SR-71 would easily have been able to, they were just too chicken to give it guns and hardpoints like god intended. Cowards.
post
replies:
This happened in 1957. You might think the plane caught up with its own bullets, but what actually happened was the pilot fired a 4-second burst from the 20mm cannon during a test flight, then climbed at high speed and dove back down faster than the speed of sound (i.e. "faster than a apeeding bullet"), where he passed through the cloud of his own rounds which had decelerated due to air friction. So it wasn't a defect in the plane, it was really a random accident nobody had thought about because planes traditionally weren't fast enough to perform a maneuver that would make such a thing possible.
edit: story on wikipedia
replies:
That's just because Lockheed never put a gun on The Blackbird.
Didn't the russians do this to? The GSh-6-30 was in theory catastrophically powerful being essentially a gargantuan flak cannon minnigun but had the unfortunate tendency to hit the firing aircraft with its own shrapnel... assuming the vibration from the gun didn't literally shake the plan apart first.
replies:
Lockheed has built some WACKY shit, but I like Grumman better. Grumman made the Avenger the Tomcat and the Apollo Lunar Module. Take that, Stinkbug.
replies:
view more:
next ›
top 50 comments