Former U.S. Air Force Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird pilot Col. Richard Graham, EAA 823636, will be presenting about his career and experiences flying the world’s fastest air-breathing manned aircraft on Thursday, Nov. 21, at 7 p.m. as part of the EAA Aviation Museum Aviation Adventure Speaker Series.
The SR-71, a strategic reconnaissance aircraft that could travel at speeds of more than Mach 3 and could operate at altitudes of more than 80,000 feet, was developed in the 1960s and was based on the Lockheed A-12, an ultra-secret black project that was tested and developed at Groom Lake in Nevada, also known as Area 51. The Blackbird served with the Air Force (and later NASA) from the mid-1960s until the 1990s before its final retirement in 1999.
Graham began his Air Force career in the 1960s, graduating from pilot training in 1965 and initially serving at Craig Air Force Base as a T-37 instructor pilot and flight examiner. In 1970, he began F-4 Phantom II training and was eventually assigned to the 555th Tactical Fighter Squadron operating out of Thailand during the Vietnam War. Between 1971 and 1973, Graham flew 210 combat missions over North Vietnam and Laos, including a number of missions as an F-4C “Wild Weasel” pilot, in which his primary goal was to suppress surface-to-air missile sites. Graham also participated in Operation Linebacker II in December of 1972.
After returning to the United States after his tour in Southeast Asia, Graham was selected for the SR-71 strategic reconnaissance program based at Beale Air Force Base in California.
“With the SR program, no one comes to you,” Graham explained. “You have to want to get into the program. There’s no one out there; there’s no personnel system like the normal Air Force when you want to go to another airplane you can put in for a statement that you want to do that. With the SR, you have to want to actually apply for the program. I saw the SRs flying out of Okinawa when I was there, and I got friendly with some of the SR crew members over at the officers’ club and they told me a little bit about the program. Eventually, after flying the F-4 for five years, I said, ‘It’s time for another airplane.’ I put my volunteer statement in to go fly the SR-71 in 1974 and got accepted.”
But getting accepted into the SR-71 program was just the beginning for Graham. Training for the aircraft was extensive and selective, with many failure points throughout the process.
“Your training is nine months long. The first three months, maybe four, are devoted to learning about the airplane, going to the school house. You go to the maintenance people who talk about the landing gear and the structure and the airplane and all this stuff. You go through all these academics and then you get into the simulator program. Now remember, you haven’t had a foot and a step in the airplane. The first three to four months you don’t get to get into the airplane. You have 12 simulator missions you have to pass, 1-12, and each number of 1-12 has practice rides with it.”
Graham would eventually pass out of the training program and became an official SR-71 pilot. After several years as an SR-71 program crew member, Graham was named commander of the 1st Strategic Reconnaissance Squadron in 1980, a position he served in until 1981. Graham then attended Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base before serving at the Pentagon in numerous positions until 1986. In June of that year, Graham was named vice wing commander of the 9th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing at Beale, and was promoted to wing commander in June of 1987, a position in which he oversaw all of the wing’s pilots and aircraft, which included SR-71s, U-2s, T-38s, and KC-135Qs.
With how busy he was in the cockpit during his years flying the Blackbird, Graham became somewhat numb to the experience of flying at speeds of more than 2,000 mph and seeing stars above him in broad daylight, but there were a few times even he was in awe of his surroundings.
“I’d like to say it’s something, gee whiz, but you’re so well trained when you get into it, you don’t even think about those things. It’s not until you can relax in the airplane and you start to take everything in and it gets pretty meaningful. I can remember taking the SR-71 from Beale over to [RAF] Mildenhall, which is where we operated out of and we were ferrying an airplane over there. We were just leveling off at about 70,000 feet and climbing, and my crew’s climbing at about 80,000 feet. It was pitch black; it was at night heading over to England. All of a sudden, I was going right through an aurora borealis up in the Canada area, going across the Atlantic Ocean. It appeared like all this dancing of the lights, and the greens and the blues were just all around the airplanes, just dancing all over the airplane. It’s just very unique to fly right through that stuff.”
As Graham explained, some missions in the SR-71 were relatively short, while others took up most of the day and involved multiple air-to-air refuelings.
“A typical mission would be taking off out of, I’ll say Okinawa, Japan, and we’d be flying up the Korean DMZ [demilitarized zone] right smack in the North and South Korean DMZ. We would fly right through it, going from the southwest to the northeast. Right smack dab down the middle and obviously imaging off to the left, which is North Korea. Then we get out in the Sea of Japan on the other side, do a 180-degree turn, come back through the same DMZ, now imaging off to the right, and then come on back down and land at Okinawa. That took about an hour and a half.
“That’s one of our shorter ones. A lot of them would be, you’d take off out of Okinawa and you go all the way out to the Middle East, 10 hours all the way down there and back. That’s three or four refuelings. Those don’t come up very often but they are the long ones. But the typical ones would be, the Korean DMZ we did a lot, we did up around Vladivostok, Russian sub pens. We did Murmansk coming out of Mildenhall in England. Murmansk is up in the Bering Sea, another sub pen for the Soviets. Anything that was on the coastal edges of anything, and you name a foreign country of the superpowers, we’d do it from the periphery. Now, you name any third-world country, we were probably flying directly over it.”
Graham retired from the Air Force in 1989, the same year that the SR-71 was initially retired. While obviously disappointed in its retirement, Graham understood that the Blackbird was an expensive machine to operate and though still useful for reconnaissance work, it was hard to justify the cost.
“Anyone in the SR program, anywhere in the chain of command was disappointed,” he said. “It was an expensive airplane. There’s no doubt about it. It is big bucks to fly this thing. There’s a lot of money involved in every mission. When you count what it takes to get an SR up and then back again, refueling three or four or five times with three tankers at each place, that gets very expensive. And pre-positioning the tankers all around the globe gets very expensive, too. It was a cost-related thing, where I think everyone realized it had capability in the intelligence community, but the money versus the capability just wasn’t there. The bang for the buck wasn’t there and satellites were getting better. A lot of things were coming along at that time.”
Thursday’s event is free for EAA members and just $5 for nonmembers.
