Harger: Seattle’s Museum of Flight has a Blackbird. NASA is quietly trying to fly an SR-71 again after 27 years

Walk into the Great Gallery at Seattle’s Museum of Flight and the Blackbird is the first thing you notice: a long black titanium dart with a drone riding on its back. Now picture walking in one day and finding it gone.

That’s what happened at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base in California. The SR-71A with tail number 844, the last Blackbird Lockheed built and the last one to fly, had stood on a display pole there since October 1999. Aviation fans who grew up with Blackbird posters on their walls had made their peace with it. The fastest jet ever built was done flying.

Earlier this year, it vanished. Aviation Week reporter Steve Trimble found out why: NASA appears to be trying to get the SR-71 Blackbird to fly again.

Every so often a story grabs me by the collar. I got two paragraphs into Trimble’s Aviation Week story and shouted across the newsroom, “Producer Paul, we have got to get this guy on the line.”

It’s the comeback nobody in aviation saw coming, and almost nobody thinks it’ll be easy. The spare parts are gone. The fuel is gone. The engineers who knew the jet best are pushing 80.

NASA pulled SR-71 tail number 844 off display at Edwards Air Force Base

“The aircraft with tail number 844, which has been on display at the Armstrong Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base since 1999 or 2000, was removed from display earlier this year,” Trimble told me on “Seattle’s Morning News.” “We have satellite imagery now that pretty much confirms it was in late February when it was removed.”

Then came the job offers.

“We’ve talked to people who used to work for NASA, who used to work on that program, who have been contacted in the last two months by NASA to come back to work with a full job offer to help get the aircraft back in the air,” Trimble said.

NASA hasn’t confirmed the project exists and told Aviation Week it had nothing more to share.

How fast is the SR-71 Blackbird? Mach 3.2 at 80,000 feet

“It flew at Mach 3.2, which is around 2,100 miles per hour, give or take, and at 80,000 feet and above,” said Trimble, who calls the Blackbird his favorite airplane. “The Concorde flew at Mach 2, but this was half again faster than the Concorde.”

At that speed, Sea-Tac to JFK takes about 70 minutes. I’ve spent longer than that waiting for my bag.

Why the SR-71 Blackbird leaked fuel on the runway

Park an SR-71 on the ramp, and it starts dripping. Lockheed designed it that way. At Mach 3, friction heats the titanium skin to around 400 degrees, and the metal grows, so engineers fitted the panels loosely. In flight, they swelled shut and sealed the fuel tanks. On the ground, they leaked. The special JP-7 fuel was so stable the puddles posed little fire risk.

The dripping never really stops. The Smithsonian’s SR-71, outside Washington, D.C., still seeps JP-7 more than 35 years after its final landing in 1990.

Area 51, UFO sightings, and the Blackbird’s secret family tree

Before the SR-71 came the A-12, the CIA’s version, tested in secret at Area 51 in Nevada starting in 1962. Years later, the CIA admitted that flights by the U-2 spy plane and the A-12 explained more than half of all UFO reports in the late 1950s and 1960s. The people who knew what those lights were couldn’t say.

Seattle’s M-21 at the Museum of Flight, the only one left in the world, was built off the A-12.

Will the SR-71 Blackbird fly again? No spare parts, no fuel, no engines

Tail 844 spent 27 years outside in the Mojave Desert.

“The people I talked to said they would have expected to see pools of water inside just from the infrequent rains out in the desert,” Trimble said.

“There’s no spare parts for this aircraft,” he added. “The Air Force destroyed all of them in 2007, as far as we know. There’s no lubricants, there’s no fuel.”

The engines are their own problem.

“This engine is a Swiss watch of engines,” Trimble said. “There are no new engines that exist.”

“The airworthiness certification, the mind boggles at how they would be able to do that at this point,” he added.

Mike Relja, a former NASA and Air Force test engineer on the SR-71, told Aviation Week he warned NASA he didn’t see a path from the display pole to the sky. Every time he raised a problem, he said, NASA’s answer was that engineering would handle it.

B-17 and B-29 restorations show why the SR-71 is so much harder

Boeing built 6,981 B-17 Flying Fortresses in Seattle during World War II, and across all factories, 12,731 rolled off the lines. That’s a deep well of parts and know-how, enough to keep a handful flying at air shows today.

Lockheed built 32 SR-71s. Twelve were lost in accidents.

Even with every advantage, bombers take years. The B-29 known as “Doc” sat in the Mojave for 42 years before volunteers in Wichita spent 16 years restoring it. It flew again in 2016.

Doc took 16 years, and Doc never had to fly at Mach 3.

NASA’s real-life Space Cowboys: former Blackbird engineers in their 70s got job offers

In “Space Cowboys,” the 2000 film starring Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland, and James Garner, NASA calls retired test pilots back because a failing satellite runs on old technology only they understand. Real life is following the script.

I asked Trimble what the men NASA called, most of them pushing 80, are saying.

“There is an excitement about this, clearly,” he said. “They’re also feeling a little old to be climbing around on the airplane and trying to solve very, very difficult problems at this point.”

Relja told NASA he’s too old to sign on, but he’ll take a phone call for free. He isn’t writing it off, either: “They went to the Moon, you know,” he told Aviation Week.

Tim Conners, another former NASA test engineer, would love to join, but it would mean moving back to Southern California.

“He has to get his wife to agree to do that at this point in their retirement,” Trimble said. “These are tall asks for people in their 70s or even late 70s.”

In the movie, Eastwood’s crew couldn’t wait to suit up. In real life, none of them signed on.

Why NASA wants the Blackbird: Jared Isaacman’s high-speed flight push

NASA wouldn’t tell the retirees why it wants the jet unless they took the job. The best clue is NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, who said at the All-In Summit in Los Angeles this month that he wants the agency pioneering high-speed flight again.

“There has been a renaissance of high-speed flight activity, commercially and militarily, in the US to a degree I’ve never seen in my career just in the last few years,” Trimble said. “So you can see why there would be interest in a reusable platform that has a pretty solid history and track record behind it.”

Seattle’s Museum of Flight Blackbird: could NASA borrow its parts?

I had to ask: could NASA borrow parts from the jet at the Museum of Flight?

Possibly, Trimble said, or at least scan them so a company could reproduce them with modern digital manufacturing. Just don’t expect museums to start handing over wings.

“If you have an SR-71 or one of its variants, that is usually the centerpiece of your museum, so you don’t want people messing with it,” he said.

I spent years chasing Boeing stories, and this region still knows its airplanes better than anywhere. Seattle is an aerospace town. If this one ever becomes a movie, I’ll be there opening night.

Whether there’s a sequel depends on one word.

“If you can get back in the air, it could be a real asset in that respect,” Trimble said. “The big question is if.”

Charlie Harger is the host of “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio. You can read more of his stories and commentaries here. Follow Charlie on X and email him here. 

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