attitude indicator, it's just an orientation, like during the day we look out and orient ourselves on the horizon, in this you orient yourself towards the PVD red line up there and it was a real lifesaver in some cases. The guys were getting bank angles of around 60 degrees per pitch at Mach 3 and that's not good, they came very close to missing the plane.

This is what we call the gooseneck light, it is a lamp or you can turn it on, it depends on your intensity. then you can shine this, you can point it to your checklist, which is usually on your knee, on your pressure suit, and they set up your checklist to read, there's one of those on each side of the plane, there's another one here, you can shine it. wherever you want and again we have another batch chain on this side to change chasing the Sun, it is necessary as we fly out of the eighty-six pilots who flew the plane operationally on the reconnaissance missions and this simulator flew all 86, obviously other people flew the airplane Senators Congressmen general journalists journalists journalists who had to get permission from the Pentagon anyone who could get permission from the Pentagon we took a model B training flight and gave them a flight too, so if you exclude everyone Those and I exclude the pilots from test and everyone else, the operational pilots come out 286 pilots and 86 navigators, as you can see in the back seat, the artist, so it has a little more space, but one thing that's missing here in the back seat is that it doesn't. controlsflight and that emphasizes the reason why we want to have a good physical exam before every flight on the plane and make sure that the person is ready to go and that there are no problems, for example, if I were, if we were flying and had a heart attack. in the front seat or crashed for some reason it doesn't have flight controls on the rear unit the best sunrise my RSO can hope for is we were on autopilot and if we are on autopilot then it can flatten with the Astro tracker and it can navigate if he can say ok take this plane to Okinawa take me back to Mildenhall or let's go out to the ocean or go somewhere to get away from the bad guys so he can still control the air if I'm on autopilot and then the best he can What he can do is probably the best thing for him to do would be to wait for the engines to shut down, run out of gas, slow down and walk into whatever we were in at the time and just slow down and then he would get out of the way. safe expulsion now.

Put reverse in I'm in the front, let's say he has a heart attack in the back seat. I have flight control Enki piloting it, but guess what I can't tell this plane weirdo. It's got the only navigation set up here in the world, I've got all the screens of where we are and where we are, how far away we are and all that, I've got all the instrumentation to tell me, but as far as telling this plane where to go, there's nothing here. up, now I can still fly. Obviously I could still fly with the yoke, but I could have overcome an aberration in Murmansk and you know how you're going to get home, you fly only heading or whatever, so we have a double responsibility here to keep both of us in good shape and I've always told myself that if Dawn ever had a heart attack, I would just start using the whiskey compass and a few other things just for the floor of my head.

I think the safest area is because I can't control the plane right now. This is the Astro tracker. that works with the stars this is the complete set it tells the plane where to go you can change it to whatever you want go there features here this folds I showed you the map projector on the front bunk but the little map projector It was only four by four , this is your map projection down here, it's the actual projector which is your focus knob and you can fold it up and you get a much larger display of the flight path and everything I do, and I do it because it has to be he has You have to have the information not only of what I have, you also have to have all the information about the sensors and where they are going to work and where they are looking and things like that, so your map saver is much larger on this screen, TRUE? here it's called RCD it's a radar correlator display every time we take images with the tip of the radar this radar correlator display will show you exactly what you're seeing with what's being picked up on that radar sixty seconds later it takes 60 seconds to process it with lasers inside the plane, process those images and present them here on this RC D screen for him to see 60 seconds later, this is the viewing site, the viewing site looks directly under the plane that has increasing powers.

You can use it to look directly under the plane to make corrections, make navigation corrections, and to look for anything on the ground so you can locate our matte CD projector. It has TDI repeater instruments that I have on the front. You have an RMI card. little attitude indicator it has the fuel gauge just like me it has some warning lights here it has three lights here yes and if we lose communication between us because we normally talk on the intercom but if we lose communication between us and I have a serious emergency. I have a switch on the front clock that I pull and this light will light up pakka.

This orange light will illuminate saying, "Hey, I have a problem. I don't know what the problem is." result, but be prepared, check your pre-rescue checklist if I have to leave the rescue and I don't have time again. I can not talk to him. I have another switch and I have to break a safety wire because this is a This is a Really, if I break the safety wire and pull it, he gets this light here, this is expulsion. I am verbally telling him to leave with us with the white because I have no further communication with him and this is one we do not have. play with when that one goes off you get off the plane you have to go first you want to go first another pylon goes second and that order if I go first and then he goes he could run to my Shh my seat and anything and We could have collateral damage so We don't want him to go first and I second this switch if you didn't hear me with this switch this one says pilot just got ejected you're a little late so that's what that one is right there and I have the same light on in my cockpit like this that when I see it ejecting, the page light says RSO ejected, this is how we communicate without verbal communication during extreme urgency and again there is much more space here and just like the rudder, there is no rudder. pedals, there are only holes for the feet, if you want good windows, so you have a window to the left and to the right, they have stuck velcro eggs.

If it's too bright for me, you can just raise the blinds on both sides. He has mirrors like I had in the front, he has the same gooseneck lights that I had and that is much more spacious in the back of this one up and forward.