Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Oh, my God. This is one of the reasons why, and maybe spoiling it a little bit, but to flash forward, the Air Force hated operating these things. It costs I think $300 million a year just to maintain these things. These were beasts from hell in every sense of that phrase, the good and the bad. Okay, that's some of the material challenges. Another problem was on the engines. The most advanced jet engines in the world at the time was the Pratt and Whitney J58. I believe, actually, they weren't even able to get the J5 in the first A-12s, and then only later in the Blackbirds did they put it in. We should tell people, the Blackbird, the SR-71 was the two-seater Air Force version of the single seater A-12 CIA airplane. Yup. Even the J58s couldn't produce nearly enough thrust on their own to get to and sustain the Mach 3-plus speeds that they needed to hit spec. In fact, at least according to Ben Rich in Skunk Works, they could only produce about 25% of the thrust required. Ben leads a team that engineers the spike inlet system. If you're looking at a Blackbird, and you look at the engines, they've got these cones in front of these spikes, these big spikes. I'm sure everybody listening has seen a photo of a Blackbird.…

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