The Plane Crash Diaries
How to Eject* from an SR-71 at 78,800 Feet
Hey, it’s possible Tom Cruise reads my blog
Fifteen miles above the earth, conditions are always the same: clear, quiet, and cold.
We float together, you and I, high in the stratosphere. At more than twice the height of Mount Everest, we are well beyond where eagles dare. Up here, there is only powerful wind, despite the thinning air.
I know it’s empty, but wait a moment. There’s something you’ll want to see.
Before you can brace for impact, the air rips apart before us. A darkened plow effortlessly furrows the dissipated air, screaming by at 2,500 mph. It’s an SR-71 Blackbird, the fastest flying thing to breathe air. Once, naysayers said the human body would turn to mush beyond the speed of sound. This craft triples it easily.
Your eyes can’t hope to follow its passage, so try to catch a glimpse inside: see that guy, up front in the spacesuit? That’s Bill Weaver, calm behind his mirrored visor, moving faster than anyone in the world. He’s having a wonderful day.
That’s who I wanted you to meet, up here, in his element. Before things start to go wrong.
At the Blackbird’s audacious speed and altitude, it takes a certain personality to be sitting in the hot seat. Like every other test pilot, Bill is just built different. Where I would be frozen in a terrified sweat, unable to remember how to breathe, Bill is all business, expert and effective. He has a different kind of brain.
They call it the pilot personality: psychologically stable, cheerfully competent, and appropriately assertive. These are not the kind of men who worry, much. They trust themselves instead. They’re trained to the hilt, utterly capable, unflappable in the extreme. Today, we’ll find out why.
He doesn’t know it yet, but Bill’s about to make the world’s first successful supersonic parachute jump. It will be very much despite his intentions.
A Beautiful Day in Almost-Space
It’s 25 January 1966: a hot new single by that English band The Beatles is lighting up the radio waves.
Driving through the temperate California air, palm trees flashing by in the morning’s magenta haze, Bill must have heard “Day Tripper” on the radio — it defies you to not sing along. Perhaps Bill voiced its ironic prophecy, as he headed to Edwards AFB for yet another stratospheric flight:
A one-way ticket?
…Yeah.
By 1966, Lockheed engineers have largely perfected the SR-71 airframe. Today, Bill and Lockheed technical specialist Jim Zwayer will be testing ways to improve high-Mach cruise performance, flying a plane with an off-balance center of gravity. Now, we’d just run a computer simulation. But back then, the best way to find out how your airplane worked was often by flying it.
Today, the flight engineers have loaded Dutch with a thumb on the scale, slightly weighing down her tail. Bill’s mission is, essentially, to take it for a spin and tell them how it goes.
It’s nearing noon by the time Jim starts “reading the prayer” — the preflight checklist — in the backseat of their SR-71, mission callsign DUTCH 54. Strapped into the pilot’s seat, Bill moves through this responsorial psalm with practiced ease: every system is go. With a final amen, the plane shoots skyward, scaling the Mojave air.
As Dutch rises through her initial ascent, Bill notices her off-kilter balance requires excessive trim to counteract. It’s like he’s driving a car with a crooked alignment: annoying, but probably fine. He deftly dials in the settings required to level the plane. Something to tell the wonks, when he lands.
With precision earned only through practice, Bill pulls back on his stick, rising through the sparse California clouds to stratospheric heights. The altimeter winds up, calculating nose-bleeding altitude silently: 76,000… 77,000… 78,000 feet.
He levels off, high above the sky. From this lofty perch, Bill could see the curve of the earth before him, the inky black of space above. Without his suit, he’d be long dead. The stratosphere is not kind.
Gently, Bill banks his aircraft to the right. Flying at more than 2,400 mph, “gently” is the only way a smart pilot does anything. The bank will inscribe a lazy radius of nearly 100 miles.
At least, it would have.
In a thunderclap instant — all calamity needs — Dutch’s right engine suddenly malfunctions. It shuts off with an audible rending of garments, a clamorous stroke that every SR-71 pilot comes to dread. Bill knows what’s happened immediately: a supersonic unstart.
“Explosive banging noises” are swiftly followed by an “instantaneous loss of engine thrust.” The engine will not return — Bill will not even have time to try. If you’ve ever seen a runner trip, you can guess what happens next.
Traveling at Mach 3.18, Dutch stumbles over her lost engine, as useless as a shattered knee. The chaotic aerodynamics assaulting the plane’s altered center of gravity transform Bill’s commanded bank into an uncommanded rolling climb.
Bill throws his stick forward and to the left, hands folded around the yoke in silent prayer, a plea to belay this murderous climb. Dutch makes no response: I hope some god is listening.
Bill’s now at the mercy of the “violent yawing of the aircraft — like being in a train wreck.”
Inside, it’s like riding a carousel at impossible speed. Bill’s body is crushed against his seat by a giant’s implacable hand, the high acceleration’s g-forces locking him into his chair. The force of Dutch’s rolling climb is overwhelming: it drains the blood from Bill’s brain. His heart can only push so hard. The g-force pushes harder.
Only seconds have passed, but Bill has barely a tablespoon of sand left in his Hourglass of Useful Consciousness. He has no idea.
If his heart could push hard enough, it would be pounding the alarm in his ears.
A pilot never wants to abandon their plane. It means your flight record is forever uneven, with one more takeoff than landing. But with Dutch completely out of control, Bill has no reason to stay. Egress is now essential.
Following emergency procedure, Bill cracks on the inter-cockpit speakerphone and briefs Jim on his planned descent to a more ejection-friendly altitude. You can eject in the stratosphere, but it won’t be nearly as fun.
Or rather, that’s what Bill thought he did. His garbled attempt at speech could only be transcribed as [UNINTELLIGIBLE].
It’s the building g-force, that stops him: his hourglass runs short. In the background, a thousand titanium rivets keen. Bill’s aircraft is ripping apart at the seams.
And that’s the final buzzer, folks!
The last grain of sand has slipped the glass. A thousand stage lights sighing off, Bill’s consciousness falls to black. The slamming of a coffin lid could not have been more final.
Today, we call this goodnight-nurse moment g-LOC, but the older name is more descriptive: “fainting in the air.” Bill is slumped against his harness, a television tuned to a dead channel.
Dutch, untethered, corkscrews higher into the air.
How to Fall From Heaven
Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird… it’s a plane!
Well, not anymore, at least.
Now, it’s Bill!, limp-rag unconscious, falling from the top of the sky. He looks the same as dead. But Bill must know some powerful gods, because he’s starting to come around. Give him space: this won’t be a pleasant awakening.
Bill returns to utter bafflement. Inside his helmet, perhaps he cocks his head to the side with the earnest inquisitiveness of a confused German Shepard. Something isn’t right.
It’s like his stream of conscious experience turned over too many pages at once: he knows he’s missed something, in between. Bill was in an airplane: now, he’s definitely not. The little he remembers is bad.
His brain, though not yet operational, does its best to help him explain: Bill, it informs him with a doctor’s solemnity, I’m afraid you must be dead.
Bill just nods, takes his passing in stride. If this is death, he thinks, I guess it isn’t all that bad. He hears the sound of rushing air, harness straps slapping in the the wind.
What do you know: he’s falling.
Falling.
Falling.
Falling.
Bill’s consciousness returns with a crescendo, with the knife-edged urgency of breaking bone: Wait, what happened to my plane? For the first time, Bill realizes he’s tens of thousands of feet in the air, falling at hundreds of feet per second.
The first thing I would do is cry. But because Bill is a test pilot, he does not collapse into sobs. The way he tells the story, you get the impression he expected it. Bill is following his training: Bill is running checklists.
His pressure suit is inflated, and he’s able to breathe: check. His drogue parachute has automatically deployed, a rudder in the air preventing death by tumbling: double-check. He is, essentially, in free fall. Remarkably, that’s triple-check.
Now, how far away is the ground? Will the main chute deploy okay? If the automated system doesn’t pop his parachute at 15,000 feet, Bill needs to know when to back it up.
Owing to his stratospheric departure, Bill has been falling for almost five minutes — long enough for ice to form on his helmet. He’s been unconscious for almost all of it.
While still trying to assess his altitude through his helmet’s frosted faceplate, Bill suddenly jerks up: his main parachute has automatically deployed. Guess I’m at 15,000 feet, thinks Bill. Altitude: quadruple-check.
Looking up to confirm proper deployment — alarmingly, parachutes can open wrong — Bill sees his full chute blooming in the air. I’ve heard ejected aviators call this sight “joyful.” It could not be anything but.
Suspended thousands of feet in the air from a silk bedsheet and some string, Bill finishes his checklist: impossibly, everything is fine. Well, his icy visor won’t latch up. When he props it open with a frozen hand, sunlight streams onto his face, the first he’s felt since falling.
It’s a perfect day for flying: clear blue skies and unlimited visibility. Below him, the rugged Western desert stretches out, barren and remorseless.
In the distance, Bill spots the flaming wreckage that was once his SR-71, the smoke rising from its crater their only distress signal. There had been time for nothing else.
… and Still Land on Your Feet
After a little more than ten minutes of parachute hang time, Bill is getting close. Returning to earth is a dangerous moment — the kind that can break your legs.
But Bill meets the earth without issue, even though it’s his very first parachute landing. Well, except he did almost land on an antelope, before it pounded away in a cloud of dust.
Unfortunately, Bill has no idea where he’s met the earth. But even as he finds his legs, Bill is on the make.
It’s nearing dusk, and considering the lack of visible structures, Bill assumes he’ll be sleeping rough. Though the temperature is comfortable now, desert heat doesn’t last. Soon, it will be dangerously cold.
This will not be a comfortable bivouac, but Bill’s emergency supplies can make it a survivable one. But before he can unload his survival kit, Bill needs to get his parachute harness off. He’s been trying, actually, but it seems like there’s too many straps….
That’s when Bill realizes: the the extra belts still clinging to his harness once held him into his ejection seat. That doesn’t happen, when you eject from the plane. That happens when you’re torn out.
These seat belts are built to withstand thousands of pounds of force: some giant hand had provided that, and more. The same colossal aerodynamic forces that had disintegrated Dutch in midair had — somehow — plucked Bill from his careening craft, tearing his seat belts neatly in two. Without his pressure suit’s protection, Bill surely would have been turned into soup.
All this happened beyond Bill’s awareness: he has no one to thank but the Fates.
In the midst of this confrontation with his own mortality, Bill’s head suddenly snaps up — is a person calling out? Bill spins around to scan the vacant horizon, blinking against the declining sun.
Yes, there it is: a cowboy hat hails Bill from the distance. The man below the hat is uncertain, but nevertheless polite: “…can I help you?” If a leprechaun had this kind of luck, he would be embarrassed.
“Well,” replies Bill, “I’m having a little trouble with my chute.”
This cattle rancher with a helicopter is Albert Mitchell: turns out, Bill fell to earth in northeastern New Mexico, right on top of the Mitchell family ranch.
When aircraft parts had started falling from the sky, Albert had called the relevant authorities, then lit out in his tiny helicopter to meet the nearest parachute. Who knows what he expected to find.
But Albert had been to the other chute first, and he had grim news to share. Jim Zwayer, the Lockheed flight-test specialist riding in the Dutch’s rear seat, had not shared Bill’s luck today. We don’t all get the breaks.
Albert had found Jim’s body not too far away from Bill’s landing site. The aircraft’s high-g crackup had also broken Jim’s neck, killing him instantly. His chute a silken burial shroud, Jim’s body had been carefully delivered to earth, life already gone. He must have been torn out as well.
Bill makes Albert take him to the other chute. He holds a brief vigil over Jim’s body, says a prayer only airmen confide, bids him rise to that gusty Valhalla where they say the boldest still ride.
Only once it’s confirmed that Albert’s cattleman will soon be here to take up the watch does Bill allows Albert to fly him some sixty miles to a hospital in Tucumcari.
Albert chugs as fast as his two-place Hughes helicopter can go, red-lining all the way to the hospital’s roof. “The little helicopter vibrated and shook a lot more than I thought it should have,” recalls Bill. After the kind of day Bill had, it must feel like standing still.
As Bill watched the sun fall towards the horizon, I wonder if that was a relief.
Hardly two weeks would go by before Bill, basically uninjured, was back in black.
On his first post-crash flight in an SR-71, the “PILOT EJECTED” indicator light malfunctioned on his jet. Flicking on, the light told his visually-obstructed passenger that Bill had ejected from the plane.
Still in the cockpit, Bill heard a panicked voice break in over the intercom: “Bill! Bill! Are you still there?” Bill laughs, when he tells the story.
He wasn’t going anywhere.
Guys like Bill are just built different: their job demands they be. Their job requires someone who can awaken in freezing air, falling hundreds of feet per second, unsure of what has happened to their airplane, and know how to save their own lives. It’s the pilot personality, but it’s also the lion’s heart.
You know, if you’re that kind of person: I’m certain that I’m not. But thank god for the lunatics who are, those most diligent suitors of calamity. To make a new world, you first must imagine the impossible is no longer so. “Fool” is the least that they’ll call you if you’re brave enough to dare. To a man that trebles the speed of sound, even death is hardly a snare.
Stop, for a moment, and pay them tribute, these masters of the sky: it’s through them, that we rise.
This article was informed by the following sources:
Bonsi, D. J. (1988). Ejection situations in the U-2/TR-1: An analysis of emotions and events (88–0330). Air Command and Staff College; Defense Technical Information Center. http://www.dtic.mil/docs/citations/ADA192872
Crickmore, P. (2009). Lockheed SR-71 Operations in Europe and the Middle East. Osprey Publishing.
Crickmore, P., & Tooby, A. (2015). Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird. Osprey Publishing.
Graham, R. H. (2013). SR-71: The Complete Illustrated History of the Blackbird, the World’s Highest, Fastest Plane. Zenith Press.
Mclninch, T. P. (1971). The OXCART Story. Central Intelligence Agency. http://www.governmentattic.org/10docs/CIA-SII-theOXCARTstory_1971.pdf [Archive.org Link]
Pace, S. (2004). The Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird. The Crowood Press.
Seedhouse, E. (2013). Pulling G: Human Responses to Increased and Decreased Gravity. Springer. https://doi.org/f6f5
Read Bill Weaver’s first person narrative in Graham (above) or from the Aviation Geek Club.
