“Surely, no one could survive that.”
The post A pilot survived a Mach 3 ejection from the edge of space by not ejecting at all appeared first on We Are The Mighty.
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At Mach 3 – three times the speed of sound – an SR-71 pilot would be pushing close to the aircraft’s top speed, but the plane would normally have been able to fly at those speeds for more than an hour. But normal flying isn’t what test pilots do. On January 25, 1966, Lockheed test pilot Bill Weaver and his backseater Jim Zwayer took off from Beale Air Force Base in an SR-71 Blackbird to do some abnormal flying on a Blackbird dubbed #952.
