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>> [Background Music] Learning occurs in many ways, reading,
writing, observing and doing.
Montgomery College's Access to History is for the doers.
Our guests have participated in actions or events
that we now recognize as part of history.
In the studio, they sit down, mic up and have conversations
with faculty and students from Montgomery College.
There is no host, no flashy set, and no commercials,
just people and their stories.
Sometimes the stories date back many years
and sometimes the story is current.
It's all historical and it's part
of Montgomery College's Access to History.
[ Music ]
>> [Background Music] In this rare episode of Access
to History, we leave the studio
for the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center where student veterans
who are part of Montgomery College's Combat
to College program got up close to aircraft that made history.
They also spent time
with retired Air Force Colonel Joe Kinego who recorded
over 900 hours piloting the famed Lockheed SR-71 "Blackbird"
in military reconnaissance missions all
over the world during the Cold War.
Traveling up to 17 miles above the earth
at over three times the speed of sound, foreign powers tried
to shoot down the Blackbird but none were successful.
Colonel Kinego's presentation
to the students during this visit contained information
that at one time was top secret.
[ Music ]
[ Silence ]
[Background Music] US Military veterans now enrolled
at Montgomery College were given a unique opportunity as part
of the Combat to College program.
They were taken to the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center near Dulles
Airport in Chantilly, Virginia.
The center is a companion facility
to the Smithsonian's National Air
and Space Museum located along the National Mall
in downtown Washington.
Home to about 200 aircraft and 150 large space artifacts,
the building's hangar-style floor area is as big
as a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier.
Some of the most famous aircraft who have ever flown are here.
At the center of the entire facility is a plane unlike
any other.
It's painted black with a cartoon skunk on its tail.
Although it's a military plane, it carries no missiles or bombs.
Its weapons are primarily cameras and incredible speed.
It's the Lockheed SR-71 "Blackbird."
Retired Air Force Colonel Joe Kinego was one of its pilots.
On this day, he took the students
in for a presentation that told its story.
[ Music ]
>> [Background Music] First of all,
welcome to Udvar-Hazy Center.
I want to congratulate you and thank you all for your service.
I know you're retired-- turning veterans, I understand,
and all enrolling in college
and that's just absolutely fantastic.
I have always been a big believer
that the military is a great place to get a start.
And then after that, when you kind of have a little bit
of a feeling as to what you want to do with your life to go ahead
and start your college education.
So, congratulations to all of you for that.
A lot of people think that the SR-71 was developed as a result
of Gary Powers being shot down in his U-2 on May 1st, 1960.
And as you'll see as we go through the dates,
that's not actually true.
It's not untrue but it's not a true fact.
There's more to it than just that.
July 5th, 1955 was-- '56 rather,
was the first Soviet Union overflight
by a U-2 aircraft done by the Central Intelligence Agency.
Two important things during the Cold War
and you're all are familiar with the Cold War I'm sure
to some extent, the Soviet Union was a closed society.
We needed to know what was going on in there
with their weapons development, with their missile development,
and what were they doing.
We felt the only way to really do
that was overfly the Soviet Union.
>> The U-2 he refers to is the Lockheed U-2,
a high-altitude reconnaissance plane developed
by aeronautical engineer, Kelly Johnson.
Earlier during World War II, Johnson led the design
of the P-38 Lightning.
P-38s were used during Operation Vengeance where the US located
and shot down Japanese Admiral Yamamoto over the Pacific.
Yamamoto was then the leader of the Japanese Imperial Navy
and one of the key architects
of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
An original P-38 is currently on display at the museum.
The U-2 was designed to fly above 70,000 feet,
safe from the range of the Soviet MiG-17--
their best interceptors at the time, and safe from Soviet radar
and missile defense systems.
Or so it was believed.
>> First flight was in July 5th, 1956.
Two very important things happened at that point.
The first one was they found out our intelligence experts
and our scientists found out that the information
that the U-2 brought back was second to none.
It was fantastic.
It was-- it was exactly what they were looking for.
Great, pictures, they could see the missiles,
they could see what was going on in the Soviet Union,
they could see the military bases very well.
That was the good news.
The bad news was that the Soviets knew the U-2 was there.
They could see it on the radar.
They could track the U-2.
They knew it was there.
So our scientists at that point felt that probably four
to five years before Soviet missile technology caught
up to the U-2.
And boy, they hit that one pretty much right on the head
because it wasn't-- but you know, four years later,
that Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union,
it is U-2, May 1st, 1960.
Following that, in 1962 when President Eisenhower worked
with Khrushchev to get Powers back,
there were no more manned overflights of the Soviet Union.
So, the U-2 didn't overfly Soviet Union anymore.
The SR-71 never overflew the Soviet Union.
You will hear a lot of people say, "Oh, yeah,
the SR-71 was overflying the Soviet Union."
Never happened because Khrushchev said in 1962
that he'd release Powers as long
as we did stop all the manned overflights of the Soviet Union.
We agreed to that so we didn't do that anymore,
but that's the time that the satellites were back online
and we had unmanned vehicles that were being able
to do the same sort of thing.
>> So between 1957 and '58,
well before CIA pilot Gary Powers was shot
down over the Soviet Union, Project GUSTO was launched
to develop a successor to the U-2 reconnaissance aircraft.
>> This is a handwritten note that Kelly Johnson did,
you know, probably at the Lockheed cafeteria in Burbank.
And you see up here it says basically redesign the U-3.
At that point he was calling it not a U-2 but a U-3.
He didn't know what to call it.
He had all those parameters and requirements, high altitude.
Down here, he did things that engineers do
which I don't even understand, lot of formulas and all
down there that he was putting together.
But this was all handwritten.
This is Kelly Johnson's handwriting from 1958.
And then up here, he started a report
and he did what's unthinkable now of a person this important.
It was-- he started writing the introduction to the proposal
that he was going to give to the government.
This was his handwritten-- his handwritten proposal there.
But I wanted you to see this because it's just--
you don't get to see this very often.
But that's how the whole program started right there.
That led to the A-12 OXCART.
This is the CIA version of the SR-71.
It's very much like an SR-71.
You put it next to each other, you wouldn't be able
to tell the difference.
It's about seven feet shorter than an SR-71.
But this is the first airplane that the contract was built
for and this was in 1959.
It was May of 1960 when Powers was shot down.
So the actual contract to build this aircraft was prior
to the shoot down of Powers in the U-2,
so that's the point I was making there,
that it was after the U-2's first flight but prior
to the shoot down that this whole development
process started.
>> The A-12 OXCART had a small radar cross-section,
about one square meter.
And in the early days of radar, it would appear
on the enemy's scopes only once
or twice before its incredible speed got it out of range.
Because this was before the advent of computers,
the design of the aircraft was done entirely using a
slide rule.
The A-12 was America's first stealth aircraft.
During flight, extreme heat was caused by air friction
and the aircraft's engines.
Due to this, 93 percent
of the aircraft is constructed with titanium alloy.
Titanium is lightweight.
It can withstand extreme temperatures both hot and cold.
And it gets stronger during these conditions.
>> I will tell you, sitting right there where I sat
in a pressure suit, and so I've got the pressure suit
on with the gloves and I've got about an inch and a half
to two inches of glass and I could put my hand
against the cockpit window for about eight seconds before I had
to pull it away because it got that hot.
But now I was comfortable in the cockpit
because we could pressurize the cockpit
and I could cool the cockpit and I was in a pressure suit
so I could cool myself up also.
But if you touch the surface like I did,
about eight seconds before you have to pull your hand away.
>> But having titanium
as its primary construction material presented one
key obstacle.
>> The United States had no source of titanium back
in the late '50s and the early '60s.
The only country that did, and this was during the Cold War,
of course, was the Soviet Union.
So the Central Intelligence Agency opened basically a
storefront in Maryland, an international business
that then opened a storefront in Europe
as an international business, and then went
into the Soviet Union and bought titanium
and that it shipped back to Europe,
and at which time they then shipped it
to Southern California where they use it to build the SR-71
that then flew in the Cold War against the Soviet Union.
It was just a great story.
It's just like your-- yeah,
just like your Saturday afternoon spy stories.
And then the heat required special fuels.
We use the fuel to cool the aircraft actually,
special hydraulic fluids.
Hydraulic fluid also has a consistency of molasses.
You have to heat it before you can actually run it
through the engines and all.
So, there's a lot that goes into getting the airplane ready
to fly but that's all as a result of the heat.
>> Heat created by the aircraft cruising at around 90,000 feet
above the Earth at Mach 3.2 which is about 2,100
or 2,200 miles per hour, or 36 or 37 miles a minute.
If it was possible to fire a high-powered rifle
like the .30-06 from coast to coast
and maintain its muzzle velocity,
the Blackbird would arrive about five minutes before the bullet.
>> We always had a-- we always had a joke
that you didn't know-- it was nothing like being lost
at the three times the speed of sound because--
because you really get lost quickly.
>> The obvious main source for all this speed,
the two massive engines.
>> Pratt & Whitney J58, its continuous afterburning engine
which was unheard of at the time and still is one
of the state-of-the-art things.
The air goes in there, this is where the air goes in,
and as the air starts hitting the compressor stages,
most of it gets bypassed around on this bleed bypass valves,
if you will, they go around.
And then it reenters the engine there in the afterburner section
where it gets reburnt and that equates for the ramjet cycle
which means that at Mach 3 and above,
80 percent of my power was basically a ramjet,
which meant that that engine and the inlet system associated
with it was actually pulling us through the air as opposed
to the engine pushing us through the air.
So you save a lot of fuel by doing that.
I mean we burnt an awful lot of fuel
in the SR-71, don't get me wrong.
But the airplane became more fuel-efficient the faster
you flew.
This is an engine on a test stand and an engine run.
And I showed you this because the maintenance guys,
the maintenance guys would run engines a lot
out of Beale Air Force Base in the SR-71.
And about twice a year when the weather was nice, they would set
up bleachers out at the engine test stand and invite people
to come out and watch an engine run,
give them all head protectors and they'd sell hot dogs
and sodas and popcorn to make money
for their ready runs and all.
And this is what it looked like.
It got-- the ground would shake.
You'd feel yourself vibrating but the engine will get so hot--
so there's the front part of the engine.
There is the afterburner part of the engine.
It became almost translucent.
You can almost see through it through the engine actually.
And the way you could tell that it was operating
on all cylinders and everything was burning perfectly was 13
of these diamonds.
If there were 13 diamonds and they would count 'em,
the engine would be operating actually at its max capacity.
And that's how they've done.
They'd shut it down and we'd all go away.
[ Music ]
>> [Background Music] Designing the aerodynamics
for any aircraft is critical.
But for one capable of traveling over three times the speed
of sound required unique characteristics.
>> The sonic boom on all airplanes comes off of the nose.
And then when the sonic booms comes off of the nose
and the air is disrupted, you want the air
to hit all the other surfaces basically straight
on like a regular airplane flying at 25 or 35,000 feet.
So everything has to be built so that that air hits the wings,
the engines and all straight on.
So, if you look at it, look at the engine.
These engine spikes that are out in the front,
they are cantered down and end.
That's so that the air coming off here hits them directly.
The wings, you see the bending of the wings,
that's so the air would hit those wings directly
in that two-degree angle of attack.
You could see the vertical stabilizers here
that cantered in a little bit.
Everything was built to make the airplane precise
and efficient at that altitude.
But in doing that, the airplane has no square corners,
so without square corners,
very little radar reflectivity going back.
So, unbeknownst to them or maybe beknownst,
'cause they were all professional engineers,
they built an airplane that had very little radar cross section
just because of the way they wanted to make it fly.
Then they put the black paint on it which absorbs some
of that radar energy and they mixed some carbon in the bottom
of the airplane here
to misdirect some of the other radar.
So as a result, very little radar cross-section
on the SR-71.
Now, in the cockpit, I could tell
if I was being tracked by radar.
I could tell if they locked on and I could tell
if they launched a missile.
You can tell all that in the cockpit just through lights.
People ask me if I ever seen a missile.
I never saw a missile in flight.
I had several missions where I actually saw launch lights
in the cockpit.
I looked out but I didn't see-- I did not, myself, see a missile
but we've had guys see a missile.
SA-2 missiles, which back when I was flying, could fly 75
over 80,000 feet, no problem.
Now, they kind of go ballistic up there
but they're up there with you.
They don't actually chase you.
They just come up and hit you, but the problem is you're going
so fast they would actually have to shoot
that missile off a launcher long before you got into the range
of the missile or the range of the radar that actually guides
that particular missile.
So, you know, they have to know exactly
where you're going to be.
No SR-71 was ever hit with a missile.
There is talk that one of the CIA A-12 airplanes
over North Vietnam came back with a little shrapnel
in the tail from an SA-2 missile.
But the belief is that they were probably barrage launching
on the B-52 bombers and it just went up to altitude and blew up
and the A-12 aircraft happened to be in the area.
I don't know that part for a fact but that seems to be.
[ Music ]
>> [Background Music] The term "Blackbird" refer to the family
of aircraft designed and built
by Lockheed's Advanced Development Programs division
more commonly known as Skunk Works.
The Skunk Works logo can be seen on the vertical stabilizers
of the SR-71 located in the museum.
There were a total of four different aircraft
in the Blackbird family.
Fifty Blackbirds in total were built.
Of those 50, 13 were A-12s and 32 were SR-71s.
Aeronautical engineer, Kelly Johnson,
was the primary designer of this aircraft.
>> Back during the Cold War, unlike budget scenarios now,
back during the Cold War, if you had an idea
and you were a smart engineer that the Department of Defense
and the government respected
like Kelly Johnson, money was no problem.
So, every time Kelly had an idea for something else
to develop here in this Blackbird family,
he had all kinds of money.
But I will tell you, when he got to the SR-71,
he delivered the SR-71-- how many times you hear this--
he delivered the SR-71 several months early
and many million dollars below budget.
And he actually gave that money back
to the government for the SR-71.
OXCART very quickly, the first flight
of the CIA aircraft was in 1962.
Area 51, you've always heard those mythical stories, yes,
there is really an Area 51.
I've been there several times.
What they would do is they'd build these airplanes
in California.
They drive them over the mountains
and then they would take them up into the desert at the Area 51
and they'd put them together and fly 'em.
After the Skunk Works, Lockheed moved out of Burbank
into Palmdale, California in high desert.
They would build them there
and then just drive them not many miles
up into the high desert for Area 51 and those areas.
Even back in those days, in Area 51 and probably still today,
they know exactly when the bad guy satellites are breaking
the horizon.
And when they're breaking the horizon, they stop everything.
If you go to Area 51 for whatever reason and I didn't,
I never had to do this because when I went out there 'cause
of the position I was in and what I was doing.
But they will foggle you.
It's called foggling.
When you get off the airplane, you put on glasses
and the glasses are set up so that you can see down.
So when you're walking along, you can see about three feet
in front of you but you can't see anything else.
So when you're going from building to building
and you're walking outside, you put on these foggles
so that you can't see what's going on.
The important date is May 29th, 1967, operations began
at Kadena Air Base, Japan.
This is in the A-12 now flown by the CIA, the first SR-71,
to put in the time perspective.
The first SR-71 had already been delivered to the Air Force.
So there's a lot going on at this point.
The A-12s were delivered to the CIA,
they were going through checkouts.
The Air Force wants to get onboard so they put
out a contract to build SR-71.
So SR-71s are being built actually and have been delivered
to the Air Force before the A-12
by the CIA flies its first operational mission
over Vietnam by the CIA.
So in the fall of 1967, the A-12 and the SR-71 have a fly off.
Back in those days, you could say it right now,
you cannot pick a name like this,
that was called "Pretty Girl" was the name
of the fly off that they gave it to.
And they basically flew the A-12s and the SR-71s
against each other, taking pictures
and comparing all the different sensor takes and sensor actions.
And between the two of those,
the Air Force's SR-71 model did get the go ahead.
In 1966, the SR was first delivered to the Air Force.
In March of 1968, the first SR-71 operational mission was
flown also out of Kadena Air Base, Japan.
At that point, they had CIA A-12s there
and Air Force SR-71s there,
and then when the SR-71 was successful,
they started flying the A-12s home.
Everything was very classified in those days,
so people watching didn't know
that there were two different airplanes operating
out of there.
They didn't know one was an A-12, one was an SR-71.
And in 1968, the A-12 program was terminated.
[ Music ]
>> [Background Music] The SR-71 was the final design
of the Blackbird family of aircraft.
It could travel at speeds of Mach 3.2,
although Mach 3.3 could be reached if necessary.
Its maximum altitude was 85,000 feet.
>> At those altitudes, you can see the curvature
of the Earth, about 350 miles.
At those speeds, you fly faster than the Earth rotates,
so it was not uncommon for me at night to fly
in a westerly direction
and actually see a sunrise come up in the west.
During the day, the sky is a deep,
deep blue, not quite black.
You can see the different shades of blue
as you're looking down into the black.
You can see some of the brighter stars during the day
and my guess is what you're seeing are probably the planets,
Venus and Mars and all.
At night, you cannot see constellations
like we're seeing here, you know, Orion and Pegasus
and those things, you can't see those, the Big Dipper,
because at night, the entire sky
at that altitude is just one big Milky Way.
I mean it's nothing but stars.
It's just the most beautiful sight you've ever seen
in your life.
It's absolutely incredible.
I was flying a mission over the North Pole once and because
of the way the Earth is shaped and longitude and latitudes
up there, got over the North Pole.
I had about an 18-minute transit
to go all the way across the pole.
And in 18 minutes, I had a full moon rise over my right shoulder
in the cockpit and set to the left three complete times.
The moon just went around the cockpit
like that three complete times.
It was absolutely the most amazing thing I had ever seen.
>> At over 80,000 feet in speeds exceeding Mach 3,
SR-71 pilots have ejected.
In fact, every Air Force crew member
who ejected from one survived.
[ Music ]
>> [Background Music] Some of the records
that the airplane has set, the important thing
about these records set a lot of reference.
These all still stand today but the important thing
about these records I like to bring
up is we did this everyday.
We didn't-- we set these records 'cause the country was set,
you know, and we had the records and the crews were there
to make sure that everything was done correctly.
But that's how we flew everyday in the airplane.
We had no subsonic missions.
We took off subsonic,
we refueled subsonic behind the tanker
and then we went supersonic.
And we just stayed supersonic the whole time
and then we came down.
I want to just take a minute here and just tell you some
of the missions we flew in the SR-71.
It was the Cold War, some of the fun missions we flew
and as veterans, my very first mission out of Okinawa,
Japan was over North Vietnam.
And we had cameras onboard and all
but the weather didn't matter,
or normally the weather did matter
and you wanted a clear day and you delay sometimes and all.
But the mission was over North Vietnam and it was primarily
to go over the Hanoi Hilton.
The SR-71, 'cause I told you, the sonic boom coming
over the nose of the airplane here creates that sonic boom
and then the spikes right here, they create a second sonic boom.
So when the SR-71 flies overhead,
you get a very distinct "boom, boom."
[ Explosion ]
Don't ask me why it's that distinct
and why it's that separated.
I really don't know but it's not like a [inaudible],
it's a "boom, boom" very distinct, double sonic boom.
And when you go through the sound barrier
and when I'm taking tours around here,
a lot of people don't realize
that when you break the sound barrier in an airplane
and you go supersonic,
that supersonic sonic boom follows you everywhere you fly.
So it's not just a one-time occurrence when you go
through the speed of sound.
So if you broke the sonic boom over Los Angeles,
the people in LA would hear a sonic boom but all the way
across country, every place you flew over, Kansas, Colorado,
or wherever, people
in the ground would hear that sonic boom.
And the same with the SR-71,
I was going to hear a double sonic boom everywhere you go.
So it's not just a one-time event,
everybody hears a sonic boom.
>> Do you hear it?
>> No, no.
You don't hear anything in the cockpit.
Nor is it like the movies you see where you start to shake
and your teeth go back and everything, you kind of get--
you kind of get down there and you feel what--
it's kind of like a pause but it's not
in the aircraft so much.
It's in the instruments 'cause the instruments pause
and then they go supersonic and then they all pick
up where they left off.
So you don't get any shaking and rattling and anything like that.
But anyway, so the purpose of this mission--
and we flew several of these in years,
was to fly over the Hanoi Hilton where our POWs were being kept
so that they would hear
that very distinctive double sonic boom [explosion]
to let them know that people were thinking about them.
Years afterwards when I go to happy hours and all
and had the different-- the clubs and all in the Air Force,
you'd run into some of the POWs and they said they did hear that
and that was kind of, you know, it's uplifting as it can get
when you're in that kind of a situation.
So that was one mission we-- one type of mission we flew.
Another type of mission we flew which was very much fun was
over Cuba, and with the explicit approval
of the Department of State.
And that was primarily when they knew that Fidel was going to be
out there having a big parade or it was a Cuban holiday
and they were going to be marching all the troops by
and waving and doing all those things that they do.
We'd fly right down the middle of Cuba right
when the parade was-- was parade hitting, you know, stage center
and give them that big double sonic boom.
>> Yeah.
>> So that they'd hear it on the ground.
And then the other types of missions we flew were more
of the standard missions where we flew reconnaissance missions
against the Soviet Union, against China, North Vietnam,
North Korea, you know, all those types of things
where we're collecting photo imagery
and electrical intelligence.
>> The SR-71 carried numerous sensors.
Among them were high-resolution cameras, side-looking radar,
ELINT or electrical intelligence recorders, and COMINT
or communication intelligence recorders.
>> Now, we had a good COMINT recorder onboard but it's funny
because we flew so fast.
You couldn't catch a lot of a conversation
that people were having.
But that proved to be very good
for the electrical intelligence recorders because we could fly
by a, say a Soviet new radar that was out there
that our intelligence people thought was onboard.
And if they turn that radar on even for a couple of seconds
and turned it off, we had traveled such a distance
that not only could we collect the radar waves from it
but we could also-- we'd travel far enough to give a little bit
of a triangulation so that they could actually see not only what
it was but where it was.
We had an astro-inertial navigation system onboard.
It tracked three stars.
Not unlike Star Trek, we had a stardate.
We put a stardate in the airplane
and the airplane system would know what stars to track
and once it saw the sky, it would lock on to three stars.
We promised the president, because of the sensitivity
to our missions, that we would never be more than 300 feet now,
300 feet off the centerline
of the mission track we were supposed to fly,
and that astro-inertial tracker would keep us that.
The reason we did that is
like our flights along the Soviet and Chinese border.
Back in those days, I don't know what they do now
but in those days, the Soviets declared supremacy
out to 15 miles that they owned out there.
We said we gave them out the three miles, international law.
So our missions were
at the three-mile point along the borders.
That's why we get a lot of reactions from the Soviets,
airplanes coming out trying to come up and intercept,
doing those types of things.
Here's another mission that was really neat.
This was during the Arab-Israeli wars
in the end of '73, early '74.
You all are too young but that was the timeframe
where we're having another gas crisis back in those days.
Because of the political ramifications,
our European allies weren't allowing us to overfly or fly
out of their countries because they didn't want
to upset the Arabs, of course, for the oil and the gas.
So these are missions that had to be flown by the SR-71
from the west coast to the east coast of the United States.
We moved them from Beale Air Force Base
to North Carolina, to the east coast.
It's about 11,000 miles roundtrip, ten plus hours.
Probably, as I say, ten plus hours,
probably more like 12 hours.
But you can see it goes across the entire Atlantic Ocean
through the Strait of Gibraltar, down the Mediterranean,
over the Sinai for about five minutes,
and then comes all the way back and lands.
We flew nine of those missions and every one
of them flew just as programmed.
No problems at all.
The rules of engagement that we had was
that if you got a launch light in the cockpit,
you push the throttles forward to accelerate
to maximum Mach which is 3.2.
So in this case, you'd accelerate from Mach 3.0
to Mach 3.2, not a big deal but a little bit of acceleration.
And then this-- and then the second technical thing we would
do is look out the window to see if you see a missile.
That's what the checklist said.
And then if you saw a missile, if you saw a missile,
what you didn't do was try to fly the airplane
to avoid the missile because they felt you are more likely
to lose the airplane trying to duke around up there
than the missile was to hit you.
>> In the unlikely event that the crew was shot down,
limited resources were available to them.
>> In the survival kit of the SR-71,
we had a small fold-up .22.
[ Laughter ]
>> That's a big--
>> Yeah, yeah.
I'm not sure exactly what that was for but we had a small,
we had a small .22 in there that we carry with us.
And we couldn't carry a wallet or anything.
We wore a name tag and the U-2 still were--
now with your name on it and your rank.
It would say like "Captain Kinego" or "Major Kinego."
And that was so you weren't considered a spy.
>> You have to wear your dog tags?
>> Did not wear dog tags for these missions.
>> For SR-71 pilots who would fly long missions
that span the globe and lasted multiple hours,
a common question was asked.
>> I need to go to the bathroom.
[ Laughter & Inaudible Remarks ]
>> I've been asked that a lot
but I'm not sure I've been asked on camera before.
[ Laughter ]
>> Number two, you were just on your own.
I mean, you just-- you just-- and we had people do it.
People just went--
[ Inaudible Remarks ]
I mean you just went, and we had people that just got sick
or something and just had to go.
But that, you just go.
Number one, it was easy.
You put on a thing called a urinary control device.
It's like a *** basically with a tube coming
out the front, you put it on.
It comes outside your suit and it goes out a tube and it was
in your pocket, and in your--
goes into a plastic bag in your pocket
and it's got a sponge in there.
[ Inaudible Remarks ]
No, no, no.
Well, no, no, yeah, you left the whole-- the UCD on.
Yeah, you put that on before you--
you had to put it on first before you put your pressure
suit on.
You got in the airplane and you got--
you're all hooked up ready to go.
If you had to go to the bathroom,
then you would put a little air on it and then you kind of open
up the valve and you go to the bathroom
and then you could turn it off, shut it down.
[ Inaudible Remark ]
I've been asked that question on 6th grade tours out here.
[ Laughter ]
Everybody wants to know that.
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah, you got to be careful how you explain it
to those 6th graders but-- But no, you need to--
yeah, I mean that's what we did.
>> After the presentation,
the student veterans left the conference room
and Colonel Kinego took them on a brief tour at the museum.
>> This airplane that you see right here, it's a Nieuport 28.
In 1914, World War I started, right?
In 1918, we sent our first soldiers and airmen
over to Europe for World War I.
When our airmen got over there, we had no airplanes.
We had no airplanes because we didn't develop the aircraft
industry at all.
We had to buy airplanes from the French
and so the first airplanes we flew was this Nieuport 28.
Nieuport 28 is a complete fabric airplane.
This is all fabric over wood.
It had a pesky problem that the French didn't like,
in that the fabric on the top of the wing would come off
and when the fabric came off, the airplane would crash
and the French pilots didn't like this.
So as a result-- As a result,
the French sold it to the Americans.
This is the first airplane in the United States
that first went into combat.
That Uncle Sam hat you see there with the gold ring around it,
if you recall in your history the, you know, we threw our hat
in a ring to go over to war in Europe.
Well, that was the Hat-in-the-Ring Squadron.
It's the 94th Squadron, threw their hat in the ring
to go in flight combat.
Do you ever stop and wonder why when you talk about airplanes,
you talk about fuselage, empennage, pitot-static system,
those are all French names, yeah.
That's because we invented the airplane
but we didn't actually develop the airplane.
The United States didn't have an aircraft industry.
French and the Europeans developed the airplane
because the winds of war were blown over there during
that timeframe coming up to World War I.
[ Music ]
[Background Music] OK, this is Enola Gay.
This is the airplane
that dropped the first nuclear weapon on Hiroshima.
And a lot of people ask me, "Is this a mockup?
Is this the real airplane?"
This is the real airplane.
That wing tip to the far wing tip is about 142 feet.
That's over 20 feet longer than the first flight
that the Wright brothers made
when they developed the airplane.
Anybody know why it was named Enola Gay?
Colonel Paul Tibbets was the pilot.
Most of the people
in the squadron had no idea what they were training for.
Colonel Tibbets did.
The night before the mission, he went out to the airplane,
he wanted something on the airplane, so he had them put
on "Enola Gay" which is his mother's maiden name.
Right in the very front,
it had this very new development called the Norden bombsight.
The Norden bombsight in World War II was
completely state-of-the-art.
It allowed the bombardier to put cross hairs on a target
that they want to drop on and then lock on,
and the airplane will actually fly,
the airplane would actually drop the bombs.
That's why, you know, you hear about Colonel Tibbets
but you never hear about who is the bombardier
that pushed the button and dropped the nuclear bomb
because the bombsight actually did that.
President Truman who had taken over from President Roosevelt
and the allies did send a memorandum to the emperor
of Japan saying, we need your immediate surrender
unconditional or something very dramatic will happen.
Didn't say what it was going to be.
We never heard anything back from the emperor.
So on the 6th of August 1945, seven B-29 Silverplate taxied
out and took off from Tinian Island.
When they got to Hiroshima, dropped the bomb,
it was an air burst, went off at about 1,500 feet,
went back to Tinian, waited.
President Truman heard nothing from the emperor, so on the 9th
of August now, 1945, six B-29s took off out of Tinian
and what do you think the primary target was then?
[ Inaudible Remarks ]
Nagasaki is too easy, too easy, yeah.
The primary target was Kokura, Japan.
Enola Gay was one of the weather ships on that mission,
got to Kokura and it was overcast so they left Kokura
and went to Nagasaki and dropped the second weapon,
same as the first.
That was on the 9th of August.
Finally, on the 15th of August, they heard from the emperor
that Japan had surrendered.
[Background Music] This is the restoration hangar.
This right here is Sikorsky and it's a Sikorsky JRS-1.
This particular airplane that's being restored right now is
basically a flying boat.
You can tell from the front here, and the way the gear go up
and it's got platoons you can put on on the side here.
It's a flying boat and this one survived Pearl Harbor.
This actually survived the bombing and took off,
and its job was to go out and look
for the Japanese fleet during the days
after Pearl Harbor 'cause you recall,
they were still pretty much convinced
that the Japanese were going to invade Hawaii.
[ Music ]
[Background Music] The space shuttle we're going
to see here is Discovery.
Discovery is the workhorse of the fleet.
There were 135 shuttle launches and Discovery flew 39 of them.
One of the better views you'd get of it is from right here.
That's where the crew sits.
The flight deck is up there.
The crew lives down here.
That's the cargo bay.
Cargo bay is 60 feet long.
You can put a school bus in there, a Winnebago,
and it's 15 feet in diameter.
Saturn V rocket are the rockets we used
to send people to the moon.
This is the ring right here
that carry the avionics and navigation.
It has less power-- less power than your iPhone right now,
and less computing capability than your iPhone,
and that's what-- how it's been.
That engine, if you recall, got its fuel only
from main fuel tanks so when the main fuel tank was gone,
that engine never burned again.
So when the shuttle reentered,
came back to land, it has no power.
It was a glider coming back in.
>> Main gear touch down.
>> And the tail, there's a split tail.
The pilot can open and close it as an air brake.
This arm that you're looking at right here,
that's called the Canadarm, probably one
of the greatest robotic achievements exported
out of Canada.
When we launch things into space,
a satellite then would be actually attached to the end
of that arm so they would execute that arm out
and then we simply lay the satellite on its orbit.
[ Music ]
[Background Music] Here is the SR-71.
They built the airplane with like expansion joints
like you would build a bridge.
So on a hot summer day, you know, they put them together
and it doesn't buckle.
As the airplane gets very hot, the combination
of all those expansion joints coming together is
about six to eight inches.
Most airplanes have fuel tanks and then they have bladders
that sit in the fuel tanks that the fuel goes in.
Back in the day when they were building this airplane,
there was no technology like that
that would keep those bladders from melting,
so there's no bladder.
So the fuel goes in the fuel tank but just sits right
against the skin of the airplane.
And you have those expansion joints, so because of that,
the fuel didn't leak out.
Now, you'll hear various stories about pours out.
It didn't pour out but it leaked out pretty significantly.
Your first five missions in the SR-71 are in the B model.
This is an A model you're looking at here.
This is an operational model.
The B model doesn't have a navigator.
It has an instructor pilot.
It sits back there but the rear cockpit is elevated
so that the instructor pilot can see out the land and all.
You only get five missions in the B model to train
and the fifth mission is your checkride.
So, you really only get four missions to train and you got
to learn how to go Mach 3, climb,
refuel, do all those things.
So, you had to come there and be able to fly fast airplanes.
You had to come here knowing how to air refuel.
You know, people ask me what did it feel
like to fly at that speed now.
Well, the answer is it didn't feel like anything.
I'm sitting so far forward, I can't turn my head far enough
to actually see the airplane, so I don't see any airplane.
So I'm in the pressure suit breathing hundred percent
oxygen, so I don't smell the airplane.
And I'm in that pressure suit with the air blowing in my head,
I don't hear an airplane.
So it's like going 36 miles a minute
on a telephone pole and it's very smooth.
[ Music ]
>> [Background Music] For student participants
in Montgomery College's Combat to College program,
it was an experience unlike any provided in a classroom.
Spending time with a retired Air Force colonel who piloted one
of the most famous planes in history and walking
through a museum that gives them access to history.
>> Being in the military,
you get to work alongside of modern technology.
But here, you actually get to see the history of all
that technology, and what you worked
with and how it got there.
So it's really cool.
It's interesting.
>> My first semester here at Montgomery College,
I did a report on Hiroshima and then
to see the Enola Gay is kind of--
brought back the feelings of me first coming back to school
as an adult and it's just spectacular.
>> I don't think without Combat to College, you know,
I would not be doing as well as I am in school.
>> The Combat to College program is fantastic
for veterans especially when they're coming
from a very structured lifestyle and then just kind
of transitioning, integrating back into "normal" society.
It's one of the only schools that I've seen or spoken
to that actually help veterans with that issue,
which is just kind of a way for that veteran to kind
of feel appreciated for the service when the college wants
to do this type of activities.
[ Music ]