Legendary Jet Arrives - In Pieces

The world's fastest and highest-flying production-model airplane, the SR-71 Blackbird, is making its final nest at Seattle's Museum of Flight at Boeing Field, where it will go on display in December.

It once flew three times the speed of sound and almost to the frontiers of space, but the A-12 version of the advanced reconnaissance plane that arrived yesterday lumbered into town in pieces on five trucks.

This spy plane came in from the heat of California's Mojave Desert, where it had been grounded for years. After the Air Force retired the last of the 49 SR-71s built by Lockheed in the 1960s, it was donated to the museum.

The cost of preparing the old bird to fly again, plus the cost of flying it here, would have been prohibitive, even if the Air Force would have allowed the flight.

So it was taken apart and trucked up Interstate 5 - an 1,100-mile trip the plane could have flown in about an hour.

The trucks, donated by Kenworth Truck Co., Kirkland, and Schmitt Lowbed Service, Redding, Calif., took about two weeks to make the long haul. They created a big stir among a crowd at the museum when they arrived with the plane's 98-foot-long fuselage strapped on a long trailer.

Some details about the once super-secret SR-71 are still classified, but this much is known: Made mainly of titanium, it could fly speeds of Mach 3 plus, range up to 80,000 feet and its cameras could record tiny objects on Earth from that altitude.

One of the dull-black and deadly looking two-engine planes once flew with its two-man crew from New York to London in one hour, 55 minutes.

Among those present when the plane arrived was Russ Szczepanik, an SR-71 co-pilot for six years, now a Bainbridge Island resident and Boeing employee.

"It's kind of a unique feeling," he said of flying in one of the planes, "because you're in the upper 1 percent of the atmosphere. You're as close to going into outer space (as you can go) and still have contact with the Earth.

"The sky is the deepest purplish-blue that you could imagine. The stars are absolutely bright, much like diamonds. You can see the entire curvature of the Earth."

Ron Dickneite, a Boeing supervisor who lives in Federal Way, was once an SR-71 ground-crew chief. He said the plane, which cruised at 1800 miles an hour, had cameras capable of spotting a wristwatch on the ground and recording its time.

But satellites gradually took over the spy role of the SR-71s, and the Air Force retired the last of the planes in March 1990.

The Blackbird trucked here will be reassembled in a temporary shed before going on display in the museum's Great Gallery.