Gonna look for that one, myself. Talk about a great story, if it is true!
SR-71 Blackbird fun facts
- Thread starter James Snover
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And there was the story of discovering Titanium's one great weakness: Chlorine. At some point an engineer and the fabrication guys were on the assembly line. The engineer is trying to show the fab guys what he wants, so he grabs a sheet of titanium, and using a straight edge and a ball point pen, inscribes a line across the titanium sheet. It was a nice,fancy pen, with a chlorine based ink. Seconds later, the panel splits in half, right along the line of the ink. Turns out Titanium is very reactive with chlorine. Seeing that, one of the guys remarks, "You know, it's summertime. And the city always puts extra chlorine in the water, in the summer time. And we just washed this one bird, and she's in the air, right now!" A frantic radio call later, the crew are instructed to land their aircraft immediately, making no maneuvers of any excess amount of g-force, as gently as possible, no explanation given. They do so, successfully. The crew chief goes out, finds the very irate crew, still in their pressure suits, walks up to a panel, taps it, and it falls to the ground. Chlorine.
I don't know what magic of metallurgy and chemistry allowed them to overcome this. But early Titanium had a real problem with Chlorine.
Titanium also was frail against cadmium where if it touched the Blackbird with a cadmium tool that area would of deterrated to nothing and a big hole would of appeared. So all the tools the groundcrew used on her was Cadmium free.
I wasn't familiar with the A-12 at all really, and a quick search turned up this article. I thought it was rather good, although the source might be questionable... OXCART vs Blackbird: Do You Know the Difference? — Central Intelligence Agency
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