by D. Vogt

Created on: October 23, 2010

The current airspeed record for a manned jet is still held by a Cold War-era American reconnaissance aircraft, the SR-71 Blackbird. However, faster unmanned prototypes have since flown, and the fastest passenger jet ever was the European-built Concorde. Concorde has not flown since its retirement in 2003, so that, ironically, both the fastest military and civilian manned aircraft ever are no longer in service.

The fastest manned flight by an aircraft took place on July 28, 1976, when an SR-71 Blackbird flown by the U.S. Air Force reached 2193.2 miles per hour, an airspeed record which still stands today. The SR-71 flew the New York-London route at less than two hours, easily beating out Concorde's record 2 hours and 52 minutes. It was first developed in the 1960s as an extremely high-altitude, extremely high-speed reconnaissance aircraft to replace the U-2. At the time, U.S. intelligence agencies relied on flights by such aircraft to produce valuable intelligence about the Soviet Union and other areas. The U-2 had run into trouble only a few years into its highly successful career (which in some areas still continues today), though, when new Soviet surface-to-air missiles destroyed a pair of U-2 aircraft, once over Russia in 1960 and again over Cuba in 1962. The SR-71 entered service in 1964.

Ultimately, the Blackbird was still in operational service until 1998, but during most of that time it was not critically necessary for the missions which the U-2 had flown. New intelligence satellites were soon able to gather a great deal of information without putting a pilot at risk or requiring an expensive aircraft to be hazarded over enemy territory. The SR-71 was first retired in 1989; a handful were reactivated during the 1990s, and then retired again once the air force determined it would be able to handle most of its aircraft intelligence-gathering functions using new unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) instead. Two of the Blackbirds stayed with NASA for testing purposes; the remainder are all permanently retired.

From the perspective of a passenger rather than a military pilot, however, the record belongs to another 1960s-era aircraft: the Aerospatiale-BAC Concorde, which first took off in 1969, and then flew regular transatlantic flights between 1976 and 2003. Like the SR-71, the 20 completed Concordes were fantastically expensive and technically complex. No attempts were made to introduce a supersonic competitor in the West, although the Soviets did develop the Tupolev Tu-144 supersonic jet at roughly the same time, allegedly after KGB spies pilfered blueprints from the Concorde team. The Concordes were suspended from flight service in 2000 after a tragic crash in Paris, and retired permanently in 2003. Concorde was a supersonic aircraft and once made the New York-London trip in 2 hours 52 minutes, although it usually did so at a more leisurely 3-3.5 hours.

Concorde and Blackbird are now in mothballs. The fastest record, of course, have always been set by what are effectively specialized gliders without jet engines - spacecraft during their re-entry from orbit. The Apollo re-entry modules reached Mach 30 (about 23,000 miles per hour), and the Space Shuttle is travelling 17,500 miles per hour before it decelerates during its descent and approach to landing. The fastest unmanned aircraft is an unmanned scramjet prototype built by NASA, the X-43. One of its descendants, the U.S. Air Force's X-51A WaveRider, can reach Mach 6 (4500 miles per hour).

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