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Somewhere an SR-71 pilot is definitely rolling his eyes.

Only publicity photo, surely.



The SR-71 might actually have a bit of a problem going slow enough.

As far as I can tell, it was never certified for a mach 2 cruise, normally accelerating right through it.


Distance and a telephoto lens can fix a lot of that. If you're kilometers away going twice as fast you have a lot more time to snap a pic, versus being 500 meters away.

They used these for surveillance so I assume the motion compensation on these things was state-secret levels of good.


The SR-71 can probably match speed.

It's just that the performance tables in the manual (which has been released to the public) only go down to mach 2.2, so you are outside of the certified/documented regimen.



Yup. There must have been any number of photos taken by chase planes during development.


The question is, how many were taken at supersonic speed? What non-military aircraft could keep up with the Concorde at Mach-2? Only another Concorde.


Concorde development was a (UK & France) national project. They would have had easy access to military aircraft. Aircraft like the Lightning might only just have been able to intercept but would easily have observed pre-arranged tests.

I wasn't on the engineering team ;) but apparently they planned 4000 hours of test flights. https://web.archive.org/web/20150316210132/http://aviationwe...

It's almost inconceivable that the test flights would not have been closely recorded, especially the significant ones including trans-sonic and supersonic ops. Despite the best design and air-tunnel work, you'd expect that things would go wrong and you really want to learn as much as possible from any incidents/events.

Unfortunately, all this happened well before the internet age, and so records and images are not so easily found :(


Most of our fighters can pull a sustained Mach 2


"our" fighters? What military are you referring to?




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