Continuing my sightseeing tour, here I am on the flight deck of the USS Intrepid. It's now a sea, air and space museum docked here in New York at Pier 86. Behind me is my favorite plane, the A-12 Blackbird. I've wanted to see one for years, but have never been able to get this close to one. You could actually touch it. There was a Harrier, an F-14 Tomcat, an F-16 Falcon and even a Russian Mig among many others. You also got to tour the command deck, crew quarters and the CIC. The hangar deck is now filled with exhibits from World War II up to the space program. Intrepid was one of the carriers that was sent out to retrieve the astronauts after splashdown. Parked next to the Intrepid you also got to tour a Concorde jet and the Growler, a U.S. submarine. Thinking it would only take an hour or two, I had also planned on taking a trip to Central Park. I ended up spending over 4 hours there...
4 comments:
Very, very cool. I took the in-laws here to tour the aircraft carrier USS Hornet, permanently docked in Alameda. It also rescued Apollo 11 and 12 astronauts, and we toured the whole ship. Really fun. The original Hornet sunk in WW2 in the Pacific, and the ship we toured fought in Korea, Vietnam and elsewhere. But I think the plane behind you in this shot is a Lockheed SR71 "Blackbird"? I read stories about this plane over Vietnam running missions. They'd shoot a missle at it and the pilot would simply push the throttle forward to outrun it. SR71 was said to do Mach 3 on the specification sheets, but Lockheed never really would say how fast it went. Outrun a missle? I'd say Mach 6. Very cool. But not as fast as Brother #4's trumpet riffs......
No, this one is an A-12. There are actually 3 different models of the "Blackbird", the SR-71 was just the most prolific, they made about 30 of them. Only about a dozen A-12's made it off the line.
Dang - that's pretty cool that you know more about planes than I do. Visions of Gumdrop bedroom and shooting "pen and pencil" missles at halfway realistic metal models of WW2 aircraft in my bedroom - prentending for the day I'd fly.....
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