Nice, I think I was in my early teens when we left as well. I’m sure my dad has a box of old photos in it somewhere, but his last few years of service kinda soured any fond memories he had left of his time in the Air Force. Though I think that’s kinda common place for senior NCO, I haven’t met too many dudes above Master Sargent who I could claim were jolly guys.

No worries, same here. We were there from 96-00, there’s a good chance we’ve run into each other before! There’s an even better chance that our fathers worked together in some capacity, it was a relatively tiny base and the U2 program was pretty small.

I think Beale was one of my favorite bases I’ve ever lived on, I used to go hiking in the foot hills basically everyday during summer. I feel like it was small and remote enough where you could get into a lot of shit as a kid without ever really getting in any trouble.

By chance did you guys ever go to one of the Christmas parties in the old skunk works building?

Supposedly it’s supposed to be optionally manned.

Oh nice, were you guys stationed out at Beale AFB?

I mean it flew in operations up until 1990 and its last actual flight was in 1999.

We can’t really build stuff like that anymore. The people who designed it had an intuitive grasp for aeronautics. You can’t teach intuition to a computer.

I mean that’s just a silly claim, the HTV-2 drone has literally gone mach 20, which is nearly 10 times faster than the SR71. Plus the SR72 project is currently in development with aims to be nearly twice as fast as the SR71.

I mean, it’s not that old of an airframe. I’m only middle aged and I saw the last time it flew in 1991. My dad just retired from the FAA a couple years ago and when he was in the military he maintained the flight suits for the SR71 and U2 programs.

The original engineers may have passed, but the crew and engineers responsible for the huge amount of maintenance for the airframe are still around and probably have more functional knowledge about the airframe than the designers.

Edit: 1999 not 1991.