This is an I-Heart podcast.

This is Lee Habib, and this is our American stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show.

And some of our favorite stories are about the men and women who serve our nation in uniform.

Throughout its nearly 24-year career, the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird spy plane remained the

world's fastest and highest flying operational aircraft.

From 80,000 feet, it could serve a 100,000 square miles of Earth's surface in a mere hour.

SR-71 pilot Brian Schuhl recalls in his book, Flood Driver, flying the world's fastest jet.

There are 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 fellow aviators of this fact.

Here's Major Shul with his legendary story known today

as the LA Speed Check.

It's called the LA Speed Story.

And it was just a story about one day it was really cool being SR 71.

Walter and I were doing a training mission around the United States where you just were

building up hours and time.

And we take off at a Beal, hit a tanker in Idaho, rip up to Montana zip across Denver hang a right turn

Albuquerque out over Los Angeles up to Seattle back into Sacramento two hours 21

minutes and you just do that for you do it backwards and you hit a tanker to

just just to gain crew coordination get build your hours we're on our last training

mission we're over

Tucson I can see downtown LA from Tucson we're at 89,000 feet I can see the whole

...