The SR-72? Sounds like a whole new wave of UFO sightings will soon be upon us!
Lockheed envisions Mach 6 successor to SR-71 Blackbird
Over at the Skunk Works, aircraft designers are hard at work cooking up a hypersonic scion to the legendary SR-71, the superspeedy recon jet of the Cold War.
by Jonathan Skillings
The SR-71 Blackbird flew faster than any other production plane ever. Its successor, the SR-72, will go twice as fast.
That's the big, jawdropping takeaway from Aviation Week's exclusive look at Lockheed Martin's work on the next-generation aircraft. A demonstrator version of the SR-72 could be ready as early as 2018.
Lockheed told Aviation Week that the goal is for the new aircraft to be seriously hypersonic, blazing across the sky at around Mach 6. The intent, too, is to broaden the mission: the SR-72 would pick up where the Blackbird left off in performing high-altitude intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions, but unlike its weaponless predecessor also would -- hypothetically -- be capable of carrying out strikes on targets.
To achieve those crazy-fast speeds, Lockheed's Skunk Works unit plans to integrate an off-the-shelf, fighter jet turbine with an air-breathing scramjet, building off the Pentagon's experimental Hypersonic Technology Vehicle (HTV) efforts, according to Aviation Week.
Hypersonic airframes of any kind have been extremely rare birds to date, and test flights have been troubled at best. Earlier this year, the fourth and final flight of the US Air Force's missile-like, unmanned X-51A Waverider project eked out a top speed of Mach 5.1 in a six-minute flight, about half of which took place on scramjet power.
Concept images of the SR-72 in the Aviation Week story show an aircraft with a pencil-point nose and a fuselage that tapers smoothly to the tail, uninterrupted by any kind of cockpit.
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