How The Mysterious Top Gun Hypersonic “Son of Blackbird” SR-72 Aircraft Would be a Massive Breakthrough

By Kris Osborn, President, Center for Military Modernization

(Washington D.C.) As the fastest air-breathing manned aircraft ever to exist, the SR-71 spy plane has forever emblazoned itself upon any record of aviation history as a sleek-looking, high-altitude, stealthy aircraft which has made a difference for the Pentagon.

The aircraft, which had several retirements with the most recent being 1998, goes back many years to the 1960s, a development which suggests early sophistication among engineers thinking about building low-observability platforms. Perhaps the aircraft was arguably ahead of its time, as it was conceived of and crafted by Lockheed Martin’s famous Skunk Works division.

SR-71 & SR-72

The SR-71s fuselage does indeed look stealthy, as it is rounded with a blended fuselage and slightly curved wing formations devoid of sharp angles. As something that first flew in 1964, the aircraft features some impressive technologies, according to a Lockheed Martin essay called “Creating the Blackbird” which points to the aircraft’s side-looking radar, signals intelligence and long-range electro-optical cameras. Specs for the aircraft list it as being capable of flying Mach 3 and reaching altitudes of 85,000 feet. A PBS documentary in 2006 explained that the historic Blackbird simply used its unparalleled speed to essentially outrun ground-based radar and air defenses.

With a crew of 2, the Blackbird aircraft had both a pilot and reconnaissance officer for high-altitude surveillance missions, operations which later became performed by unmanned systems in later years following the retirement of the aircraft. Following its military service, the Blackbird supported NASA for many years until the late 90s. An interesting essay in the Business Times explains that the Blackbird’s missions were eventually absorbed by drones and satellites.

However, the Blackbird concept lives on, and the most enduring legacy of the famous spy plane may be the way it has inspired the current, fast-paced effort to engineer its successor, a hypersonic SR-72 drone. The new, “Son of Blackbird” as it is called, is slated to take to the sky by 2025, according to Lockheed’s paper.  A potentially-secretive manned-Mach 6 Darkstar “son of Blackbird” was potentially featured in Top Gun Maverick. The high-speed jet flown by Tom Cruise in the movie does resemble an image of the aircraft posted by Lockheed Martin, however there is no actual confirmation that such an aircraft exists. 

It would make sense that a Blackbird follow-on would be manned or unmanned, given that it allows for the possibility of hypersonic flight and leverages decades of technological breakthroughs since the advent of the Blackbird in the 1960s.

It makes sense that the amazing Mach 3 speed of the 1960s-era Blackbird set the stage for its follow on, as a hypersonic Blackbird son SR-72 would simply need to stretch to Mach 5 or faster to qualify as hypersonic. Should the SR-72 be capable of manned- hypersonic flight, that would indeed be a massive breakthrough, as it would require a potentially unprecedented technology enabling a human to travel at hypersonic speeds of Mach 6.