Arguably few aircraft are quite as iconic as the striking-looking SR-71 Blackbird spy plane, renowned for its ability to cruise at three times the speed of sound so as to outrun enemy surface-to-air missiles.But the Blackbird’s was actually an enlarged evolution of the Lockheed A-12, designed for service with the Central Intelligence Agency. The single-seat A-12 could fly slightly faster and higher, but it was doomed to be replaced by its heavier Air Force spinoff.By the late 1950s, aviation engineers knew that new Soviet surface-to-air missiles could effectively threaten high-altitude U-2 spy plane overflights of the Soviet Union. This was dramatically illustrated by the shoot down of Gary Power’s U-2 in 1960 over the Soviet Union, which triggering a humiliating political crisis. A second U-2 was shot down during the Cuban Missile Crisis—an event which could have sparked a global nuclear war.Engineers in Lockheed’s Skunk Work’s facility worked on a U-2 successor using new survivability strategies: sustained supersonic cruising speeds to outrun missiles, electronic warfare systems to suppress their guidance systems, and a stealth-optimized airframe incorporating radar-absorbent materials to decrease the range at which the spy plane could be detected.
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