Good morning,
Whitewater’s forecast for today calls for a day of thunderstorms with a high of eighty-one degrees.
Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission will meet tonight at 5 p.m. The agenda is available online.
On this day in 1974, a milestone in aviation: an American SR-71 made the trip from New York to London in less than two hours. Wired describes the event and plane —
On a flight to the Farnborough Air Show outside London, Maj. James Sullivan and Maj. Noel Widdifield fly the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird from New York to London in 1 hour, 54 minutes, 56.4 seconds. The 1,806-mph flight still holds the transatlantic speed record between the two cities.
Developed during the middle of the cold war, the Lockheed SR-71 was designed as a reconnaissance aircraft that could fly fast enough to avoid being shot down by Russian aircraft or missiles. Initially developed as the A-12 for the CIA, the aircraft evolved and adapted many times in its more than 30 years of flying.
