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Originally Posted by radz282003
I agree on the points of the F-14. It's too bad it was so costly to maintain and operate. I love that jet.
The SR-71 did have a close rival though, the MIG-25 and MIG-31. Both were able to get up to Mach 2.83 or something close to there, and there was speculation it could go faster. I think, though, the SR-71 was still better, as there were something like 700+ USSR missles fired at it without ever bringing one down. They'd just go WOT and run away from the missles. I think the top speed of those, officially, was Mach 3.3, but I've read there were pilots who'd reached higher speeds. One thing to remember was it was designed to run at, at least, those speeds regularly. That's awesome.
But I digress. I vote F-14 or F-15  |
For the longest time, top speed was mach 3.0+ for the Black Bird, altitude of 80 000 feet +. Then I was hearing 3.5+ and 100 000+. And yeah, there were Soviet planes that could almost reach its speed, but only for a very short burst. They would have to have a perfect intercept course, wait till the SR71 is right behind them, punch it, and hope that it hasn't gone too far ahead of them.
One plane that might have made things real interesting would have been the Avro Arrow. Odds are you've never heard of it. Unvailed the same day as sputnik launched, it reached mach 2 at 75% throttle with test engines. In the final version, this would be equivelent to about half throttle. It wouldn't be able to reach mach 3, probably would have reached 2.5 or better. But it would have been damm impressive for a Canadian company to do in the 50's. Now into wildass speculation . . . consider what the replacement for that could have done 20 years later. If only . . .
(this thread has been brought way off topic by a Canadian who wants to be an aerospace engineer, thus the Avro CF-105 Arrow is the greatest plane in history in his mind)