EP171: How To Properly Brag About the World's Fastest Plane and Losing My Mentor, Finding Peace
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 21 January 2022
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, SR-71 Blackbird pilot, Bryan Shall, explains how much fun you can have when you're the fastest plane in the sky. LCpl. Tom Morton tells the story of Sgt. Joe L. Wrightsman not only being his mentor and squad leader, but also a hero of the highest caliber who died trying to save an Afghani police officer from drowning in the Helmand River.
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Time Codes:
00:00 - How To Properly Brag About the World's Fastest Plane
10:00 - Losing My Mentor, Finding Peace
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Lee Habib, and this is our American stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show. |
| 0:16.0 | And some of our favorite stories are about the men and women who serve our nation in uniform. |
| 0:22.6 | Throughout its nearly 24-year career, the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird spy plane remained the world's |
| 0:29.6 | fastest and highest flying operational aircraft. |
| 0:32.6 | From 80,000 feet, it could serve a 100,000 square miles of Earth's surface in a mere hour. |
| 0:40.3 | SR-71 pilot Brian Schuhl recalls in his book, Sled Driver, flying the world's fastest jet. |
| 0:48.3 | There were a lot of things we couldn't do in an SR-71, but we were the fastest guys on the block and loved reminding our |
| 0:56.6 | fellow aviators of this fact. Here's Major Shul with his legendary story known today as the LA |
| 1:04.4 | speed check. It's called the LA Speed Story. And it was just a story about one day it was really cool |
| 1:10.7 | being an SR-71 pilot. Walter and I were was just story about one day it was really cool being being |
| 1:12.0 | SR 71 pilot Walter and I were doing a training mission around the United States |
| 1:15.6 | where you just were building up hours and time and we take off at a Beal hit a |
| 1:19.8 | tanker in Idaho rip on up to Montana zip across Denver hang a right turn |
| 1:24.3 | Albuquerque out over Los Angeles up to Seattle back |
| 1:27.5 | into Sacramento two hours 21 minutes and you just do that for and you do it |
| 1:32.9 | backwards and you hit a tank or two it was just just to gain crew coordination |
| 1:36.5 | get build your hours we're on our last training mission we're over Tucson I can |
| 1:42.2 | see downtown LA from Tucson we're at 89,000 feet I can see the whole |
| 1:46.9 | western United States bathed in a warm October fall glow I can see the chain of Rocky |
| 1:52.4 | Mountains from Canada to New Mexico I could I could just see the most beautiful picture laid |
| 1:56.9 | at my feet in this air as smooth as glass not a gauge moving in the cockpit it was perfect now |
| 2:03.6 | i'm thinking we bad and i feel sorry for walter because he has to monitor five radios in the back |
... |
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