July 10 Meeting: Col. Buddy Brown, USAF (Ret.)
UPDATE:
‘Lost at 2300 miles per hour’
“I bet you’ve never been lost at 2300 miles per hour, let me tell you, it’s an experience,” said Buddy Brown, a retired Air Force colonel, to a packed house at the Concord/Farragut Republican Club last week.
Brown wasn’t just any pilot in the Air Force. He was one of the select few chosen to fly missions in the U-2 and SR-71 spy planes.
He’s one of six pilots still living who flew reconnaissance missions in the U-2 over
“If anything happened, they wanted to be able to say it was a military exercise, not a spy mission,” Brown said. “We took off at 4 a.m., through the worst thunderstorm I’ve ever flown in.”
They got to
“You could look down and see their SAM (surface-to-air missiles) sites about the size of your fingernail,” he said. “They looked like the Star of David, but each point on the star was a missile.”
The U-2, though, had defensive interference designed to make the missiles deflect away from the aircraft.
Brown also flew his planes into the remnants of nuclear tests, conducted by
“We could predict where the air mass from the test site would blow to,” he said. “So we flew in, took samples and we could tell what kind of missile it was, what kind of warhead it was, pretty much everything you could want to know.”
But, the worst trips, he said, were in the
“I would rather bail out over
Navigation was also tricky, as one of his fellow pilots found out.
“You would get to the North Pole and all your heading would switch to due south,” he said. “One time, our pilot got started on the wrong ‘south’ heading and ended up in the middle of the
After eight years, Brown climbed out of the U-2 pilot seat and into a new plane, the SR-71 Blackbird.
“There’s not an aircraft flying now that could do what the Blackbird could,” he said. “It’s faster than a bullet from a .30-06 rifle. It flew at 80,000 feet – so high you could see the curvature of the earth.”
The plane required 100 hours of time in a simulator before pilots could fly it yet Brown said it was remarkably smooth.
“While you were flying, you’d feel just like you were sitting right here unless you had a unstart,” he said.
A unstart is when the plane would stall, causing the sonic boom to get out in front of the SR-71.
“It shakes the aircraft all over the place.”
Now, back on the ground in Farragut with his wife, Nancy, Brown attends church regularly at Central Baptist Church of Bearden.
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