Tacit Blue and Bird of Prey and Quid
Half a century ago, Lockheed Martin had the A-12 followed by the SR-71...if they did it back then with what they had.....fast forward to the Reagan administration, and then to the first Bush administration, should not been a problem to cobble something faster and less vulnerable to the then latest Soviet SAMs and Triple-A???
IIRC, the SR-71 when it was brought back out of retirement, stuck around for 6/7 years while the NASA pair were kept till 99 before their last flight?
Magic question I have is, after 9/11, I wonder if anyone in the Pentagon considered bringing them back out of retirement / mothball for urgent reece over Afghan and Mid East.
Tacit Blue and Bird of Prey were revealed publicly a decade or so after flying in secret. I know they were technology demonstrators, which flew for a few years, but if the timeline of the Aurora supposedly operated within the 90s and retired, it could be about time to be revealed to the aviation community, could it not?
Area 51 has been officially acknowledged by the Obama administration so could this SR-72 be the Aurora coming into light, assuming the airframe probably existed for over a decade if not two.
The sighting by Gibson over the North Sea (coinciding with the Leuchars SATCO curious about the extremely fast mover from Machrihanish area, told to mind his own business and ignore the blip earlier in the year or year before)
marks up a few question marks.....I agree the F-111C pair is a bit odd, (could be the Lakenheath and the then Upper Heyford lot and logic dictates it be the Wing CO if not the base commanders flying) . Unless they came from the Test Force at Edwards...
Could hazard a guess that the KC-135 in the description, be a Q model with JP-7 refueling the Aurora again from the then 9th Det 4 from the 'Hall (or had they and the SR-71 pair gone by 1990?)
And what about the two seat test vehicle whose landing gear collapsed down in the west country in late 94, with two American voices calling a Pan and got injured, (not sure if there was 1 fatality). Then the C-5A assigned to LM on its way to the Eifel Valley, told to divert into the west country to pick up the test vehicle a few nights later?
I'm sure somewhere, some aviation enthusiast probably wrote on a forum or in one of the aviation pubs, you find in WH Smiths, that the Aurora supposedly flew from Fairford during Allied Force.
Cheers
Last edited by chopper2004; 3rd Nov 2013 at 21:05.