Doomed to Fail - Re-Release - the SR-71 Blackbird (the plane in the Ryan Reynolds movie 'Mayday!')

Episode Date: September 20, 2026

New on Netflix is this Ryan Reynolds movie where we can only assume he's playing 'Ryan Reynolds in a plane' but it's a COOL plane at least!! Here's a re-release of the dish!  Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail]

In a matter of the people of the state of California versus Orenthal James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask what your country can do for you. Boom, and we're back on a presumably cold Wednesday at this point. You know, I hope I don't have to, like, release this after you've been frozen to death. So take care of yourself. I actually won't have plenty of firewood. Good. Because in Texas, the only shirt, the shirt.

insurance is came man meat. Yeah. So, sweet. So I'm going to go ahead and kick things off Taylor with my topic, which is going to be a little weird for usual. I'm excited. I'm excited. It's not going to be like the normal thing. So.

What is normal? What even is normal? I can't wait. So I'm going to have you guess. Oh, God. I can be. What do the CIA Bill Clinton in the Mariana Trench have in common? They're all deep and dark.

And there's things in there that we don't know what they are. It always circles back to Epstein's list. Exactly. So, no, no. I saw a meme on Instagram recently, and it featured this specific aircraft that I think we've probably all seen, but like probably don't even really think about very much anymore. And it led me down a rabbit hole where I found like a ton of fascinating info,

and I thought it would be a pretty good topic for discussion here. So I'm going to be discussing the conception, career, and the doomed to fail demise of the legendary aircraft, the SR 71, also known as Blackbird. You know what that is? No, that's very exciting. You look very excited too. So I feel excited that you're excited. It is, oh, God, like, I feel like every kid growing up, like looked at the post. So this thing was like, I want to be in that thing one day.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm to hold leisure. It looks so cool. So I broke this down to several components. Like the first piece of it, the first act is going to be the conception. So I'm going down. We're going to take some wild turns here. I'll just stick with me, okay?

I'm excited to get to the Marianna Trench because that feels like the opposite of where you want to be if you're in a plane. That is a very last thing we're going to cover. So I'm going to keep the nail biters here until we're done. Okay. They're forced to listen to me. I can't wait. So I'm going to start. the topic of the conception of the Blackbird by starting with the U.S. intelligence community as a whole.

So the further you dig into funding and budgets for the intelligence community, the more you realize how entirely opaque the whole process is and how little is exposed to the public, I have yet to find a reliable source on how budgets actually work with the 18 agencies that comprise the U.S. intelligence community. Also, that blew me away, 18 agencies. That's literally with the totality of what's called the I see the intelligence opinion in the United States comprises of. I think it mostly CIA, FBI, NSA. But like,

there's 15 others. 15 others. Yeah. Whoa. There was, I was just to interrupt, we were watching Family Guy yesterday or the day, and they talk about Harvard.

And they're like, Harvard has, you know, illustrious alumni. And then they show Ted Cruz, Jared Kushner, and Steve Bannon. And then they show the, Unabomber and then they pause and they go, we apologize to Ted Kaczynski for putting you in that group. But I was telling Juan how like Harvard ruined Ted Kaczynski.

Yeah, LSD. Yeah. They broke his brain. Yeah. Well, actually, I think the CIA commission Harvard, Harvard consented to doing it. So I don't know. I don't know who's more complicit there. But someone else.

So I started thinking of this. So basically the whole, this is all. This is all pretty common knowledge. So the way that the federal government budget works is that agencies put together their budgets and they submitted to Congress and Congress has to basically rubber stamp it and they say, yep, this funding is appropriated and things keep running. It is way more complicated than that. Like what I learned is that actually it's a three-year process.

So from when you submit a budget to Congress until those funds are actually used, it takes about three years. So like the process for the. the money that is allocated this year started in 2022. Like that's how long of a cycle that is. But what's really interesting and something that I cannot figure out is how money for the community, intelligence community gets allocated. I found this like Harvard research paper on it and it also was basically just citing the same other stats and resources I found everywhere else.

But one thing that I notice is that the more I dig into, like, every now and then, we'll do a topic. And I can feel my own personal, like, political affiliations, kind of moving and shifting underneath me. And that's kind of what I thought when I dug deep into this. Because to get to the bottom of how black budgets are spent, you backed your way into it by looking at how overall budgets are spent. So I pulled up this stat, which, like, blew me away. So in 2022, the federal government budgeted $4.1 trillion for the year, 23, so last year, for mandatory spending. Of that, of the $4.1 trillion, 82% or $3.4 trillion could be addressed by just fixing three societal problems we have. How health insurance works.

Yeah. Our ability to save money for retirement in student loans. Oh, oh, really? that's it. That's it. Like those three things. So again, like, I'm not advocating for this, but by comparison, all we ever talk about, like, societally is how much we spend it on military.

And we spend a ton. We spend more than the next, like, I forgot what it was, like 20, 30 countries combined or something. It is, we spent five times more addressing those three issues than we do on our military. And it's not fixing it yet. Because if you look at it, you're like, okay, so let me get this straight. So because there's no cap and limit to how companies can, how much it costs gets basic medical procedures done. And because of a convoluted insurance system that creates all this middleman process in the middle there, we blow up our costs on that front, which means we all end up paying for through tax dollars.

that we then taxed to pay for the retirement of elders out of our own resources which is going to go bankrupt anyways. It's just like, it's so crazy. It's like, it's like just literally just fix the health care problem. It means people can save their own money for retirement. Right. It's just like.

And then you get into like schools and you're like, wait, so this turned into a business when? This is literally like $50,000 a year for a fucking undergrad degree. It's like crazy. Like, so anyways. No, agree to agree on all those things. I went through a whole feelings thing with this.

I'm very excited for in the next 10 minutes when like the CIA burst into your house. So. I know, right? The amount of Googling I did on this. I was like, yep, that's being tracked. That's being tracked. That got tracked. That keystroke was tracked.

Like just literally. The men and black are going to show up. It's going to be very exciting. 100, 100%. So the intent. intelligence community's funding falls under a single umbrella, which, so basically all 18 agencies, it's intelligence community. That's the budget. That's where the budget goes. So by all accounts, the rough approximation of how much was budgeted for the entire intelligence community, these 1880s, was 90 billion dollars. So basically. For this year? You were saying? For last year.

Okay. Yeah. It was two years ago, but it was four last. year. So if anybody looks into this, like I know that there's two categories here. There's military intelligence programs as national intelligence programs. I'm bucking them all into one. The military intelligence is significantly lower than the national intelligence. But anyway, it's like that if you look this status up, I'm just including them into one. This is part of our defense spending and is unique from the rest of the budget process part because budgets aren't line item here. So the obvious reason why that is is because they need the ability to create what's called black budgets,

which is off the book spending that not even Congress has access to. So like it is very, very like top secret national intelligence stuff. And that's the point of it. The point of it is to be able to kind of create and run and operate classified projects.

And I'm sure that I've been propagandized to be like, yeah, of course. What do you mean? Like I've watched a lot of like movies and like TV shows where I'm like, of course they need a black budget. You know. Yeah, well, I mean, like, here's the thing. I would say that after learning what I've learned here, I'm like, yeah, we do.

Like, we actually tangibly do. And this project is a really good case study of why that is. And this is the only one that we really, like, I mean, sure, we know of a lot of them now. But, like, I don't know what's being worked on right now. Like, what's being worked on right now might be, like, something we'll never, we won't even know in our lifetime, right? So, um, so it was from this budget, what's called the Black Budget. that the Air Force and the CIA joined forces because they're part of the intelligence

community. They joined forces to plan the creation of a plane, which at the time was codenamed Archangel, which is rad. Just absolutely rad. So a little bit of background, a little bit of history on this. So in 1956, the U.S. created a spy plane called the U2. It was built to fly incredibly high and take incredibly high quality pictures of the train below.

During the height of the Cold War on May 1, 1960, one of these planes was flying over the Soviet Union when it was shot down by a service to air missile. This was basically an incredibly huge PR disaster from the United States. And there was on one account, I remember I read Eisenhower told his secretary that he was ready to quit his job. But he was just like so ashamed and embarrassed. Because at this time, when Crucese was essentially the grace that the Soviets gave America was Alan Dulles, the head of the CIA, probably did this on his own and didn't even tell. the president. So like let's not just throw everything out as far as our negotiations on a peace treaty here. Because he's a baddie, right? Delos, yeah, Dallas was definitely a baddie. Yeah.

So again, huge disaster for the U.S. and Eisenhower and Cruceth agree that the U.S. will never fly planes over the Soviet Union again. That was kind of the agreement. Like we're going to put an ironclad treaty in place. It's not going to happen again. So knowing this, obviously, Allen Dulles was like, cool, we have a problem. Now we need a plan that just can't get, can't ever be caught. Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. I was like, of course they didn't really do that. Yeah, of course not.

The problem was that we can't do this. It was like, okay, now we should have to figure out how not to get caught doing this again. So they approached the recipient of a ton of black project money contracting Lockheed Martin to develop and build such an aircraft. So in 1962, they signed a contract to build a contract to build. build six planes that at a time had a designation and still do of SR71. That's what I'm referring to as Blackbird. So SR 71, Blackbird, same thing.

I see it. The basic requirements were threefold. Had to fly super high, had to fly super fast, and it had to stay completely under wraps. That's it. That was the idea. So Lockheed Martin had a division focused entirely on building projects like this. It's called Skunkworks, which is now like a euphemism used by any sort of company that has like an in-house specialty projects. thing but it all originally have lucky barn yeah exactly and basically like if you look at the list of

like the project skunk works has worked on it's like every insane plane that has ever existed so for example any time you hear reports out of something happening or someone citing something out of area 51 it's probably a skunk works plane like to that point even the initial test flights done for the sr 71 they were all done area 51 for context. So creating a plane that can fly high and fast enough to basically outperform any other plane or missile, for that matter, in the world was a pretty tall order. And what it essentially means is they had to basically invent all new processes and technologies

and manufacturing capabilities, all from the ground up. I'll go through what it takes to basically operate this thing later on. But it's crazy the amount of work they had to go into this. They had to basically figure out how a new way for engines to work, for fuel to be stored, how to ensure survivability, a whole host of other stuff that will go into the details up. Have you looked, have you looked playing up before, Taylor? I'm looking at it right now. It looks silly.

Describe it. It's like a big front part, and then it has like little engines and wings on the back. But the front part is very like oblong and big, right? Yes. I think it looks silly. It does look like a bird. It doesn't not look a bird. It looks more like a bird than other planes.

Taylor, you say silly. I say probably badass. Yes, let's figure out. Whoever wants, please write in. We'll do a poll. Is it sillier badass? We'll see what would the interwebs have to say. I do know that we have a military pilot who is a listener.

Yeah, please. If you've ever even seen one of these things in person, like I would love to know. So, basically, Basically, the reason it looks the way it looks isn't because they were trying to make it look badass. Like the goal is this thing for can never be seen. Like literally the entire objective would never be seen. And so that's why it's designed the way that it's designed. Somebody described it a little bit.

So the front of the plane to your point, it's like a boom. It comes to a point like a fighter jet does. But then it sweeps down really rapidly on the edges. And from the top or the bottom, it kind of looks almost like it's flat, the central fuselage part of it. And that's all done because it's stealth capability. So it was designs that it wouldn't be readable as a plane on traditional radar. It would leave a radar signature. So the wings and the engines are integrated into the wings.

And they have this cone-like structure the very front of it, which is entirely a design component of how the engine was supposed to work to get it up to its max speed, which we're going to get into here in a second. So what the plane was came to, capable of doing no plane no sorry no manned plane ever since has matched it so in 1964 they built a thing that even today we have not tried to replicate so it was capable of flying in excess of mock 3.2 which is 2 500 miles per hour so the the the in access part was in short burst some have reported claims of 3.5 but it would sustain

flight at 3.2, which is the fastest, you can go. Well, the fastest of manned plane would be able to go. Did you watch Top Gun 2? You mean Maverick? Yeah. Yes. It's great. It's great.

But he flies at a mock a lot. He flies in a mock a lot, yeah. Well, I mean, that's the thing. Like, these speeds are not that. I mean, this speed is atypical, but flying incredibly fast on one of those jet planes is not. The more critical part of its functionality, had to do with the fact that its service ceiling was 80,000 to 85,000 feet high, which is like super high, like super, super, super high.

When you look at pictures of people in the cockpit of this thing, they look like they're in outer space. They don't even look like they're flying a plane. 100%. I see that for sure. So the reason they had to design it this way was twofold. One is because no other plane outside of what's called a Zuma Center or something. something like those lights.

No other plane can actually sustainably fly at this elevation. A plane could occasionally get up there, but it would just be shooting straight up and then would lose all lift and just fall back down. So occasionally, they were able to lock targets on this thing in the later operational history, but they're never able to get close enough to actually do anything about it.

But the other more important part... I'm so sorry. I know you're on a roll, but I have a stupid question. Is this pre-satellites or like during satellites? Because aren't satellites like above this? So wouldn't that not matter anymore? I'm going to get to that. Okay. Yes, that is a really good point.

Thank you. Thank you for understanding my very scientific question. No, no. We're talking about this for a lot, for a while later on. So the other part of it had to do with the speed. So the speed was also meant to outrun missiles. So even if there was a surface-to-air missile launch this thing, it could outpace a missile. So that's entirely how it was supposed to run.

Also, the idea was, they given its service ceiling. By the time a missile actually got high enough to reach it, it would then need to accelerate faster. And by that point, it would have exhausted all propulsion. So that was the idea. The name, the SR designation of it stands for strategic reconnaissance. The purpose of this plane was to fly up over or to the side of any targets on the ground

to take incredibly high quality, high resolution pictures. All this is being stored in the plane, because this is 1964. Right. Once the plane lands, they would remove the components and then send it over to the CIA to analyze the data, interpret it, and then run it up the ladder, essentially. So like I said, a lot of stuff around building this thing had to be unique. I'm going to touch on just a few of them. There's a ton that we could be talking about, but we don't have forever. So I'm going to touch on a few of the more interesting things.

One was that flying at this speed and created a tremendous amount of resistance in the air, which caused a tremendous amount of heat to be built up. So it was determined early on that they couldn't build this out of steel or any traditional materials that you would use for airframe construction. They would have to use titanium. The problem was that the order they would need to use for the titanium was in short supply in the U.S. But was an incredibly high supply in the Soviet Union, which is who they literally were trying to build this plane against. Yeah. So the CIA did what the CIA does exceptionally well. and they basically set up a ton of little shell companies across the entire country or the entire world and ordered in small batches the titanium they would need to construct the plane so they wouldn't raise any alarms or anything and it took years it took years like during the design phase like I mean they didn't even know if they're going to do this but they still design I mean that the ingenuity here is crazy

I think we talked about that something we talked about something with that like but the opposite way we're like oh it was helium it was how in the u.s we had all the helium and we had all the helium and we wouldn't give it to Germany to make their blimp. Yeah. Yeah. So wild. Also, because objects that don't melt in heat expand in heat, the body paneling of the plane was loose fitting. So when it was

on the ground, it wasn't actually fully secured as a one cohesive structure. It would have to reach Mach 3.2. It's cruising speed for all the pieces to actually come together and fit. Where did I hear that about a regular planes. Someone just told me that. Like, planes are built on a moving platform because they're meant to be

moving. I mean, I'm sure they are. I'm sure all of them are. Like, I know that planes do, um, it's like subs, right? They used to talk about how people in subs, they would tie a string from one side of the sub to the other side of the sub on the inside. And then as you go further down, you can see how much the string sags because the entire body is shifting and moving. Plains, I'm sure do the exact same thing. Yeah. So yeah, that's, that's the piece about how the construction side of it was. One interesting quirk about the plane was that the fuel for the plane was all housed in the airframe itself.

It was like circulating around the plane, which a lot of planes do this. Most of time it's just in the wings, but in this plane it had to be kind of all around because it needed a ton of fuel and its wings weren't even that long. It were delta wings, like a little bit sloped. So the problem with that is because the skin of the plane is loose fitting, and because it expands and contracts so much, this thing would just constantly leak fuel when it was on the ground. Right, right, right.

There's only so many times you can compress and come back and the fuel cell wouldn't shatter. And so basically, maintenance workers devised a count of how many drops a minute were okay versus now we have to actually replace all this paneling, replace the air cell, fuel cells and everything. Yeah. So the other thing that was unique about this was just the survivability of it. So, like, again, if you look at pictures, you think you're looking at an astronaut, not a pilot inside of the...

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The reason was that they couldn't pressurize the cabin sufficiently at this height. So what I read was that at this, at the cruising altitude of 85,000 feet, the best they could really hope for was to, was to pressurize it to the equivalent of 10 to 25,000 feet, which you'd still pass out at. But you're still not doing the auction at that level. And so what they had to do was create a pressure suit. So they're inside a pressurized suit where all their life support is dependent on this suit itself, not the cabin that you're actually inside of. And the other part of it, the other reason why they had to do this was in the event of a ejection event,

which happened a lot, in the event of an ejection, given the speed and the altitude, A, you die from just the fall because you'd be without oxygen for so long in a descent. But the other part of it was that if you were to inject, the heat your body would experience would be about 450 degrees. That's how hot it would be upon ejection. So there was no time to fumble for oxygen or mass or anything. Why would it be hot when it's cold up there? Because of the speed? Because of the speed, yeah.

So what they were saying was that the. body itself would heat up to around 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit and the glass that was in front of the pilot would be somewhere in the 250 to 350 range. It gets crazy, crazy hot because it's the speed of the resistance.

So going into a bit of the operational history. So the SR 71 was operational until it's, well, there's going to be two retirements. Its first retirement happened 24 years after went to active service. And during that time,

It was used in Vietnam, Israel, Lebanon, and obviously the Soviet Union. Basically, any global conflict, the U.S. had any sort of interest in. The stories around this and the numbers that are thrown around of, like, some of the emissions of this thing went on are kind of inconceivable. So one of the quirks of the SR-71 was that it would take off with its fuel cells half full. The idea being that the lighter it is, the better. and so it would take off also leaking fuel anyways so why waste on the ground so takeoff its first stop upon takeoff was meeting up with a mid-air refueling tanker and it would refuel

it's very first thing was to stop and refuel so it would do that and then it would accelerate to full speed so like its actual cruising speed of 3.2 Mach 3.2 and it could only do this for about 90 minutes So about 90 minutes after cruising at this altitude or at this speed, it would have to start looking for another tanker, which would find refuel and then keep going. It just like a constant thing. I had to keep being refueled in there. So it would be like, while the stories that you'd hear about this from some of the pilots that flew in it were, you know, they would take off from Sacramento and they would basically do a loop around half the country where they would go from Sacramento up to Seattle, turn back around, go over Albuquerque, down to San Diego. go back to Sacramento and they would refuel twice. It'll be like a two-hour trip to do this whole thing.

Wow. There was one pilot, there was a story I read about one pilot who he had dinner with his wife and kids at home. Everybody went to sleep. He goes to the air base. He suits up. He flies to the North Pole where the CIA wanted photos to ascertain whether the Soviet Union was planting listening devices under the ice sheet to track the nuclear submarines.

And then he flew back home and it was just a couple of hours and he went to bed. That's some Santa shit there. Yeah. Yeah. And it actually happened on Christmas Eve. Didn't really. That's delightful. Yeah.

I also remember watching one of the last manned space missions that went up. Like they do a thing where at some point they have like one more, like one more chance to bail. And if they did that, they'd land in Dublin. You know, like. Oh. Oh. Because they go up. Yeah, but it's like six minutes.

So like six minutes after leaving Florida, they could technically land in Dublin, but because it went up. So crazy. You know? So crazy. So fun. Similar to this, like this guy, one of the stories that I read,

the one with the guy was going out, Albuquerque, doing like a loop around 50% of the country, basically, in two hours. He was talking about how when he was in Albuquerque, he could see downtown L.A. on one side, and Denver and the Rocky Mountains on the other side. No way. That's cool.

Oh, cool. Yeah. And it was also actually, one interesting mission that it went on was that it actually was used to track the route that D.B. Cooper went on and took pictures underneath them to figure out where he might have ditched. It didn't work. They ran five missions trying to do this. And it didn't work because of cloud coverage in the Pacific Northwest. So they want you to think. That's what they want you to think.

They did find his body. It's me. I'm D.B. Cooper. Strange reveal. That's weird. So finding tangible mission history on this thing is really, really hard because I'm sure all that is classified. The stuff you know is the stuff that pilots are talking about on YouTube and some grains of detail come out when you look at like the planes that have been downed. Because then you know, okay, so one was down in the North China Sea.

we know that like something happened in the engine and then it the details are scarce but so there's not a ton of detail around this and so that's part of the reason why it went into its first premature retirement was because nobody really knew what it did they just knew we spent a ton of money on this thing and it looks cool and it goes high but like yeah yeah exactly and to your point satellites which i'm going to get to in more detail here So the military was trying to find places to cut its budget, but also it had a shinier, newer toy that it was trying to fund, which is the B2 bomber, more commonly known as the stealth. So at that point, kind of like you mentioned before, global satellite coverage was becoming more pervasive.

And it was definitely more pervasive than it was when the SR 71 was initially in development. So people in power had this misconception on the cost of maintaining the price. program and how valuable the program actually was in light of other competing interests. So because of how secret it was and because the planes, planes like this get priced out based on how much it cost to operate them on an hourly basis, there was an assumption that this fleet cost about $700 million to operate a year, which comes out to about $85,000 per flight hour. But really, it was closer to $300 million.

It was flying a lot more than people actually knew because it was secret. So you don't know that, those details. So you think it's more expensive than it actually was. Also, $300 million in the scheme of the U.S. budget is like, you know, a quarter to you and me. Yeah. So in late 1989, the plane was officially retired just short of being involved in Operation Desert Storm, which didn't matter really because the U.S. won so decisively. but it was noted because General Schwartzcoff came out saying, like, hey, we actually could have used this plane.

Like, it would have been really, really helpful to know how people were moving and how to position people. And that would self-perpetuate itself because in 1993, that's when really things started popping off like a lot more in the Middle East and with the war in Bosnia. And so the military requested that the Congress allocate budget to reactivate several of these SR-7s. So their argument on doing so was that typically with a satellite, to reposition a satellite to a specific point, can take up to 24 hours to do. And the military was looking at this and saying, like, we can get from here, we can get from a military base in the U.S. to over Russia, over Bosnia, over Lebanon in like two hours. Yeah, totally. So time was kind of of the essence here. Also, because the plane can keep doing the same pass over and over again,

it was able to quickly determine the motion of things. So what they were talking about was in Bosnia. They were trying to determine where weapons were being transported to. But a satellite hits that spot and then passes and then hits it again and then again. So it doesn't show you the real-time progression of things the way that's going to go. So for a period of time, a few of them did return into active service. And that was until 1997 when Bill Clinton famously used a power that he thought he had, which he did not, called the line item veto. So he struck the SR 71 budget as a line item from the budget for 98.

And that went up to the Supreme Court, which Supreme Court deemed was not a power the president actually has. Can you imagine how quaint that was, Taylor? like that's what we were fighting about as a country was like does the president have the power to do a line item veto we were so cute back then when the president like you know could read and like adducive

yeah what a lovely what a lovely time to be alive lovely time regardless at that point it became clear that there was so much resistance now the president was getting involved on this project that a second retirement was ultimately inevitable and that's what happened so

in 1998, they went into permanent retirement status and now are basically just exhibited in museums. That's all they do. I feel like, that's fine. They probably have new ones than better ones. So. I don't want to ride on a plane from 1963.

Do you? Is that whatever? So, well, the thing is, it's not that they have, well, you wouldn't be riding in that anymore. So there is an SR 72 in development. And what that is is a drone. Like, everything's going to

because. You don't have to worry about, like, human survivability at all, which is great. It helps a lot. And so that Lockheed Scott Quark is working on currently, and that is kind of the next stage of unmanned aircraft. So, wow. Some fun facts and interesting statistic. So 32 SR7s were built in total. 12 were lost.

One pilot ended up dying as a result of the plane crashing. Zero planes, though, were lost due to enemy combat. So the mission was, the objectives were met. Like, it was never caught. It all went wrong due to, you know, issues with the engine or stuff like that. So it was all mechanical in nature. It still holds the fastest route by plane from New York to London at just under two hours. So it was one hour and 54 minutes long.

Is it that route? I thought the entire hour of 54 minutes, you're like, ah. It's wild. It's wild. Yeah, there was another one I saw that was Kansas City, Missouri to New York in seven minutes. There he is. I think crazy. Yeah.

It maintained a flight at the highest altitude ever achieved consistently by a manned plane at 85,000 feet. And one fact that I promised at the very beginning that I'm going to go ahead and the LeBron. And it's kind of a creepy one is. is that in April of 1989, the last SR 71 to be lost in a mission actually went down. And it was codenamed Ichibon. And what happened was one of the engine bearings froze, which basically caused the engine to just disintegrate and tear itself apart midair. The pilots ejected safely, and they were rescued.

And the Navy went to work to recover the plane from the China Sea. They did that. They did their investigation, all that good stuff. It was all done, like, on site. it was deemed too expensive in a security hazard to transport this thing back to the U.S. to have it scrapped. So he decided the best thing to do is to drop it somewhere where literally no other country could have the resources to pull it up. Whoa. So they dropped it in the Mariana Trench?

Today, if you go down to the Mariana Trench, you might stumble on a 34-year-old SR-71 Blackbird. That was dope. That's crazy, right? It's fun. I like that. Yeah. So that is my story. It all, you know, for me, like the Duna fell part of it just goes back to, like, how

supersonic planes are anyways. Like, they're so crazy advanced and so crazy expensive to operate. Like, I remember the Concord was one of the, it was just like the pride of British airways and eventually it's like, yeah, we're done with us. Like, nobody needs to go to New York. Nobody needs to go from London to New York that fast. Yeah, like, we're fine. We can just leisurely, ten-hour flight or whatever.

that's cool. It's interesting. I think it's so fun that there's all those like secret. You know, I don't know. I don't know. Who knows? My dad was talking about how he was like, well, yeah, Palm Springs is where, you know, Eisenhower was supposed to have met the aliens and they were like, stop doing nuclear things. And he was like, no. And then like that was it. I love that. And we know, you and me know someone, I won't say their name, but some, I'll tell you later. but one of the engineers we used to work with at our old job used to work at Area 51, and he told me that he would live in Las Vegas and they would drive to a parking lot, and then they go on a plane with no windows to work every day. Yeah, I believe it. Yeah, I believe it.

Yeah, I looked at a bunch of pictures of Area 51, too, and it's really creepy. It's a really creepy spot. Yeah. But I don't think it's like alien creepy, honestly. like research in this and seeing how secretive the government is about stuff like this. Like yeah, of course. Like they're going to have to test this stuff somehow. And so, yeah.

We're going to kill each other before anything else happens anyway, you know? Yeah. Humans will annihilate ourselves in before, before we get to intergalactic alien anything. That's the paradox. I mean, that's the thing. You look at the plane and again,

right to us if you think it's cool or silly looking. But you look at a plane like that. You know, like that's what we developed. started working on in like 1958 so what the fuck is out there now that we don't know about like, oh totally, it's like invisible planes up here yeah, yeah, so it's like what's more likely that it's like aliens that are we're seeing over Groom Lake or

Lockheed Martin is like creating the next crazy thing yeah, I bet 100% yeah there's a cool air and space museum in Pop Springs also that is really fun has a bunch of old planes in it you can go into like a World War II bomber and touch everything. That's fun. That's cool.

I like it. Yeah. Yeah. So that's our story for today. And if you have any thoughts or want to answer our question, write to us, Dumb to Fellpod at Chippel.com or all of socials. Yeah, all the socials. I doem to fill a pod.

I have one listener mail. Agnes, my friend Agnes, listened to the Chicago Fire episode. And she wanted a little bit more context. She totally understand. what was happening in 1871. I definitely want to like bring that back. So just to pull us out of the plane into back to the Chicago fire real fast, 1871 was the Franco-Pression War.

Ulysses Grant was president. And in London, Queen Victoria was the queen. And she just had opened Royal Albert Hall in memory of her husband. And also the first photographs of Yellowstone were taking in 1871. Whoa. Fun context. other things are happening during that time. Yeah.

That's the fun stories. So Russia was done as Prussia back then? No, pressure was more like Germany, that area. And then as we also learned today or Monday, you know, Germany started to unify in like the 1860s. Yeah, I got it. Yeah, it's exactly the same time. Like Germany started to unify around the same time with the Great Chicago Fire. Wild.

Maybe they're related. Maybe. Probably not. Was that? the other sweet well thank you Taylor thanks for hearing the story

thanks everyone for listening and please do rate subscribe do all the things and we'll join you in a week we join you in a week awesome go ahead and cut things off