[onesun]

I didn't make it past the first lovely sentence. "With a sleek needle nose and a swept double-delta wing with two prominent nacelles, the supersonic SR-1 Blackbird spy plane is the stuff aviation legend."

SR-1? "Stuff aviation legend"? I'd expect a little better editing from Popular Mechanics.

[kevincennis]

You stopped reading the entire article because they dropped an "of"?

[cyberferret]

I must admit that I picked up on the "SR-1" typo. If this was my local daily rag article, I could forgive, but for a technical publication that is supposed to give us accurate, meaningful data, that immediately sows some distrust that the rest of the information in the article may be suspect. Grammatical errors I can forgive to a certain extent, but getting the designation of the aircraft wrong that is the feature of the article? That is sloppy editing.

[rconti]

They mentioned the SR-1 program again later in the article too. I even had to Google it to make sure it wasn't me with the misunderstanding.

[kevincennis]

I actually didn't even notice that until you put it in quotes just now.

[romwell]

Then there are outright broken sentences like this:

>The 1980s saw an increase in threats capable to countering the SR-71, including improved enemy air defenses and the introduction of the MiG-31, which was armed with the R-33 air-to-air missile could intercept the Blackbird.

This just breaks my mental parsing, since there are so many ways to fix this:

1. ..MiG, which, being armed with the R-33 missile, could intercept the Blackbird;

2. ..MiG, which was armed with the R-33 missile, and could intercept the Blackbird;

3. ..MiG, which was armed with the R-33 air-to-air missile, and therefore could intercept the Blackbird.

(and so on)

[onesun]

I wrote that with a bit of sarcasm, but yes, it was hard for me to take this article seriously, even though I did manage to finish it.

[jpeanuts]

I'm more bothered by the tautology. What is an unswept delta-wing supposed to look like?

[dragonwriter]

That's closer to an oxymoron than a tautology. But I guess a wing with a back swept leading edge and a forward swept trailing edge (which the SR-71 has) could have a triangular shape and a 0° sweep as typically measured (the SR-71 doesn't, of course), making it an “unswept delta”.

[SamReidHughes]

I didn't notice those typos the first time I read the article. Maybe it's really easy to misread letter-number combinations like that if you're already expecting it to be a certain number.

[ProAm]

Good old hacker news where people would rather discuss how the article was written instead of the content it contains.

[dang]

Please don't posture over the community while being part of it. There are tons of substantive comments in this thread alone. Your superiority to others is, at a minimum, off topic.