Interesting SR-71 story (1 Viewer)

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The story is true to. At least according to the book Lockheed Blackbird Beyond the Secret Missions by Paul F. Crickmore. Took me three months to read it but it's full of excellent information and pilot stories and this was one of them.
 
The XB-70 suffered several "unstarts" at high Mach number and that was never quite solved.

All four inlet cones on the Convair B-58 Hustler were operated by analog electronics. Several suffered an unstart (at high Mach, of course, otherwise it's just a compressor stall) and when power was lost on one side, it would yaw into the unstarted engine, the vertical tail would snap off, and the aircraft would discentegrate in flight. I knew guys who refused to fly it fast except in wartime late in its career due to unstart issues. Most wound up out of the service and into an airline seat, mostly in DC-7's and B-707's.
 
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Wow surprised he could walk with balls that big.

"Ben Rich, who designed the inlets at Skunk Works, often referred to the engine compressors as "pumps to keep the inlets alive, the inlets and exhaust took more design hours than the engines and provided most of the thrust at Mach 3.2 the engines just got in the way"

It was the same for Concorde the inlet had controllable ramps that slowed the inlet air to mach 0.5 and were designed to automatically go to maximum and to stop airflow to the engine if it failed, a spill door/flap opened to exhaust the air from the inlet and as a bonus it gave extra lift. Without this automatic safety measure an engine out at mach 2 would stall the air in the inlet destroy the engine and possibly the wing as well. Plus the plane yawing and banking in the direction of the failed engine is not something you want happening at 50,000 ft and 1350mph midway across the Atlantic.
 

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