Word: blackbirding
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...blackbird and thrush...
...into the Russian area. Early one morning, as Soviet engineers landed from two river craft on their part of the island to repair navigation markers, Chinese ambushers opened fire with submachine guns and grenade launchers. The fusillade killed one Russian worker, wounded two and inflicted severe damage on the Blackbird and Turpan, the boats. The Russians, so they say, did not even shoot back...
...photograph anything of military interest, from missile installations to arms depots. Best known is the subsonic U2, which precipitated a major cold-war crisis when the Soviet Union shot down one piloted by Francis Gary Powers in 1960. Its replacement is the SR-71, the 2,000-m.p.h. Blackbird, which is probably the world's fastest airplane in sustained flight (TIME, April...
...mighty engines can drive the SR-71 in a missile-like ballistic curve that takes the plane above 97% of the earth's atmosphere. Yet even in the rarefied upper atmosphere, the surface temperature of the plane's leading edges hits 630°, enough to heat the Blackbird's titanium skin to cherry-red incandescence. An intricate system of pumps and pipelines circulates fuel near enough to the skin to absorb heat and carry it to cooler parts of the plane where it is radiated away. Even so, if the space-suited two-man crew cannot take...
...peer through clouds and map terrain far from its path. New cameras use "folded optics" to produce telescopic closeups in black-and-white or on new, grainless color film-which can be dropped in pods and parachuted to waiting intelligence officers. When sensitive receivers detect incoming radar pulses, the Blackbird can dip into its bag of tricks and give itself "electronic invisibility." There is even a top-secret method of masking the SR-71's heat emissions to confuse enemy infrared tracking. Put together in one package, the sophisticated gadgetry makes the Blackbird all but invulnerable-the next best...