At eighty thousand feet in the air, it had to be perfect, but it wasn’t. Though it was grounded, it required more love than there was time. The price of maintaining the love was costly to the time. Military budget runs in a circle, and when your budgeting is marked as a thing to consider and question every twelve hours upon a congressional wrist watch, you take all you can get.

There weren’t many engineers willing to work on a multi-million dollar device that holds a linear and horizontal velocity record, and the ones that did wanted more money than god. The Air force translation of that is, I get to work on my own damn jet. Loose bolt? Take this hammer. Beehive nested in the engine? Here’s a stick.

It won’t be long until the retire of the Blackbird, and it’ll be a sad day when it’s gone. I better enjoy being a SF-71 pilot while I can.