[ethank]

Such a beautiful plane. I got the chance to see the second to the last flight of the NASA SR-71 at Edwards AFB in I think 2001 or 2000. The airplane is other worldly, loud as hell and simply beautiful.

They did a full Mach 3 overhead pass (at 50k feet I think) and also a bunch of slow and high speed passes before it landed and it did a close up crowd taxi-by. The engines at idle have a unique noise, different than any other jet they had.

From the front its a higher pitch noise due to the fact that you're hearing the eddies off the compressor (the engine had no slow RPM fan like most military jets), and from the back like the worlds largest hair dryer.

At take off, it sent up a rooster tail of dust from the runway that went for a half mile.

Sad that they retired the bird. Kelly Johnson was a super hero engineer.