GOING COASTAL: Yeilding recounts record-breaking flight at Sheffield library

If you turn on your favorite maps app and plot a course from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., you’ll find the trip will take an estimated 38 hours and 56 minutes to cover the 2,668 miles between them. That’s more than a day and a half.

Florence native Ed Yeilding once made the trip in just over an hour. Sixty-four minutes and 20 seconds to be precise.

It helps that Yeilding and his team member J.T. Vida did not have to worry about traffic conditions on their trip.

It also helps that they were traveling in the fastest manned jet ever built, the SR-71 Blackbird.

Yeilding gave a program about his time flying the Blackbird at the Sheffield Public Library on June 4, including a firsthand account of the March 6, 1990, flight where Yeilding, Vida and the last Blackbird to ever fly the skies went from the West Coast to the East Coast of the United States in 67 minutes and 54 seconds, a speed record that still stands 36 years later.

“It’s the airplane’s speed record — we were just lucky enough to be the crew,” Yeilding said. “I’m anxious for that record to be broken. I like to see progress. I’m hoping this record will be broken pretty soon. I’d like to see something faster. I keep waiting for them to call me and ask me to fly it.”

Yeilding graduated from Auburn and joined the United States Air Force.

He began flying the SR-71 in 1983. By then, the platform had been in service for almost 20 years.

The Blackbird was developed by Lockheed’s Skunk Works unit led by aerospace pioneer Clarence “Kelly” Johnson, one of the most storied names in aviation history.

The Blackbird was developed as a strategic reconnaissance aircraft and entered service in 1966.

In 1960, the Blackbird’s older cousin, a U-2 spy plane also designed by Johnson, was shot down by the Soviet Union.

When designing the Blackbird, Johnson and the Skunk Works sought to build an aircraft that would not allow a repeat of the U-2 incident.

The answer was simple in concept but monumental to pull off – the SR-71 would fly so high and so fast that shooting one down, even with a surface-to-air missile, would be almost impossible.

The Blackbird could fly at 85,000 feet, high enough to see the curvature of the earth.

It flew at Mach 3.3 (2,193.167 mph) at its fastest, but average operational speed was Mach 3.2.

For comparison, the bullets fired by M1 Garand rifles fielded during World War II flew at twice the speed of sound at 1,900 mph.

The Blackbird was literally faster than a speeding bullet.

“I never got to meet my hero Kelly Johnson, who designed the plane,” Yeilding said. “By the time I got to flying it in 1983, he had had some light stokes, and he wasn’t taking visitors. But I did get to fly in front of him. It was such a huge honor.”

Of the 32 aircraft built, 12 were lost in accidents, but none were shot down by an enemy.

By the end of the 1980s, the service life of the Blackbird was coming to a close.

The Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C., was set to receive an SR-71 for display.

The idea was conceived that the last flight of the Blackbird should be a memorable one.

“They wrote a letter to the secretary of the Air Force and said how neat it would be if the airplane set the record,” Yeilding said. “So, I was ordered to set the speed record. I was excited of course.”

Yeilding and Vida were the two-man team selected to make the final flight of the Blackbird.

At 4:15 a.m. Pacific time on March 6, 1990, the SR-71 taxied before taking off at 4:30 a.m.

The Blackbird leaked fuel while on the ground, which was designed on purpose.

The metal of the fuselage would expand and seal due to the extreme heat of hypersonic flight.

Blackbirds were also not completely filled with fuel before takeoff in case something was to go wrong.

The platform was known to be more difficult to fly than many other aircraft.

Yeilding and Vida topped off their fuel with two tankers some 200 miles off the West Coast before lighting the afterburners and crossing back over land at Mach 2.5.

“Fuel was going to be really tight,” Yeilding said. “We couldn’t cross the coastlines at top speed. We crossed the coast and started the timer at Mach 2.5. Eight minutes later we were at top speed, Mach 3.3. We slowed down when we were over D.C. and crossed the East Coast at Mach 2.5.”

The crew set three separate city-to-city speed records that morning that also still stand.

Yeilding said he was thinking about the song “America the Beautiful” and the pioneers who had taken months to travel across to country years before.

When the Blackbird reached its destination, it was topped off with fuel one final time so Yeilding and Vida could make two separate passes over the awaiting crowd at the Smithsonian.

The final pass was done at just 200 feet over the crowd, with Yeilding lighting the afterburner so the crowd could “feel the power” of the aircraft.

“I’ll never forget how we felt,” he said. “We were excited that we had just set some speed records and flown the fastest, but we were also sad about it. That was going to be our last flight in the Blackbird ever, and the last time that beautiful airplane would ever fly.”

A ceremony honoring the Blackbird, its crew and its history was then held on the tarmac.

When Yeilding was done with his presentation, he received a standing ovation from the 100 or so people that had gathered to hear his story.