Confessions Of An SR-71 Blackbird Pilot

Few humans have flown a jet as high or as fast as Adelbert “Buz” Carpenter. During his six years as an SR-71 Blackbird pilot, the now-retired Air Force colonel flew 230 missions, frequently exceeding three times the speed of sound. Over the course of nearly 800 hours flying one of the world’s most iconic aircraft, Carpenter soared over Cuba, skirted North Korea and tracked Russian nuclear submarines in the Arctic. He also had a few close calls, in one case narrowly avoiding disaster.

With the possibility that NASA could be returning the SR-71 to its test fleet, the Blackbird is back in the news and we wanted to dive deep into what it was like to fly the jet and get some thoughts on the latest SR-71 rumors from someone who piloted it. We couldn’t think of anyone better than “Buz” Carpenter.

Before joining the Blackbird program, Carpenter flew recon missions during the Vietnam War as an RF-4C pilot among other assignments. He now serves as a docent at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum’s Udvar Hazy Center.

U.S. Air Force Col. (ret.) Buz Carpenter, former SR-71 Blackbird instructor pilot, shares some of his memories of flying the supersonic aircraft with the audience at RAF Mildenhall, England, July 27, 2026. (U.S. Air Force photo by Karen Abeyasekere) Karen Abeyasekere

Some of the questions and answers have been lightly edited for clarity.

Q: How did you become an SR-71 pilot? Walk me through your decision to join the program. What made you want to fly it? What was the qualification process like?

A: Well, it was a multi-step process… You had to fill out all this paperwork. You had to send them your flight records, all your flight checks, your physical records. What are your professional ratings in the Air Force? Do they rate you as superior? 

The home base was Beale Air Force Base in California. If they liked you, you got called back for about a week. The first two days were a modified astronaut’s physical. I mean, they checked everything. You had a series of interviews. As a pilot, I had to fly with two current SR-71 pilots, not in the SR, but in the companion trainer, the T-38. 

At any time, there were only 11 of us qualified to fly the SR-71. That’s how small a group it was for the whole program. Only 85 of us ever flew operational missions… So you can see it’s a pretty small group.

Lockheed Martin

Q: Did pilots have to be invited to apply for the SR-71 program?

A: Oh, you had to apply for it. When there was a pilot in the program and he knew somebody he used to fly with that was really super, the invitation would be: ‘fill out the paperwork, and once we get the paperwork and look you over, we’ll call you back’ and go through the same routine that I went through.

You’ve got to go through the physical. Sometimes it was shortened because they knew the person. A couple of them were actually T-38 instructors at Beale Air Force Base, and their invitation was a lot shorter because they had all the records there. They knew who you were, and they knew how you could fly.

About a week before Christmas, 1974, I got a telegram that says ‘you’ve been selected. You will report to Beale Air Force Base July 1975 and commence training in the SR-71.’ I couldn’t have been happier.

Q: What was the training like?

A: The first thing you’re going to do is you’re going to get checked out in the T-38, even though we had all flown it earlier. You had to become [requalified] in it, because as long as you’re in a program, you’re going to continue to fly the T-38. 

Once you actually started the program, you’d be paired with your navigator, who then assumed the title Reconnaissance Systems Officer [RSO]. And in my case, it was the wonderful Capt. John Murphy. We trained and flew together for four years. 

Your first month or so was mostly academics, because the airplane was so different. You had to learn the systems because the airplane operates in a very hot environment — an average temperature of almost 600 degrees [Fahrenheit]. The airplane grows three to four inches in length, an inch or two in width — it’s 93% titanium to deal with the high temperatures [associated with supersonic flight]. So during flights, you are going to have to deal with systems that are now straining or starting to fail because of the heat environment they’re operating in. So it is imperative that you understand exactly how this airplane is engineered, and what kind of options you might have if you start getting failures.

Then you start getting into the simulator, and obviously it’s a kind of crawl-walk-run type of a deal. This was the first simulator I’d ever seen that was a computer simulator. Up until that point, they called them part-task trainers. It had all the switches and everything, but it didn’t fly like the airplane. Like you’d be in the trainer and they want to simulate a fire. Somebody would bang against the side of this thing, and yell ‘fire’ and turn on the fire light, but they were just watching what you were doing. The SR simulator flew exactly like you [would fly the plane]. 

So even before John and I started training, we would find times when the simulator wasn’t being used at night, and we would go down there, and fly this simulator. And if you did something wrong, it reacted exactly how the airplane would react. I mean, it could crash if you did something bad enough.

An SR-71 flight simulator. (NASA Photo / Tammy Gill)

There’s no visual. The simulator could move a little bit motion-wise, not severely. It would react exactly how the airplane was going to react, but you couldn’t see anything. Your first visual of what the airplane was like was going to be on your first flight in the airplane. 

That’s when you’re going to see what does a takeoff look like in 20 seconds? What does it look like to get behind a tanker and refuel? And as importantly, what does it look like to come back in at 175 indicated [airspeed] and land this airplane on a runway? It was a tremendous training aid because when you came back later on when you were doing your six weeks in Japan, maybe you took some vacation, but the first thing after that they’re going to put you in the simulator for four hours and see how you react to emergencies. It was very complex and defining. We washed people out who could not maintain the level of proficiency that we expected if you were going to fly this airplane.

Q: Could you practice refueling as well?

A: You could do takeoffs, because it was like an instrument takeoff, and you could do ‘quote’ instrument landings, but you had no visual to see how this whole thing would come together. Air refueling we didn’t mess with it because there wasn’t enough you could see. When you came to an air refueling in the simulator, they would just fill you up and say, ‘oka

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