I mean, it's not that old of an airframe. I'm only middle aged and I saw the last time it flew in 1991. My dad just retired from the FAA a couple years ago and when he was in the military he maintained the flight suits for the SR71 and U2 programs.

The original engineers may have passed, but the crew and engineers responsible for the huge amount of maintenance for the airframe are still around and probably have more functional knowledge about the airframe than the designers.

Edit: 1999 not 1991.

So Space Cowboys 2, except

• Everybody passes the physicals just fine, but all decide to quit instead of going through the onboarding process
• The young punk bad guys in the movie are secretly trying to get an LLM to redesign it, but can't because the Blackbird was a skunkworks program and some key principal princple either never got written down or DOGE cut the funding to restore the microfiche with the details so all the details got destroyed

EDIT: Spelling.

I like the idea that one becomes more and more retired each year after they stop working.

Given the US diet and healthcare system, I'd say many are definitely 6ft under

Yeah but what everyone forgets is that knowledge can be relearned if you do it right.

And the issue of Fogbank was eventually solved by having modern day scientist study the problem (it was something like contamination of boron being used to make the fogbank material.)

The SR71 could be manufactured today if we wanted to. It wasn't built with some magical spells that are forever lost to history. There are more people alive now that know how to machine titanium than there were when they built them originally. Its just a matter of investment in the labor and tooling to make them again, which probably isn't worth it which is why they'll keep flying the remaining planes.

One of the worse internet "I'm smart" thoughts is that "we've lost the ability to make insert outdated item because all that talent is dead." Ok, so retrain new talent like every generation has to do anyways and maybe next time don't pinch pennies and shutdown the factory with all these gods of manufacturing, instead bring in apprentices and have them learn from these masters.

But what about the profit margins and the shareholders?!?!? PE firms can't milk successful companies to death for $$$$ if they actually invest in talent.