In early November of that year, Lockheed Martin unveiled the SR-72 concept with a media push that included several interviews with Brad Leland – Lockheed Martin’s Hypersonics program manager and the engineer who had already been heading the effort for seven years by that time. In 2006, the firm secretly began initial design work on what would become the SR-72, but it wasn’t until 2013 that the effort first broke cover. Related: Hypersonic firm Hermeus proves their Mach 5+ jet engine works Development on the SR-72 began in 2006 SR-72 Render (Lockheed Martin) This was a point not lost on the aircraft’s manufacturer, Lockheed Martin. If the Air Force already had a fleet of more capable spy planes in service, it’s unlikely these efforts would have gotten much, if any, traction.īut the SR-71 program’s zombie-like inability to die also serves as evidence for America’s lasting need for an Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) aircraft with the Blackbird’s unique high-speed and high-altitude capabilities. The SR-71’s first of two retirement decisions came in 1989, after what Washington Post reporter Patrick Tyler described as a bit of “last-minute horse-trading to apply declining defense budget resources to other Air Force and intelligence satellite programs.” Put simply, the high-flying aircraft’s perceived value was on the decline right alongside the defense spending that kept it airborne.įurther confirmation that a high-flying replacement didn’t already exist came in the aircraft’s 1994 revival and subsequent re-retirement in 1999, followed by another high-profile effort to bring the Blackbird back to duty in the early days of the Global War on Terror in 2001. The unpopular truth, however, was that the SR-71’s massive operating costs combined with advancing air defense technologies led many to believe that spy planes were becoming a relic of the past and that the future was in orbit. Many argued then (and still do today) that the US wouldn’t retire the Mach 3 spy plane without an even more capable replacement already in operation. Legends of a faster, higher-flying replacement for the SR-71, commonly called the SR-72, first began to emerge back in the 1980s when the Blackbird first flew into retirement. Related: SR-72? Hints of a new Skunk Works spy plane reignite rumors of a Blackbird successor The Air Force did not have an SR-71 replacement when the Blackbird retired (Lockheed Martin) In this installment, we’ll delve into the known and alleged timeline associated with this aircraft’s public – and then covert – development. With no further details to pull from, these remarks could potentially point to any number of secretive Special Access Programs (or SAPs, as classified efforts are commonly called), but through extensive research and several interviews, we believe these statements could indeed align with what we know about the SR-72 that Lockheed Martin was once openly developing.įor more context into Muradian’s claims and a thorough exploration of the turbine-based combined-cycle hypersonic propulsion system that was developed for the SR-72, we recommend reading that previous article. “My understanding is that the program was re-scoped because it is that ambitious a capability that required a little bit of re-scoping in order to be able to get to the next block of aircraft,” Muradian said. Gertler, Muradian brought up the Air Force’s highly classified RQ-180 reconnaissance drone, before going on to state that the Air Force was already testing “a much more capable reconnaissance aircraft that is the product of the Skunk Works.” During a conversation with Teal Group Senior Analyst J.J. Recently, Sandboxx News discussed remarks made by Vago Muradian, the editor-in-chief of the Defense & Aerospace Report, during an episode of the outlet’s podcast. After recent rumors surfaced that the United States Air Force is testing a new high-performance spy plane developed by Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works, Sandboxx News decided to explore the possibility that the legendary hypersonic SR-72 may not only be real, but potentially heading toward service in the not too distant future.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |