On January 25, 1966, test pilot Bill Weaver and his navigator were on a SR71 test flight when the plane disintegrated around them at Mach 3.18.
"After taking off, we reached our cruising altitude of 78,800ft, as we entered our 35 deg bank turn, the right engine malfunctioned and the control stick jammed. I attempted to stay with the plane but within a few seconds, I blacked out and the bird disappeared around us.
My first thought was that I was having a bad dream. As I regained consciousness, I realized this was no dream. Therefore, I must be dead. Since I didn’t feel bad, I decided being dead wasn’t so bad after all. AS FULL AWARENESS took hold, I realized I was not dead, but had somehow separated from the airplane. The sound of rushing air confirmed I was falling, but I couldn’t see anything. because my face plate had frozen over and I was staring at a layer of ice.
At that altitude, centrifugal forces are high enough to cause physical injury. For that reason, the SR-71’s parachute system was designed to automatically deploy a small chute shortly after ejection and seat separation.
The little chute must have deployed and was doing its job. Next concern: the main parachute, which was designed to open automatically at 15,000 ft. Again I had no idea if it would work. There was no way to know how long I had been blacked-out or how far I had fallen. Then I felt the reassuring sudden deceleration of main-chute deployment. I raised the frozen face plate and saw I was descending through a clear, winter sky with unlimited visibility.
My first-ever parachute landing was pretty smooth.
When I did land, which felt like the middle of nowhere, a rancher found me. He loaded me onto his helicopter and flew to a nearby hospital.
Now, I didn’t know much about rotorcraft, but I knew a lot about “red lines,” and he kept the airspeed above red line all the way. I couldn’t help but think how ironic it would be to have survived one disaster only to be done in by the helicopter that had come to my rescue.
Two weeks later. I was back on a new SR71” #blackbird