3175375
Senior Member
Happy Halloween!
Heavy Metal
- Thread starter amazinblue82
- Start date
3175375
Senior Member
When witches go riding,
and black cats are seen,
the moon laughs and whispers,
‘tis near Halloween. (VX-4 commanders aircraft ‘Vandy 1’)
FYI VX-9 did the flyover at Iowa’s game this past Saturday. (F/A-18F ‘Rhino’)
67newport
Old Man with a Hat
The Marion 8700 in Ohio
3175375
Senior Member
This is not a picture of a manufacturing assembly line
This is a picture of the SR 71 Program Depot Maintenance (PDM) input back shop at site 2 Palmdale, California. Directly under the titanium panels are the fuel tanks.
The triangle-shaped panels were for reducing the radar cross-section. Everything about this beautiful SR 71 had to be invented because of the high heat; traditional sealants to seal the panels would break due to the extreme temperature range from very, very cold outside to very, very hot inside the plane.
The SR-71 was trucked from Burbank, assembled at Palmdale, and Flight Tested, then delivered to Beale.
SR-71s would disappear while being rotated in and out of maintenance, so there is no certain tail number that only stayed at, for instance, Beale, Okinawa, or Mildenhall.  I once asked my father Butch Sheffield, which SR-71 did you fly in? and he said ALL of them.
This picture shows a full-blown phased inspection where the entire aircraft and systems were thoroughly inspected. Every 800 hours, the plane would be sent south to Palmdale, California, for the Periodic Depot-level Maintenance (PDM) inspection performed by the Lockheed Skunk Works. This six-month-long inspection is where the aircraft is basically taken apart, inspected, modified, upgraded, put back together, and flight tested.
When making the A-12/SR -71 at Palmdale, they had trouble dealing with the titanium. Lockheed engineers used a titanium alloy to construct over 90 percent of the SR-71. Titanium was challenging to work with and unavailable in the United States in large amounts. It was available in Russia!
Lockheed did have a big problem early on;it discovered that spot-welded parts made in the summer were failing very early in their life, but those welded in winter were fine.
They eventually tracked the problem to the fact that the Burbank water treatment facility added chlorine to the water they used to clean the parts to prevent algae blooms in summer but took it out in winter. Chlorine reacts with titanium, so they began using distilled water from this point on.
Linda Sheffield
This is a picture of the SR 71 Program Depot Maintenance (PDM) input back shop at site 2 Palmdale, California. Directly under the titanium panels are the fuel tanks.
The triangle-shaped panels were for reducing the radar cross-section. Everything about this beautiful SR 71 had to be invented because of the high heat; traditional sealants to seal the panels would break due to the extreme temperature range from very, very cold outside to very, very hot inside the plane.
The SR-71 was trucked from Burbank, assembled at Palmdale, and Flight Tested, then delivered to Beale.
SR-71s would disappear while being rotated in and out of maintenance, so there is no certain tail number that only stayed at, for instance, Beale, Okinawa, or Mildenhall.  I once asked my father Butch Sheffield, which SR-71 did you fly in? and he said ALL of them.
This picture shows a full-blown phased inspection where the entire aircraft and systems were thoroughly inspected. Every 800 hours, the plane would be sent south to Palmdale, California, for the Periodic Depot-level Maintenance (PDM) inspection performed by the Lockheed Skunk Works. This six-month-long inspection is where the aircraft is basically taken apart, inspected, modified, upgraded, put back together, and flight tested.
When making the A-12/SR -71 at Palmdale, they had trouble dealing with the titanium. Lockheed engineers used a titanium alloy to construct over 90 percent of the SR-71. Titanium was challenging to work with and unavailable in the United States in large amounts. It was available in Russia!
Lockheed did have a big problem early on;it discovered that spot-welded parts made in the summer were failing very early in their life, but those welded in winter were fine.
They eventually tracked the problem to the fact that the Burbank water treatment facility added chlorine to the water they used to clean the parts to prevent algae blooms in summer but took it out in winter. Chlorine reacts with titanium, so they began using distilled water from this point on.
Linda Sheffield
i am not an engineer but was P&L responsible for engineered products.
nothing as sophisticated as a Blackbird, but vexing quality/manufacturing issues we applied statistical problem solving to.
LSS, we (my team who knew stuff - i just wrote the checks) solved an aluminum porosity issue referencing this Lockheed chlorine fix years before.
In my case, the "pink x" was the local water, and the "red x" was also a seasonal additive.
Small world
67newport
Old Man with a Hat
67newport
Old Man with a Hat
When I was attending Fuller Seminary in Pasadena from 1982-1985, I worked as a Youth Pastor in a church in Crescenta Valley. A woman there caught my interest in planes as I was watching one fly by; she told me her husband worked on the SR-71! His name was Burt Locke, and he worked his entire career at Lockheed. She said he couldn't tell her a thing about what he was working on for 15 years! The Blackbird was a huge secret!
