THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, September 28, 1994 TAG: 9409280415
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A9 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium: 61 lines
In its heyday, the SR-71 Blackbird spy plane was the sexiest item in the business - faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than 30 locomotives and able to leap as many tall buildings as you could find.
But they were beasts to fly, cost $300 million a year to operate and could be replaced by something new in the research pipeline that could fly higher and faster and get even better pictures. So in 1990, the Air Force retired the Blackbird.
But this year concerned members of Congress have decided that because something new has not yet emerged from the research pipeline, the republic needs to bring the Blackbird out of mothballs. This, according to a bill still pending this week, will cost taxpayers $100 million in the first year.
It seems somehow fitting that Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va., one of the ablest federal spenders in history, is leading the effort to breathe life into this mummy.
And according to Rep. Dan Glickman, D-Kan., chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and one of the Blackbird's sworn enemies, the plane is definitely a mummy.
``The sensors are old, the infrastructure to service it no longer exists, they have to refuel too often and they're extremely expensive to operate,'' Glickman said.
The Blackbird is so dead that 14 of the 31 planes built between 1964 and 1967 are already in museums.
NASA uses three Blackbirds for test purposes, and the Air Force has three in storage. Others are gone for spare parts. Byrd has his eye on the Air Force Three.
The Blackbird does have its advocates. John Pike, director of the Space Policy Project at the Federation of American Scientists, said he spent most of the summer trying to figure out how the Byrd proposal fit into the senator's grand plan ``to relocate the United States to West Virginia,'' and finally concluded that it didn't. Instead, he decided, the Blackbird made sense.
According to Pike, planners originally hoped to replace the Blackbird with a new plane called Aurora, but after ``spending billions,'' the Defense Department apparently lost interest around 1989.
Meanwhile, the intelligence community was catching heat because the satellites that replaced the Blackbird during Desert Storm didn't deliver the goods. Satellites, Pike explained, hate clouds and are much better at photographing license plates than enemy encampments.
Now Defense is working on yet another drone scheme, but Pike says this isn't going well either. Given the overall track record, then, why not bring back the Blackbird?
Forget it, say Glickman's people. The new drones are doing just fine, and could be ready for service in the same two years it will take to get the Blackbirds in the air.
But at Mach 3.2 (2,200 mph) the Blackbird still can fly faster than any aircraft.
``The question is whether they work,'' Pike said. ``And they work.'' by CNB