Sled Driver: Flying The World's Fastest Jet - The SR-71 Blackbird. Sled Driver: Flying the World's Fastest Jet by Shul, Brian and a great selection of similar Used, New and Collectible Books available now at AbeBooks.com. ![]() The United States Air Force SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance plane (aka The Sled) is long retired but still holds the world speed record for a fixed-wing aircraft. Officially, it’s rated at Mach 3.3 but Blackbird pilots hint that it went faster. A lot faster. Major Brian Shul shares from his book Sled Driver what it’s like to fly a Blackbird and proudly proclaim over the airwaves that you’re the King of Speed. Whether you’re a fast-jet buff or not, Brian’s excerpt from Sled Driver will make you laugh and leave you proud. “In 1962, the first SR-71 Blackbird successfully flew, and in 1966, the same year I graduated from high school, the United States Air Force began flying operational SR-71 missions. I came to the program in 1983 with a sterling record and a recommendation from my commander, completing the weeklong interview and meeting Walter Watson, my partner for the next four years He’d ride four feet behind me, working all the cameras, radios, and electronic jamming equipment. I joked that if we were ever captured, he was the spy and I was just the driver. He told me “Just keep the pointy end forward.” We trained for a year, flying out of Beale AFB in California. On a typical training mission, we’d take off near Sacramento, refuel over Nevada, accelerate into Montana, obtain high Mach over Colorado, turn right over New Mexico, speed across the Los Angeles Basin, run up the West Coast, turn right at Seattle, then return to Beale. Total flight time: two hours and 40 minutes. There were a lot of things we couldn’t do in an SR-71, but we were the fastest guys on the block and loved reminding our fellow aviators this. People often asked us if it was fun to fly the jet. Fun wouldn’t be the first word I’d use. Intense maybe. Even cerebral. But there was one day in our Sled experience when I’d have to say that it was pure fun to be the fastest guys out there, at least for a moment. It occurred when Walt and I were flying our final training sortie. We needed 100 hours in the jet to complete our training and attain Mission Ready status. Somewhere over Colorado, we passed the century mark. We made a wide turn into Arizona and the jet was performing flawlessly. Ripping across the barren deserts 80,000 feet below us, I could already see the coast of California. I was beginning to feel a bit sorry for Walt in the back seat. There he was, with no particular good view of the incredible sights before us, tasked with monitoring four different radios. This was good practice for him for when we began flying real missions, when a priority message from headquarters could be vital. It was difficult for me to relinquish control of the radios, as my during my entire flying career in hi-performance fighters, I controlled my own transmissions. But it was part of division of duties in this plane and I’d adjusted to it.
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