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SVTPerformance's Chain of Restaurants
Road Side Pub
SR-71 Blackbird fun facts
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<blockquote data-quote="James Snover" data-source="post: 16307969" data-attributes="member: 67454"><p>Yep. Distributed throughout various tanks to control the aircraft's center of gravity vs. it's center of lift. By shifting the fuel around, they could trim it out without having to deflect the control surfaces, which would have added a lot of drag. The center of gravity had to be watched constantly because it changes with the speed of the aircraft, too far forward or aft, and at the veary least your fuel consumption goes through the roof, and at the very worst, the plane becomes unflyable and destroys itself.</p><p></p><p>There was a container of liquid nitrogen onboard, as the fuel was consumed, the tanks were filled with liquid nitrogen so there couldn't be a fire.</p><p></p><p>The fuel was notoriously un-inflammable. You could fill a bucket with it, drop a match in it, and the match would go out. It absolutely would not catch on fire. So they also used the fuel as coolant, to pull heat away from the hottest parts of the airframe. Thsi alo preheated the fuel, so when it did hit the combustion chambers, it would burn.</p><p></p><p>On takeoff, though, they had to add a shot of TEB, tetra-ethyl-borane, a chemical compound so nasty it instantly burst into flame on contact with air. That would at least allow the fuel to ignite in cold combustion chambers. Also had to have a shot of TEB when they lit the afterburners, if they had been shut down. The throttle had a counter on it: it displayed the number of shots of TEB available, it counted down from 50. When you ran out of TEB, you could not relight the afterburners. And if the engines flamed out, and you had no TEB, you were very quickly going to be back on the ground because you could not restart the engines without it. They were difficult enough to restart, even with it.</p><p></p><p>It took up to 25 minutes to refuel once they found the tanker. Oddly, only one half of the windshield had a defroster, and at 30,000 or so feet at -40F, the Blackbird cooled off fast, and the windshield frosted over almost immediately.</p><p></p><p>EDIT: The fuel was notoriously UN-inflammable was what I meant to say. Corrected it up above, but just so everyone knows: I mis-typed it, originally. No doubt some form of Russian interference, I'm certain ...</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="James Snover, post: 16307969, member: 67454"] Yep. Distributed throughout various tanks to control the aircraft's center of gravity vs. it's center of lift. By shifting the fuel around, they could trim it out without having to deflect the control surfaces, which would have added a lot of drag. The center of gravity had to be watched constantly because it changes with the speed of the aircraft, too far forward or aft, and at the veary least your fuel consumption goes through the roof, and at the very worst, the plane becomes unflyable and destroys itself. There was a container of liquid nitrogen onboard, as the fuel was consumed, the tanks were filled with liquid nitrogen so there couldn't be a fire. The fuel was notoriously un-inflammable. You could fill a bucket with it, drop a match in it, and the match would go out. It absolutely would not catch on fire. So they also used the fuel as coolant, to pull heat away from the hottest parts of the airframe. Thsi alo preheated the fuel, so when it did hit the combustion chambers, it would burn. On takeoff, though, they had to add a shot of TEB, tetra-ethyl-borane, a chemical compound so nasty it instantly burst into flame on contact with air. That would at least allow the fuel to ignite in cold combustion chambers. Also had to have a shot of TEB when they lit the afterburners, if they had been shut down. The throttle had a counter on it: it displayed the number of shots of TEB available, it counted down from 50. When you ran out of TEB, you could not relight the afterburners. And if the engines flamed out, and you had no TEB, you were very quickly going to be back on the ground because you could not restart the engines without it. They were difficult enough to restart, even with it. It took up to 25 minutes to refuel once they found the tanker. Oddly, only one half of the windshield had a defroster, and at 30,000 or so feet at -40F, the Blackbird cooled off fast, and the windshield frosted over almost immediately. EDIT: The fuel was notoriously UN-inflammable was what I meant to say. Corrected it up above, but just so everyone knows: I mis-typed it, originally. No doubt some form of Russian interference, I'm certain ... [/QUOTE]
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