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Just read a wild fact about the SR-71 Blackbird's fuel system
I was looking through an old maintenance manual from the Air Force museum in Dayton and saw that the SR-71 would leak up to 600 gallons of fuel on the ground before a flight. The airframe was built with loose panel gaps that only sealed from the heat of flying at Mach 3. I had no idea they literally designed it to leak on purpose. Has anyone here ever worked on a bird with a design quirk that crazy?
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the_leo23d ago
I read that the Blackbird's fuel was basically a heat sink for the cockpit and electronics too. The JP-7 was so stable they'd use it to cool the avionics before burning it. They even had a separate tank of a more volatile fuel just to start the engines. The whole system was built around managing that insane heat.
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brianm6623d ago
My buddy was a crew chief on F-4 Phantoms back in the day. He told me they had these big rubber fuel bladders in the wings that would sag and crease over time. They’d have to send guys in through the access panels to literally crawl inside the wing and smooth out the wrinkles by hand so the fuel gauges would read right. Always thought that was a wild way to fix a plane.
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