When A Pilot’s Spy Plane Disintegrated Around Him, He Started An Insane Free Fall From 78,000 Feet

A Lockheed SR-71 “Blackbird” is streaking across the sky above California, 14 miles high. One moment, the plane is rocketing through the thin air at enormous speed, and then disaster strikes. The aircraft is out of control, falling to pieces, and pilot Bill Weaver has no idea what’s happened; he’s unconscious and plummeting toward the ground.

Gradually, Weaver regains consciousness. “This has to be a bad dream,” he whimsically thinks. But 14 miles up and shooting towards Earth is not a great place for whimsy. He’s not going to wake up and figure out what’s going on. Because this hasn’t been a dream, as he slowly realizes.

The air is rushing by Weaver as he falls. But although he can hear the wind making pieces of his equipment flap, he can’t see anything. The glass window of his suit in front of his face is covered in ice, the freezing temperature of the thin air having left him effectively blind. There seems to be no way out for Weaver.

Weaver had not been afraid of danger; for his entire career as a test pilot, it had been a central part of his life. He’d been involved in testing super-fast planes for some time. The pilot had tested not only SR-71s, but also all the other planes that could top Mach 3 – that’s three times the speed of sound – including YF-12s and A-12s.

The plane that had fallen apart around Weaver was a Lockheed SR-71, known as a Blackbird. Operated by the United States Air Force (USAF) as a spy plane, it was still a young airplane at the time of the 1966 accident. Lockheed had developed the aircraft from its A-12 in its Skunk Works department.

When spying, the Blackbird flew high and fast. Very fast. It was and still is the most rapid piloted aircraft, a record it took from Lockheed’s YF-12 in 1976. The plane was quick enough to outpace a missile. This was the plan if the Soviets somehow managed to get a lock: simply outspeed their weapon.

Although the Blackbird was fitted with countermeasures to defeat enemy radar, it would hardly need them. It was made to be close to invisible to radar, and if the enemy did lock on, the pilot could maneuver to shake free. If that failed, the SR-71 would disappear out of range so fast that a missile couldn’t get close.

And forget about intercepting the Blackbird with a fighter jet. The Soviet Union’s quickest plane was the MiG-25, but it couldn’t fly at the heights at which the SR-71 cruised. So it’s no surprise that in 34 years, not a single Blackbird went down under enemy fire. Even so, of the 32 planes constructed, accidents claimed 12.

So the Blackbird – so named for its dark color, which was actually a near-black blue – was not always a safe ride for its occupants. They were two, sitting in cockpits one behind the other. At the front flew the pilot, while behind him you’d find the reconnaissance systems officer, who controlled equipment and navigated.

To keep the fliers alive at the elevations that the plane reached, they wore pressure suits. These were a type of life-support kit, which pumped in oxygen and, importantly, were pressurized. Without them, the fliers would be prone to a great deal of suffering, not just from the g-forces and rough ride, but also from the boiling of their blood in the low-pressure environment!

When a plane goes at Mach 3, it generates a lot of heat. And had the Blackbird been smooth, its skin would have been liable to cleaving apart and warping. So much of the plane’s aluminum skin was corrugated, which allowed it to grow when it warmed up, keeping it strong.

Heat wasn’t the only danger that threatened the Blackbird. The onboard computers struggled to keep up with the flood of data from the aircraft’s onboard sensors. Without getting too technical, at high speeds turbulence could then mean that a shockwave normally expelled backwards out of the plane’s engines could travel forward, instead emerging from the power unit’s inlet. The phenomenon, an “inlet unstart,” would cause the plane to swing from side to side, emitting bangs, until the internal systems got things back to normal.

The unstart could make the going a bit rough for the crew, with the wild movements throwing their heads against the cockpit. One way the crew might try to fix the unstart would be to stop both inlets and then start them up again. Lockheed learned from the problem, installing automatic reset systems – but not before Weaver’s accident.

Unstarts were common, so Weaver may well have expected one when he walked across the tarmac at Edwards Air Force Base in California. It was a winter’s day early in 1966, and he was accompanied in the Blackbird by Jim Zwayer. The crew of two would evaluate the plane’s navigation and reconnaissance systems together.

On top of this, the two of them would be looking into ways to enable better flight at very high speeds. To do this, the center of gravity of the plane was set back further than it normally would be. This could be expected to cut the stability of the Blackbird along its length.

It was about 11:20 a.m. when the crew received clearance for takeoff, and they powered away from Edwards. They refueled in midair, and turned east. Weaver took her up to 78,000 feet – not far short of 15 miles high. The plane flew at Mach 3.2, not far short of an astonishing 2,500mph.

As the plane cruised high above the Earth, the automatic controls of the inlet of the right engine stopped working, so Weaver switched to manual. The inlet had to be continually tweaked as the plane flew above the speed of sound, to manipulate the airflow into the engine. Do this wrongly, and problems would ensue.

The risk of an unstart reared its head. If the engine suffered an unstart, it would no longer be pushing the plane forward; as a result, with only one engine firing the plane would “yaw.” This means the remaining engine would power the plane in circles as well as forward, a catastrophe if it wasn’t set straight. Still, Weaver wasn’t too worried: other things being equal, the manually-adjusted inlet system should keep the shockwave in position.

Weaver made a planned turn to the right, banking the aircraft 35 degrees. Boom! The feared unstart immediately happened, the huge forces acting on the plane at such terrifying speeds violently increasing the right turn as well as pushing the nose skywards. Weaver slammed his stick down and to the left, but to no avail! The pilot realized that things were about to get hectic.

Ejecting from the plane at such high speeds would probably have been fatal, and Weaver tried to advise Zwayer to stick with it until he could slow down and get a bit lower. But with the g-forces mounting, the pilot could hardly get a word out straight. When people listened back to the cockpit voice recorder, they couldn’t understand a word that he said.

The truth was, though, that Weaver was not going to be able to get the plane down or even keep it one piece. It was careening out of control more than 17 miles up in the air. The planned maneuver had been the straw that broke the camel’s back, and now all heck was breaking loose in the aircraft.

It had only taken a couple of seconds from the problem in the inlet to spiraling out of control. And that spinning took its toll on Weaver, with the g-forces now so high that he could no longer stay conscious. As he lolled in his seat, completely out, the plane quite literally fell apart, and Weaver’s unconscious form started to head towards the ground.

Weaver wasn’t unconscious for too long, but when he came to, things were kind of weird. At first, he imagined that he was at home in bed, dreaming of all this. But as he gathered his senses, he started to realize that he was actually awake. The pilot was confused, though: there was no way he should still be alive.

So Weaver’s next conclusion was quite logical. If he couldn’t be alive, he must have died. And as it happened, he felt okay. If this was the afterlife, it wasn’t so – but, wait a minute! This wasn’t heaven. He had somehow been ejected from the plane and was plummeting towards the ground at a scary rate.

Now Weaver knew this was true because he could hear the air rushing past him and the distant noise of straps being flapped by the wind. But with ice covering the front of his helmet, he was effectively blind. So all in all, his position seemed difficult. He was still many miles from Earth, couldn’t see and had no idea how he’d got out of his plane.

The good news was that his pressure suit had kept him alive. Its emergency oxygen had ensured that inside it, the pressure stayed high. As we noted earlier, this kept his blood from boiling. And the inflated suit had protected him from being tossed around like a rag doll in the g-forces to which he’d been subjected.

The bad news was that when Weaver’s plane had disintegrated, it had been spinning and tumbling. And the air up here was just too thin to stop him if he was rotating. His ejection seat had a small parachute designed to stop a pilot from spinning, but as he hadn’t ejected in the approved way, it might not have worked.

Well, more good news. Sort of. Weaver was falling straight down, so the stabilizing chute must have worked. Now his next problem was that he had no idea how far from the ground he was, or how long he’d been out. His main chute was supposed to open at 15,000 feet, but in his position you wouldn’t want to rely on it.

So Weaver decided to activate it manually. Now his chief difficulty was that with frozen hands, he couldn’t actually find the D-ring that would deploy the chute – he’d have to open his helmet up. Just as he grabbed his face plate, he felt himself slow rapidly. His chute had deployed. And with his helmet open, he could see his navigator’s chute in the distance.

What was left of Weaver’s plane had beaten him to the ground and lay in flames several miles away. But his new concern was that, should he survive the landing, he’d be coming down in empty, snowy ground that seemed to be miles from any human life. A tough night beckoned.

Mind you, Weaver told himself that he was still strapped into his seat, so he would have some equipment, with a kit in its assembly. And he’d trained in survival, so things could be worse. With only a few hundred feet to go, he released himself from the seat. A lanyard would keep it attached to him, but not too close so that it wouldn’t injure him on landing.

As the pilot neared the ground, Weaver spotted yet another pitfall. Right where he was about to land was some kind of wild animal – perhaps an antelope. But it soon ran when he neared the earth. He came down into softish ground, not too much the worse for wear, albeit caught up in a fight with a wayward chute.

Amazingly, there was a person there to help him with the chute. A man in a cowboy hat came into view, having disembarked from a helicopter. So he wouldn’t be sleeping in the open after all! His amazing trip to the ground would now see him rise once more, this time in a chopper.

The man, Albert Mitchell, Jr., owned a ranch nearby – it turned out that Weaver had landed in northeast New Mexico, not far from the rancher’s house. Mitchell helped him with the canopy and trapped it under some rocks so that Weaver wasn’t dragged off into the sunset. Mitchell had alerted the authorities, having seen the chutes coming down.

Once Weaver was out of the chute’s harness, he found out what he’d heard flapping in the wind. It was the remains of his seatbelts. He definitely hadn’t ejected from the airplane: he’d left the seat behind! All that was left was the shredded remains of the belts that had attached him to it.

On top of that, there was only one oxygen line still attached – just – to Weaver’s pressure suit. The other was loose. If both had gone, he’d have been finished, without air and with a depressurized flying suit. And the kit had been a lifesaver: he had no more than a few bruises. Sadly, the same couldn’t be said for his colleague: Zwayer had lost his life when the aircraft fell apart.

It turned out that the Blackbird’s nose had snapped off behind the back cockpit. This had left the plane vulnerable to enormous g-forces which had pulled Weaver and Zwayer out of the aircraft. After the accident, putting the center of gravity behind its normal spot was discontinued, and work was done on the inlet system.

As for Weaver, his fall to Earth had not dampened his enthusiasm for flying Blackbirds. He went up again a fortnight later. Naturally, his accompanying crewman was a little nervous about how he’d feel. So when he took off, he heard a worried voice come over the comms. The engineer in the rear cockpit thought he might have bailed out on takeoff.

It turned out that the guy in the back seat couldn’t actually see into the front cockpit. And when he’d gotten a red light on his warning board that said that the pilot had ejected, he feared the worst. Luckily though, Weaver had remained aboard. The cause was just a switch that had mistakenly flipped.

So Weaver’s career as a test pilot did not end just because his plane vanished from around him. No, it continued in the same way. He got put onto the L-1011 airliner project after he’d finished with Blackbirds. Later he got promoted to chief pilot and managed Lockheed’s commercial flying operations. All in all, a better future than he might have hoped for when hurtling towards the Earth in free fall on that January day.