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

Schuel 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 pilot.

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 beale, hit a tanker in Idaho, rip on 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, and you do it backwards, and you hit a tanker, too. It was just to gain

crew coordination, build your hours. We're on our last training mission. We're over Tucson.

I can see downtown L.A. from Tucson. We're at 89,000 feet. I can see the whole western

United States bathed in a warm October fall glow. I can see the chain of Rocky Mountains

...