Chinese High Altitude Spy Ballons?

[ironglow]

  A lot of strange stuff going on...  Must be a Democrat  coyote...can't tell a balloon from the moon...any better than
     it's nearly human counterparts can tell male from female..

[ironglow]

Just read that the US is using $479,000 missiles to shoot down these balloons.  Big plastic bag of hydrogen, off the shelf cameras, radio to transmit the pictures and a little framing.  Hmm.  The big balloons with all the attachments is probably less than $10,000. 

The SR-71's were the only plane that could fly that high.  They need to get them out of mothballs, and equip them with plain old machine gun.  They could fly high, and drop down their speed to below sonic and shoot them down with a few bullets, then get their engines throttled back up to finish out their flight.

  "We don't need any steenking SR-71"....

    https://avgeekery.com/that-time-an-f-15-pilot-shot-down-a-satellite-32-years-ago-this-week/

[Ranger99]

Blackbirds weren't built for
maneuverability, but for raw
speed and as a photographic
platform. They don't even have
proper landing gear. It's like an
airborne top fuel dragster

[ironglow]

..But it doesn't seem as if the SR-71 would have to be rolled out of mothballs, according to tis link..

 
    https://avgeekery.com/that-time-an-f-15-pilot-shot-down-a-satellite-32-years-ago-this-week/

  I know there is a blackbird in the Wright-Patterson museum in Ohio and another in a museum near Washington,
   but I don't know if there are any others.

[magooch]

We had airplanes back in the Sixties that could fly over 70,000 feet high.  It is hard to believe that there hasn't been some improvement in all these years.  I never heard where Area 51 had shut down.

[ulav8r]

There is an SR-71 at the SAC museum about 40 miles west of Omaha.


Got to hear a talk by the retired officer that picked the pilots for the SR-71's.  It was a secret mission at the time and his direct commander did not know what was going on, nor any Base commanders of the bases he visited.  When he turned his final recommendations, he was told to add his name to the list.  He protested that he exceeded the age limit but was added anyway and flew several missions.  He claimed the the plane on display was positioned in an attitude that would lead to a crash if it were in flight.  It was nose down at about a 10-15 degree angle.  The SR-71 was always nose high during flight, it could not fly even if it were level and nose down would guarantee a crash.

[darkgael]

t I shudder to think what the cost per flight hour is for a SR71.

$200,000 per hour.

Blackbirds weren't built for
maneuverability, but for raw
speed and as a photographic
platform. They don't even have
proper landing gear…….

The Blackbird has a nose wheel and two sets of main gear…..fairly normal tricycle landing setup. Now Lockheed’s U2 has atypical landing gear….a single centermounted double tire main and a tail gear. The landings are always accompanied by a chase car which follows the jet down the runway. The U2 is capable of flights in excess of 70,000 feet. It first flew in 1955 and is still in use.

[Bob Riebe]

One YF-12 survived and is at Wright-Patterson.
It could be armed, at a full million dollars refurb.
Service ceiling is not the altitude above which an aircraft cannot fly, it is the altitude at which as aircraft can fly and the pilot does not have to worry about normal problems, including god wannabe officers.
All aircraft published limits are not absolutes, except maybe the Russian ones which are partly hearsay, partly real.
Chinese claims are wannabe, from what I have read.

The F-106 was unofficially flown, steady state at Seventy Thousand feet and hit Mach 2.7 in same unofficial tests.
The British LIghtning was the British interceptor with the highest NATO service ceiling, and highest climb rate.
One of those could have shot it full of holes as it had 30mm cannon, not 20mm.