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The Air Force Might Be Getting a Mach 3 SR-72 Bomber
So Sunk Works wants to take a recon platform and turn it into the fastest and highest flying bomber ever. Cool!
There's no certainty here, but the SR-72 would build on the successful SR-71. It would be the fastest plane ever in service if made.
Like a bolt out of the blue, Lockheed Martin’s renown Skunk Works publicly teased one of aviation’s great snark hunts—revealing plans for a successor to the SR-71, the legendary Mach-3 reconnaissance plane designed with slide rules and retired when the millennials were born.
That 59-year old aircraft, originally developed as an uber-interceptor, still holds the record for fastest sustained supersonic flight at 2,100 miles per hour—much faster than a .50-caliber bullet.
But the new plane just announced, the SR-72, will fly twice as fast—so fast that at top speed the very air entering its engines will be moving as fast as an SR-71. Keeping combustion and thrust going under such conditions has been likened to lighting a cigar in a hurricane. The SR-72’s planned ability to go from a standing start to Mach 6 and back again is a hat trick no one has been able to pull off.
Yet, an SR-72 demonstrator reportedly first appeared in plain view in California in July 2017.
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