Things I didnt know about the

SR-71
Tiffany Smith

Cover Ups and Secrecy

C.I.A. created several coverup companies which were used to purchase the required Titanium for the construction of Blackbirds from Soviet Union ironic considering a lot of missions consisted of gathering intel about the country that the materials were purchased from.

Titanium Structure
Before the Blackbird, titanium was only used in high-temperature exhaust fairings and other small parts directly related to supporting, cooling, or shaping hightemperature areas on aircraft. The Blackbird however was constructed mainly out of titanium (85% to be exact) and the rest were high-end composite materials.

Flying a Blackbird

Flying a Blackbird
Crews flying at altitudes of 80,000ft face two main survival problems: maintaining consciousness at high altitude, and surviving a possible emergency ejection.They can fly so fast that it is possible to cover several countries in the Middle East in mere minutes. Pilots required pressurized flight suits to cope
with the low atmospheric pressure and lack of oxygen at high altitudes.

Because computerized equipment was nonexistent during the design and construction of Blackbird, the cockpit was unsurprisingly analog.

Stealth
The unique shape, combined with materials used to coat the frame, gave the Blackbird impressively low radar signature. The SR-71 was one of the first aircraft to get noticeable differences in its ability to stay invisible to radar. A total of 12 out of the 32 aircraft

Retirement
The Blackbird was first retired in 1989 because of the cost of maintaining the aircrafts. Then after tension in the Middle East in 1993 the SR-71 program was reconsidered by Congress and officially retired in 1998. With the two remaining working Blackbirds given to NASA; the rest of them are in museums.