July 8, 2025 • 10 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, When an SR-71 Blackbird disintegrated mid-air at over 2,000 mph, pilot Bill Weaver was ejected at a speed and height few humans have ever survived. He thought he was dead, but the story that followed became one of the most remarkable survival moments in aviation history. The History Guy shares it.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:13):
And we continue with our American stories. And our next
story comes from a man whose YouTube videos are followed
by hundreds of thousands of viewers of all ages, and
he's simply known as the History Guy. In nineteen sixty six,
and SR seventy one Blackbird disintegrated at seventy eight thousand feet.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
The pilot's first thought.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Was, quote, no one could live through what just happened,
Therefore I must be dead. Here's the History Guy with
the story of the SR seventy one Blackbird disintegrating at
altitudes unknown to most men.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
There's an old airplane story that's called the LA Speed
Chat can go something like this. A pilot of a
single engine Cessna calls the Los Angeles Arara Control Center
and asks for a speed check. Wants to know how
fast he's going. Center tells him he's going about ninety knots.
Immediately thereafter, another pilot, someone in say a twin engine
beach craft, trying to make fun of how slow the
(01:08):
Cessna goes, asks for a speed check, and the center
tells him that he's going around.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
One hundred and twenty one knots.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
But almost immediately thereafter, another voice chimes in and This
is a Navy pilot who's flying in an F eighteen
Fighter Chat and he doesn't really need to know how
fast he's going. He's got an air speed indicator inside
his cockpit. He's just trying to prove to everybody out
there on the frequency that he's flying the biggest, baddest,
fastest jet in the world and show all those cessna
and beachcraft owners how fast plane really flies. And the
(01:36):
LA Center radios back that he's going an impressive six
hundred and twenty knots. And you think that would be
enough to win this little contest. When another voice casually asks,
this is Aspen three zero, can you give us a
speed check?
Speaker 2 (01:52):
And after a moment, the Center responds.
Speaker 3 (01:54):
Aspen three zero, we have you going one thousand, nine
hundred and ninety three knots. That story, which was related
in Brian Schull's book Sled Driver Flying the World's Fastest Jet,
shows how we extreme the world's fastest air breathing manned
jet aircraft in history. The lockeed SR. Seventy one Blackbird
(02:18):
really was. But you know, if you fly in an
airplane that can go more than three times the speed
of sound and almost into outer space.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
One thing's important. You don't want to.
Speaker 3 (02:27):
Fall out, and if you did, it would be history
that deserves to be remembered. In late nineteen fifty seven,
the CIA approached to the defense contractor Lockheed, asking them
to secretly design an undetectable spyplane. Lockheed's Advanced Development Project
unit was called the Skunkworks, a nickname it had gotten
since the original facility had been built near to an
(02:48):
old plastics manufacturing plant that produced awful smells. In nineteen
fifty five, the Skunkworks had gotten a CIA contract to
build an ultra high altitude spyplane designed for flying over
the Soviet Union and photographic sites of strategic interests. The
plane was the lockyed U two, a plane able to
fly at such a high altitude that it was thought
to be outside Soviet radar capacity and invulnerable to Soviet
(03:10):
fighter aircraft and ground to air missiles. The new request
was for a plane that could go even higher and
faster than the U two. The plane ended up with
the designation SR for Strategic Reconnaissance seventy one.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
Painted a blue so dark that.
Speaker 3 (03:25):
Was almost black to camouflage the plane against the night sky,
it earned the nickname Blackbird. The SR seventy one was
designed for flight at over Mock three with a flight
crew of two. Traveling at supersonic speeds meant that the
outside of the aircraft would get very hot more than
six hundred degrees, so Loki could not use aluminum. The
plane was ninety two percent titanium inside and out, but
(03:46):
most problematic is that the ore needed to make titanium
is rare and in short supply In the United States.
The major supplier of the ore was the Soviet Union.
The US surreptitiously worked through third world straw buyers to
acquire the ore. The plane was designed to reduce its
radar cross section and early version of stealth that, combined
with its speed and altitude, made the plane virtually invulnerable
(04:08):
to countervasures. There were also challenges given the plane's altitude
ceiling above eighty thousand feet. A normal pilot's mass cannot
provide enough oxygen for a pilot above about forty thousand feet,
and breathing becomes impossible above forty nine thousand feet as
the pressure at which the lungs excrete carbon dioxide exceeds
outside air pressure. At sixty two thousand feet some eighteen
(04:30):
plus kilometers, the pressure reaches something called the Armstrong limit.
The Armstrong limit represents the altitude above which atmospheric pressure
is sufficiently low that water boils at the normal temperature
of the human body. Simply put, a human cannot survive
above this limit, as their blood would literally boil to
asteand the conditions. Aircrews for high altitude craft have to
(04:53):
wear pressurized suits. In the Terrible scenario where an aircrew
had to eject at extreme altitudes, the suit had a
built in oxygen designed to keep the suit pressurize. Of
just thirty two SR seventy one's built twelve were lost
to accidents, and the first of those accidents occurred during
the plane's testing phase of January twenty fifth, nineteen sixty six.
(05:15):
The plane, tail number nine five to two, took off
from Edward's Air Force Base at eleven twenty am. The
pilot was Bill Weaver, an experienced Lockheed test pilot. Jim's Wayer,
a Lockheed flight test reconnaissance and navigation system specialist, was
in the rear. The two were investigating procedures designed to
reduce trim drag and improve high mock cruise performance. Weaver
increased the plane speed to mock three point two and
(05:36):
climbed to seventy eight thousand feet. Several minutes later, the
right engine automatic inlet control system failed, requiring a switch
to manual control.
Speaker 2 (05:45):
This was common in the early test phase of the aircraft.
Speaker 3 (05:48):
But as Weaver took the plane into a scheduled thirty
five degree bank turned to the right, the right engine
suffered a dreaded inlet unstart. The resulting asymmetric thrust caused
the plane to roll further right, increasing the bank to
sixty degrees and pitch up. Knowing the chances of surviving
an ejection at mock three point one point eight and
seventy eight eight hundred feet was not very good, we
(06:09):
were hoped to be able to get the plane to
a lower altitude and speed to allow a safe ejection.
He yelled for zwere to stay with the planes attempted
to gain control, but the G forces were so strong
that the words came out garbled and unintelligible. The radical
G forces were beyond human limits, and weaverin's wayar lost consciousness,
neither able to activate the ejection system. SR seventy one
(06:30):
tail number nine five to two disintegrated in mid air.
Back at Edwards, the plane disappeared from radar and they
lost radio contact. The initial assessment was was that the
flight crew could not have survived such a violent breakup
at that speed in altitude. When Bill Weaver woke up,
he thought he was having a bad dream. His next
thought was, no, one could survive what just happened. Therefore
(06:50):
I must be dead. But as he became more aware,
he could hear rushing wind what sounded like straps flapping.
He was alive and had somehow separated from the aircraft
despite not activating the ejection system. In fact, he had
been thrown clear in the accident. His ejection seat was
still with the wreckage of the plane falling to Earth
at that very moment. The flight suit had apparently done
(07:11):
its job with the oxygen tank that was attached to
the parachute harness, inflating the suit to keep it pressurized.
That was itself astounding given the violence of the plane's breakup,
and it was a good thing otherwise Weaver's blood would
be boiling. But the visor on his helmet was iced
over well. I could tell that he was falling. He
couldn't see the parachute system was supposed to initially deploy
(07:32):
a small chute that should keep him from tumbling, but
he couldn't be sure that it had deployed, as he
had no idea how long he'd been unconscious. He didn't
know how far up he was or how long before
he might experience the rapid desceleration caused by colliding with
the earth. But the small chute had deployed and he
was falling vertically. The main chute should open automatically at
fifteen thousand feet, but it could not be sure the
(07:52):
automatic systems were functioning. He tried to find the manual
activation for the chute, but his hands were numb by cold,
and with the suit inflated, he couldn't find it. But
just then he felt the reassuring sudden desceleration caused by
the opening of the main chute. He lifted the faceplate
on his visor, only to find that the latch was
broken and he had to hold it up. Given the
plane speed, he couldn't even be sure which state he
(08:13):
was going to land in, and the ground below looked desolate.
He could see the burning wreckage of the airplane on
the ground some miles away, and most importantly, he was
reassured to see Jim Zuayer chute open some distance off.
Despite being an experienced test pilot, we never actually jumped
out of an airplane before. This was his first parachute landing,
and he said it went okay, despite nearly landing on
(08:34):
what appeared to be a very surprised antelope. Given the
side that the search area must be, he figured he'd
have to figure out how to survive the night before
he could expect rescue. But on that count he was wrong.
He was busy trying to collapse his parachute while having
to hold up his faceplate when he heard someone behind
him say, can I help you with that? It turns
out the plane had broken apart over a New Mexico
(08:55):
ranch owned by Albert J.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
Mitchell Junior.
Speaker 3 (08:57):
Mitchell and several ranch hands were Brandon Colts when they
heard a noise and saw parachutes descending from the sky
several minutes later. Mitchell was a pilot and owned a
small Hughes three hundred helicopter and had immediately flown to
where Weaver had landed. After helping Weaver collapse the shote,
Mitchell flew to where Jim Zueyer's shoot had landed, only
to find that Zweyer was deceased. His neck had apparently
(09:19):
snapped when the airplane broke up. After the accident, we
were found out that the flapping noise that he'd been
hearing as he was falling was because the heavy nylon
straps that had strapped him into the aircraft had been
shredded by the accident. And that shows how impressive it
was that his flight suit held together through all of that.
But he also found out that the oxygen tank that
connected to his flight suit was connected by two tubes,
(09:39):
and one had torn loose and the other was barely
hanging on. If that second tube had torn loose, then
the flight suit would not have inflated and he would
have died. Albert Mitchell flew Weaver to the nearest hospital,
which was into them carrying New Mexico, and Weaver remembered
being terrified because Mitchell kept the little helicopter speed above
the red line for the entire trip, and Weaver was
thinking how ironic would be that if he survived falling
(10:01):
out an SR seventy one at seventy eight thousand feet
only to die in a little helicopter on the way
to the hospital. The Air Force retired the SR seventy
one in nineteen ninety eight, and NASA retired THEIRS in
nineteen ninety nine, but there are persistent rumors that the
skunk Works is working on a successor to the SR
seventy one that some people claim will be twice as fast.
In its thirty three years of service, Jim Sware was
(10:24):
the only SR seventy one crew member to die in
a flight accident. Bill Weaver was back flying SR seventy
one's within a week and eventually became Lockeed's chief test pilot.
He retired and lives in Carlsbad, California.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
The man who survived the disintegrating Blackbird his story Bill
Weavers here on now American Stories
And we continue with our American stories. And our next
story comes from a man whose YouTube videos are followed
by hundreds of thousands of viewers of all ages, and
he's simply known as the History Guy. In nineteen sixty six,
and SR seventy one Blackbird disintegrated at seventy eight thousand feet.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
The pilot's first thought.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Was, quote, no one could live through what just happened,
Therefore I must be dead. Here's the History Guy with
the story of the SR seventy one Blackbird disintegrating at
altitudes unknown to most men.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
There's an old airplane story that's called the LA Speed
Chat can go something like this. A pilot of a
single engine Cessna calls the Los Angeles Arara Control Center
and asks for a speed check. Wants to know how
fast he's going. Center tells him he's going about ninety knots.
Immediately thereafter, another pilot, someone in say a twin engine
beach craft, trying to make fun of how slow the
(01:08):
Cessna goes, asks for a speed check, and the center
tells him that he's going around.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
One hundred and twenty one knots.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
But almost immediately thereafter, another voice chimes in and This
is a Navy pilot who's flying in an F eighteen
Fighter Chat and he doesn't really need to know how
fast he's going. He's got an air speed indicator inside
his cockpit. He's just trying to prove to everybody out
there on the frequency that he's flying the biggest, baddest,
fastest jet in the world and show all those cessna
and beachcraft owners how fast plane really flies. And the
(01:36):
LA Center radios back that he's going an impressive six
hundred and twenty knots. And you think that would be
enough to win this little contest. When another voice casually asks,
this is Aspen three zero, can you give us a
speed check?
Speaker 2 (01:52):
And after a moment, the Center responds.
Speaker 3 (01:54):
Aspen three zero, we have you going one thousand, nine
hundred and ninety three knots. That story, which was related
in Brian Schull's book Sled Driver Flying the World's Fastest Jet,
shows how we extreme the world's fastest air breathing manned
jet aircraft in history. The lockeed SR. Seventy one Blackbird
(02:18):
really was. But you know, if you fly in an
airplane that can go more than three times the speed
of sound and almost into outer space.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
One thing's important. You don't want to.
Speaker 3 (02:27):
Fall out, and if you did, it would be history
that deserves to be remembered. In late nineteen fifty seven,
the CIA approached to the defense contractor Lockheed, asking them
to secretly design an undetectable spyplane. Lockheed's Advanced Development Project
unit was called the Skunkworks, a nickname it had gotten
since the original facility had been built near to an
(02:48):
old plastics manufacturing plant that produced awful smells. In nineteen
fifty five, the Skunkworks had gotten a CIA contract to
build an ultra high altitude spyplane designed for flying over
the Soviet Union and photographic sites of strategic interests. The
plane was the lockyed U two, a plane able to
fly at such a high altitude that it was thought
to be outside Soviet radar capacity and invulnerable to Soviet
(03:10):
fighter aircraft and ground to air missiles. The new request
was for a plane that could go even higher and
faster than the U two. The plane ended up with
the designation SR for Strategic Reconnaissance seventy one.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
Painted a blue so dark that.
Speaker 3 (03:25):
Was almost black to camouflage the plane against the night sky,
it earned the nickname Blackbird. The SR seventy one was
designed for flight at over Mock three with a flight
crew of two. Traveling at supersonic speeds meant that the
outside of the aircraft would get very hot more than
six hundred degrees, so Loki could not use aluminum. The
plane was ninety two percent titanium inside and out, but
(03:46):
most problematic is that the ore needed to make titanium
is rare and in short supply In the United States.
The major supplier of the ore was the Soviet Union.
The US surreptitiously worked through third world straw buyers to
acquire the ore. The plane was designed to reduce its
radar cross section and early version of stealth that, combined
with its speed and altitude, made the plane virtually invulnerable
(04:08):
to countervasures. There were also challenges given the plane's altitude
ceiling above eighty thousand feet. A normal pilot's mass cannot
provide enough oxygen for a pilot above about forty thousand feet,
and breathing becomes impossible above forty nine thousand feet as
the pressure at which the lungs excrete carbon dioxide exceeds
outside air pressure. At sixty two thousand feet some eighteen
(04:30):
plus kilometers, the pressure reaches something called the Armstrong limit.
The Armstrong limit represents the altitude above which atmospheric pressure
is sufficiently low that water boils at the normal temperature
of the human body. Simply put, a human cannot survive
above this limit, as their blood would literally boil to
asteand the conditions. Aircrews for high altitude craft have to
(04:53):
wear pressurized suits. In the Terrible scenario where an aircrew
had to eject at extreme altitudes, the suit had a
built in oxygen designed to keep the suit pressurize. Of
just thirty two SR seventy one's built twelve were lost
to accidents, and the first of those accidents occurred during
the plane's testing phase of January twenty fifth, nineteen sixty six.
(05:15):
The plane, tail number nine five to two, took off
from Edward's Air Force Base at eleven twenty am. The
pilot was Bill Weaver, an experienced Lockheed test pilot. Jim's Wayer,
a Lockheed flight test reconnaissance and navigation system specialist, was
in the rear. The two were investigating procedures designed to
reduce trim drag and improve high mock cruise performance. Weaver
increased the plane speed to mock three point two and
(05:36):
climbed to seventy eight thousand feet. Several minutes later, the
right engine automatic inlet control system failed, requiring a switch
to manual control.
Speaker 2 (05:45):
This was common in the early test phase of the aircraft.
Speaker 3 (05:48):
But as Weaver took the plane into a scheduled thirty
five degree bank turned to the right, the right engine
suffered a dreaded inlet unstart. The resulting asymmetric thrust caused
the plane to roll further right, increasing the bank to
sixty degrees and pitch up. Knowing the chances of surviving
an ejection at mock three point one point eight and
seventy eight eight hundred feet was not very good, we
(06:09):
were hoped to be able to get the plane to
a lower altitude and speed to allow a safe ejection.
He yelled for zwere to stay with the planes attempted
to gain control, but the G forces were so strong
that the words came out garbled and unintelligible. The radical
G forces were beyond human limits, and weaverin's wayar lost consciousness,
neither able to activate the ejection system. SR seventy one
(06:30):
tail number nine five to two disintegrated in mid air.
Back at Edwards, the plane disappeared from radar and they
lost radio contact. The initial assessment was was that the
flight crew could not have survived such a violent breakup
at that speed in altitude. When Bill Weaver woke up,
he thought he was having a bad dream. His next
thought was, no, one could survive what just happened. Therefore
(06:50):
I must be dead. But as he became more aware,
he could hear rushing wind what sounded like straps flapping.
He was alive and had somehow separated from the aircraft
despite not activating the ejection system. In fact, he had
been thrown clear in the accident. His ejection seat was
still with the wreckage of the plane falling to Earth
at that very moment. The flight suit had apparently done
(07:11):
its job with the oxygen tank that was attached to
the parachute harness, inflating the suit to keep it pressurized.
That was itself astounding given the violence of the plane's breakup,
and it was a good thing otherwise Weaver's blood would
be boiling. But the visor on his helmet was iced
over well. I could tell that he was falling. He
couldn't see the parachute system was supposed to initially deploy
(07:32):
a small chute that should keep him from tumbling, but
he couldn't be sure that it had deployed, as he
had no idea how long he'd been unconscious. He didn't
know how far up he was or how long before
he might experience the rapid desceleration caused by colliding with
the earth. But the small chute had deployed and he
was falling vertically. The main chute should open automatically at
fifteen thousand feet, but it could not be sure the
(07:52):
automatic systems were functioning. He tried to find the manual
activation for the chute, but his hands were numb by cold,
and with the suit inflated, he couldn't find it. But
just then he felt the reassuring sudden desceleration caused by
the opening of the main chute. He lifted the faceplate
on his visor, only to find that the latch was
broken and he had to hold it up. Given the
plane speed, he couldn't even be sure which state he
(08:13):
was going to land in, and the ground below looked desolate.
He could see the burning wreckage of the airplane on
the ground some miles away, and most importantly, he was
reassured to see Jim Zuayer chute open some distance off.
Despite being an experienced test pilot, we never actually jumped
out of an airplane before. This was his first parachute landing,
and he said it went okay, despite nearly landing on
(08:34):
what appeared to be a very surprised antelope. Given the
side that the search area must be, he figured he'd
have to figure out how to survive the night before
he could expect rescue. But on that count he was wrong.
He was busy trying to collapse his parachute while having
to hold up his faceplate when he heard someone behind
him say, can I help you with that? It turns
out the plane had broken apart over a New Mexico
(08:55):
ranch owned by Albert J.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
Mitchell Junior.
Speaker 3 (08:57):
Mitchell and several ranch hands were Brandon Colts when they
heard a noise and saw parachutes descending from the sky
several minutes later. Mitchell was a pilot and owned a
small Hughes three hundred helicopter and had immediately flown to
where Weaver had landed. After helping Weaver collapse the shote,
Mitchell flew to where Jim Zueyer's shoot had landed, only
to find that Zweyer was deceased. His neck had apparently
(09:19):
snapped when the airplane broke up. After the accident, we
were found out that the flapping noise that he'd been
hearing as he was falling was because the heavy nylon
straps that had strapped him into the aircraft had been
shredded by the accident. And that shows how impressive it
was that his flight suit held together through all of that.
But he also found out that the oxygen tank that
connected to his flight suit was connected by two tubes,
(09:39):
and one had torn loose and the other was barely
hanging on. If that second tube had torn loose, then
the flight suit would not have inflated and he would
have died. Albert Mitchell flew Weaver to the nearest hospital,
which was into them carrying New Mexico, and Weaver remembered
being terrified because Mitchell kept the little helicopter speed above
the red line for the entire trip, and Weaver was
thinking how ironic would be that if he survived falling
(10:01):
out an SR seventy one at seventy eight thousand feet
only to die in a little helicopter on the way
to the hospital. The Air Force retired the SR seventy
one in nineteen ninety eight, and NASA retired THEIRS in
nineteen ninety nine, but there are persistent rumors that the
skunk Works is working on a successor to the SR
seventy one that some people claim will be twice as fast.
In its thirty three years of service, Jim Sware was
(10:24):
the only SR seventy one crew member to die in
a flight accident. Bill Weaver was back flying SR seventy
one's within a week and eventually became Lockeed's chief test pilot.
He retired and lives in Carlsbad, California.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
The man who survived the disintegrating Blackbird his story Bill
Weavers here on now American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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