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US District Judge Richard Stearns sided with 25 states and the District of Columbia which sued the administration.

A federal judge has ruled against enforcing a new rule by the administration of US President Donald Trump that would require chronically ill people on Medicaid, a public health insurance programme for low-income individuals, to prove themselves “medically frail” to qualify for work exemptions.

US District Judge Richard Stearns blocked the rule on Thursday, siding with 25 states and the District of Columbia, which had sued the Trump administration in June over the change, arguing that it unlawfully limits exemptions for people with serious medical conditions.

The law says the definition of medically frail must include people who are blind or disabled, have substance use disorders or disabling mental disorders, have certain disabilities that significantly impair daily activities, or have serious or complex medical conditions.

‘Significantly impair’ abilities

But the administration’s rule went further, requiring people in those categories to show that their conditions also “significantly impair” their ability to comply with the law’s work requirements.

The plaintiffs argued that the stricter rule would prevent eligible Americans from accessing the care they need, and that it oversteps the law’s text.

“The states have met their burden of showing irreparable harm for which monetary damages would provide inadequate compensation – they face the burden of costly and intensive alterations to their eligibility verification systems,” Stearns said in his 16-page ruling.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the agency that adopted the rule, declined to comment.

Medicaid is a public health insurance programme for low-income people, funded by state and federal governments.

Two restrictions upheld

Starting January 1, 2027, Medicaid expansion enrollees aged 19 to 64 must show that they work or do community service at least 80 hours a month, or are in school at least half the time. There are exceptions for those considered medically frail or in addiction treatment programmes, among others.

Notably, while the ruling will make it easier for some Medicaid recipients with qualifying medical conditions to obtain an exemption from the new work requirements, Stearns’s decision does not strike down the work requirements as unlawful.

Stearns serves in the District of Massachusetts and was appointed by President Bill Clinton.

His ruling upheld two other federal restrictions on how states can verify medical frailty that the states and the District of Columbia had also contested.

Nobel Peace Prize winner returns to Venezuela from exile, pressing for elections and criticising a controversial US oil deal with Caracas.

Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado has thanked US President Donald Trump’s administration for opening the “floodgate to freedom” by abducting President Nicolas Maduro in January.

The Nobel Peace Prize laureate on Thursday also called for elections to be held in Venezuela next year, in her first public remarks since returning from more than 10 months in exile.

“Thanks to their vision, their courage, and their action on January 3, the floodgate to freedom has been opened,” Machado told a news conference in Caracas, naming Trump, his administration and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Rubio “has set out a sequence of events aimed at moving toward a democratic transition that makes clear the holding of presidential elections in 2027”, she said.

Machado has praised Trump before, presenting the president with her Nobel medal – a prize he feverishly coveted for himself in 2025.

A longtime activist, Machado fled Venezuela for Oslo in December to accept the Nobel Peace Prize. On Thursday, she said she had come home to “mobilise society”. US special forces veterans with an organisation called Grey Bull Rescue helped Machado escape by boat after she spent a year in hiding from Maduro’s regime.

Since Maduro’s abduction in January, the country has been ruled by his former Vice President Delcy Rodriguez.

Machado was greeted by cheering supporters as she travelled in her motorcade after she returned to Venezuela on Sunday. Rodriguez voiced distaste for the fanfare.

“The show could have been avoided – the airports are right here,” she said on state television.

When asked about a possible meeting with Rodriguez, the opposition leader said she had not received any message from her or from Washington.

Shortly before Machado’s statements on Thursday, Rodriguez assured the nation that elections would be held in Venezuela “with the world as witness” but did not specify a date.

Her return comes just weeks after a controversial US oil deal that will see Venezuela hand over 20 percent of its vast oil reserves.

“This agreement does not reflect the levels of transparency that Venezuelan society wants,” Machado said, criticising the deal.

Four children drowned in bodies of water, while another man died in a car accident caused by the floods.

Heavy rains have been pouring over several Syrian provinces, leaving at least five people dead, including four children, in northern and eastern regions.

The four children all drowned in bodies of water across Raqqa and Deir Az Zor governorates, the Ministry of Emergency and Disaster Management said in a statement on Thursday.

A man also died when his car was caught in floodwaters near al-Salmani Bridge in the western Raqqa countryside.

Five others, including two children, remain missing in the storms that have drenched the country.

Bridge collapse

Thursday marked the second day the ministry recorded responses to flooding across the country. It continues to issue situation updates on its X account.

The ministry reported infrastructure damage and disruptions to several bridges in affected areas: Aleppo, Raqqa, Deir Az Zor, Hasakah and Homs.

State news agency SANA said al-Salmani Bridge, west of Tabqa, collapsed in the flooding, shutting the road linking Raqqa to Aleppo.

Emergency teams also reported rescuing 15 civilians whose vehicles were trapped by floodwaters. The ministry said it evacuated approximately 375 families from three camps on the rural outskirts of Raqqa.

This is not the first time the country has faced the threat of heavy rains and the flooding that follows.

UNICEF reported in June that 17,000 people had been adversely affected by flooding so far in the year. At the time, the UN agency said 700 families had been displaced, including around 2,000 children, and that 49 water treatment plants in Deir Az Zor and Raqqa governorates had also gone out of service.

Iran claims to have brought down what looks to be a U.S.-made MQM-170C Outlaw G2 drone largely intact. A video shows it has a notable feature on top of its nose. In U.S. military use today, Outlaw-series drones are best known as an aerial target for use in training and testing.

The footage in question, and the accompanying claims, should be treated with caution given that the regime in Tehran and the country’s media outlets do routinely make exaggerated and unverified claims. That being said, so far, the footage looks to be credible. Furthermore, the U.S. military has pushed back on Iran’s version of events, but has not explicitly denied having lost one of these drones in the region recently.

For its part, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) says it captured the MQM-170-series drone following what it described as an “offensive electronic warfare operation” somewhere to the “west of the Strait of Hormuz.” The IRGC also claims that the uncrewed aircraft was conducting reconnaissance on Iranian air defenses positioned along the country’s Persian Gulf coast. At the time of writing, no firm evidence has been provided to support either of these assertions. The IRGC has released the aforementioned video, seen below, which it says shows the drone being tracked via an infrared camera, as well as after its recovery.

“In the past weeks and months, the IRGC has repeatedly lied out of desperation, and today is no different,” U.S. Navy Capt. Tim Hawkins, spokesperson for U.S. Central Command, told TWZ when asked about the specific Iranian claims.

“We’re not going to waste our time. U.S. forces remain vigilant and laser-focused on our assigned missions,” Hawkins said in response to a follow-up question about whether CENTCOM could confirm or deny the loss of an MQM-170-series drone for any reason.

As an aside, Iran recovered an Anduril Dive-LD uncrewed underwater vehicle (UUV) largely intact last month in what the IRGC claimed had been a “complex intelligence and operational action.” U.S. authorities ultimately confirmed the loss of the advanced UUV, but said it was the result of a malfunction.

As mentioned, the drone seen in the IRGC video does look to be an MQM-170C, or at least a closely-related variant thereof. It has an interesting feature on top of its nose: a single forward-looking aperture. This is something that is commonly associated with staring-type optics, which drones often use to aid with navigation. There is a possibility that it could be a seeker, if the drone were to be configured as a one-way-attack munition, but this seems unlikely.

MQM-170C’s manufacturer, Griffon Aerospace, which refers to this design internally as the Outlaw Gen 2 (G2), does say on its website that it can be configured as “an inexpensive payload development platform offering great endurance, payload size, weight, and power.” The company’s website also says that the target configuration of the G2 has a gross weight of 150 pounds, but that this can grow to 225 pounds when used as a more general-purpose drone.

The drone, which is nearly 11 feet long and has a wingspan of 16 feet, otherwise has a stated maximum endurance of eight hours, top speed of 126 knots, and the ability to reach altitudes of more than 16,000 feet. The design is propelled by a 2-cylinder, 2-stroke combustion engine driving a single pusher propeller. The G2 gets into the air via a catapult-type launcher and can be recovered, either after a glide-in landing on suitable terrain or via parachute.

Griffon Aerospace also offers an ‘expanded’ G2E version with fixed tricycle landing gear as an “open and customizable platform for ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] missions, subsystem testing, and R&D [research and development].” This version has a lower maximum takeoff weight and total endurance compared to the baseline G2, according to the company’s website. The IRGC video does not show any evidence of landing gear, but it could have broken away when the drone came down.

The larger Outlaw family, which traces back to the early 2000s, also includes the Gen 1 MQM-170A, which has a completely different design from the subsequent G2 drone. Griffon also developed a derivative of the Gen 1 design with a twin-boom tail, called the Outlaw Boomer, which the U.S. military designated the MQM-170B. There is also a twin-engine, twin-boom derivative of the Outlaw G2 that the U.S. military has at least tested in the past.

This brings us to the additional matter of a contract the U.S. Army awarded to Griffon Aerospace, valued at nearly $68 million, for the procurement of a Gen 3 version of the Outlaw on June 3. When the Pentagon first announced this deal, it was explicitly said to be “in support of Operation Epic Fury” against Iran. That portion of the announcement was quietly deleted sometime thereafter.

“A company official declined to provide details about the Gen 3 design,” Breaking Defense reported in a story published on June 5.

On August 25, Griffon received an additional contract from the Army, valued at just under $133 million, “to procure Griffon Outlaw systems, support equipment and field service representatives for system use and employment.” That announcement made no mention of operations against Iran.

At the time of writing, Griffon Aerospace’s website does not appear to make any mention of the Gen 3 Outlaw. TWZ has reached out for more information about this drone.

Given the known breadth of Outlaw designs to date, it is possible that the Gen 3 drone is substantially, if not entirely, different from any of the existing types. At the same time, the June contract announcement does establish a link between the Outlaw family and U.S. military use outside of training and testing, and specifically as part of real-world operations aimed at Iran.

There remains the potential that Iran simply captured an Outlaw target drone that U.S. forces lost control of during training or testing in the region. The drone seen in the IRGC video lacks the high-visibility orange markings typically seen on aerial targets, though these could easily have been painted over. Iranian authorities could have still fabricated the recovery, in part or in whole, though there is no firm evidence of that at present, either.

Another non-U.S. operator region could also be employing versions of the Outlaw, including in non-target drone roles, such as for surveillance and reconnaissance, or as decoys.

All of this does now come amid growing signs that the United States, as well as Israel, are preparing to launch a new major campaign against Iran. As TWZ reported recently, stimulating Iranian air defenses to glean key intelligence about their current capabilities and positions would be critical in the lead-up to any such operation.

“Stimulating Iran’s air defenses is critical,” our own Tyler Rogoway wrote on X earlier this month following unconfirmed reports of unusual Israeli air activity. “By Iran operating as if a full scale attack could be coming, their air defenses can be detected, categorized and geolocated. This is absolutely critical prior to a major air operation. Surveilling them during times of lower alert does not provide the same fidelity of actionable intelligence. Knowing where those threats are and how they are operating can mean the difference of life and death and/or will help standoff munitions make their way to their targets as those defenses can be suppressed, destroyed, or avoided entirely via careful mission planning.”

In September, claims had emerged that Iran had shot down a U.S.-made ADM-160 Miniature Air-Launched Decoy (MALD), but that remains unconfirmed. There were also reports of unusual, UAP-like objects flying over Iran, which have similarly not been confirmed.

The updated lawsuit cites a new report that Democratic operatives recruited a competitor to confuse voters and unseat a Republican incumbent.

The United States Department of Justice has filed a revised lawsuit seeking to decertify the results of a Senate race in the state of Alaska if Republican incumbent Dan S Sullivan loses narrowly.

The updated lawsuit on Thursday comes just days before the November 3 midterm election, which will determine control of Congress.

The complaint accuses Democrats of trying to confuse voters by placing a candidate with the same name as Sullivan on the ballot.

Alaska’s Senate race is one of seven key toss-ups that will likely decide whether Republicans keep their majority in Congress’s upper chamber.

Democratic challenger Mary Peltola is seeking to unseat Sullivan, a Republican ally of US President Donald Trump.

But a New York Times report on Wednesday alleged that members of Peltola’s campaign helped recruit a retired teacher, Dan J Sullivan Jr, to run for the Senate seat as a spoiler candidate, designed to draw votes away from the incumbent.

The Times report prompted a renewed legal push under the Trump administration to bar Alaska from certifying its election results, should Senator Sullivan lose.

The Department of Justice issued 40 subpoenas and document preservation requests as part of the revised complaint, the Reuters news agency reported.

Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy also ordered a criminal investigation into the allegations. Peltola’s campaign has denied involvement in Dan J Sullivan Jr’s bid for the Senate.

Prosecutors, however, have accused the Democrat and her allies of playing partisan tricks – and undermining voters as a result.

“They orchestrated his sham campaign for the purpose of misleading Alaskan voters and getting Peltola elected,” Justice Department lawyers wrote in their amended complaint.

But the Justice Department’s lawsuit has raised concerns about election integrity and federal meddling.

Under the US Constitution, election administration falls to the states, not the presidency.

In June, Alaska’s Supreme Court ruled that Dan J Sullivan Jr could compete in the midterms, and the state’s election office has already taken steps to reduce confusion between the two Sullivans.

Recruiting candidates to split an opponent’s vote – a practice known as ballot stacking – is also generally considered to be legal and has been used by both parties in Alaska.

Critics have been sceptical of the Justice Department’s bid to pause the certification of Alaska’s Senate results if Senator Sullivan does not win re-election, noting it would be impossible to divine voter intent based on the final tally alone.

Justin Levitt, a former Department of Justice official under President Joe Biden, also questioned what legal authority the federal government had to get involved in the case.

“I don’t know what they’re putting out subpoenas to investigate because I don’t know what federal violations are implicated that DOJ would have jurisdiction over,” Levitt told the Associated Press news agency.

“Sure makes it seem like the point of the investigation is to become the story.”

Democrats and Republicans are locked in tight races nationwide that will determine which party holds a majority in the US Senate for the remainder of Trump’s second term in office.

Republicans currently hold a slim majority in the legislature’s upper chamber, with 53 out of 100 seats.

Democratic candidates are hoping to win seats by capitalising on Trump’s deep unpopularity and frustration over the cost-of-living crisis.

Trump has suggested he may not accept the midterm results if his party loses its majorities in Congress, and he has pushed false claims of widespread voter fraud.

The Justice Department has also attempted to challenge the voting process in several states, including California.

EUFOR confirms Chinook CH-47 helicopter crash in Bosnia, with four Italian nationals confirmed dead.

Four people belonging to the European Union Force in Bosnia (EUFOR) have been killed after an Italian military helicopter conducting a training operation crashed.

EUFOR said a CH-47 Chinook helicopter crashed during “routine training” in the Brcko region on Thursday, about 180km (110 miles) north of Bosnia’s capital, Sarajevo.

A total of 11 people were injured in the crash, EUFOR said, adding that all the injured are receiving treatment and are in stable condition.

The Italian government said in a statement that all those on board the military helicopter were its nationals.

The victims were two soldiers and two Red Cross volunteers, according to the Italian defence ministry.

“At this moment of immense grief, my thoughts go first and foremost to the families of our fallen, to whom I extend my personal condolences and those of the entire defence establishment,” Italian Defence Minister Guido Crosetto said.

Wreckage

Bosnian media outlets published photos of the wreckage showing the helicopter overturned on the ground in a flat field.

A spokesman for Brcko hospital told the AFP news agency that there were 15 people on board at the time of the crash, which initially killed three people.

“Twelve people were transported to our hospital. Unfortunately, a fourth person succumbed to injuries in the hospital,” the spokesman said.

“EUFOR is conducting a full and thorough investigation of the incident and will release more information as it is verified, and when appropriate,” the force said in a statement.

EUFOR, which has between 1,000 and 1,500 personnel, has been deployed in Bosnia since 2004, when it replaced a NATO peacekeeping force that had been in the country since the Bosnian War ended in 1995. The mission oversees the implementation of the Dayton Peace Agreement, which ended the three-year war.

With only days left until the 2026 midterm elections, United States President Donald Trump has announced he will scale back his packed rally schedule, cancelling scheduled appearances in Iowa and Kansas.

The Republican National Committee (RNC) confirmed the cancellations in a statement on Thursday, unveiling a slate of “tele-rallies” to replace the cancelled events.

RNC Chairman Joe Gruters argued that the virtual appearances will be more efficient, reaching more voters than Trump otherwise could with on-the-ground stops.

“Voters across the country want to hear from President Trump before Election Day, and this 72-hour sprint will be a huge boost in the closing days,” Gruters said.

The tele-rallies will be broadcast to nearly 20 states, including battlegrounds like Michigan, Alaska, Texas and Iowa, where competitive races are unfolding for the US Senate.

The RNC statement added that further events may be announced in the coming days.

Trump’s rally on Friday in Daytona Beach, Florida – some 320 kilometres (200 miles) up the coast from his Mar-a-Lago resort – will proceed as planned.

Less than five days remain until the midterm elections on November 3, which will decide the composition of Congress, as well as key state and local offices.

Whichever party controls Congress will shape Trump’s legislative agenda during the final two years of his second term.

Trump has also expressed concern that the Democratic Party might push to impeach him for a third time if it wins majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

Currently, the Republican Party holds narrow majorities in both chambers. In the Senate, the party holds 53 seats out of 100. In the House, it has 218 seats, with all 435 offices up for grabs this election cycle.

The Senate, meanwhile, will see only about a third of its offices on the midterm ballot. Unlike in the House, where terms only last two years, senators are elected to six-year time spans, and their elections are staggered across different election years, to allow for greater stability.

Political forecasters have predicted Democrats have an advantage this midterm election cycle, citing Trump’s slumping poll numbers and voter blowback over cost-of-living issues, foreign policy and other concerns.

Harvard University’s ElectIt election forecasting model, for instance, has estimated that Democrats have a 94 percent chance of taking control of the House.

The race for the Senate, however, will be more difficult, with fewer seats available to win.

Trump has placed himself at the centre of the Republican strategy to defend the party’s congressional majorities. To motivate his base of support, he has repeatedly encouraged voters with the phrase, “Pretend I’m on the ballot.”

Midterm elections occur halfway through a president’s term, and they are often considered a reflection of a president’s popularity.

At 80 years old, however, Trump will be the oldest president by the time his term concludes, and his health has been a concern.

Since starting his second term, the Republican leader has been photographed with bruising on his hands, sparking speculation about any undisclosed medical conditions he may have.

After concluding a rally in South Carolina on Thursday, reporters inquired about his health.

“Mr President, you’ve been doing a lot of travel. We’ve been doing a lot of travel with you. How are you feeling? How’s your health?” a reporter from the news agency Reuters asked on the tarmac.

Trump, at first, dodged the question, focusing instead on his optimism about the Republican Party’s prospects in the election.

“We’re going to have a strong Tuesday night,” Trump said.

But the reporter continued with his line of questioning: “So you’re not going to Kansas has nothing to do with you being sick of travelling?” That prompted an irate reply from Trump, who lashed out.

“Oh, you’re sick to ask that question. You are sick,” Trump said, as he proceeded to insult the reporter’s weight.

“You’ve been following me for two weeks. I feel perfect. You are disgusting. Put yourself in shape. You look like hell.”

During his remarks to the reporter, Trump also questioned the need to visit Salina, Kansas, as he had planned to do on Saturday. “I don’t feel I have to go to Kansas,” the president said.

Kansas, normally a Republican stronghold, has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1932.

But this election cycle, Republican Senator Roger Marshall is facing a tight race with Democrat Adam Hamilton, the pastor of a megachurch.

On Thursday, the news outlet CNN released a poll showing Hamilton up by four percentage points, leading with 49 percent support to Marshall’s 45 percent.

Authorities vow firm action against violence as yellow vest and student movements announce widespread demonstrations.

France’s interior minister has announced the deployment of 70,000 police officers across the country in preparation for planned protests on Saturday, coinciding with Halloween.

Interior Minister Laurent Nunez said on Thursday that security measures, including the use of armoured vehicles and water cannon introduced last week, will be strengthened.

Nationwide protests over the rising cost of living have rocked France, with some degenerating into large-scale looting and riots.

“The day of October 31 presents a very high risk of public disorder,” Nunez said at a news conference.

About 70,000 police officers and gendarmes will be mobilised, matching the number deployed at last week’s protests, he said, calling the move an “exceptional measure”.

Demonstrations last Saturday drew about 410,000 protesters nationwide, according to the interior ministry, though unions put the figure at roughly double that. The ministry said more than 2,700 people were arrested a week earlier.

Warning on Halloween masking

The “yellow vest” movement and student unions have called for a new day of protests on Saturday.

Nunez warned demonstrators against using Halloween as “a legitimate reason to hide one’s face” to cause disturbances in public areas.

He told reporters demonstrations would be allowed, but “not in city centres, where there is a risk of public disorder”.

The interior minister issued a warning to far-right groups that clashed with left-wing protesters at rallies in about 15 French cities.

“We will tolerate no excesses,” he said, and pledged an “extremely firm” response.

Nunez accused the “ultra-left” movement and some yellow vest activists of circulating messages on social media promoting demonstrations on Halloween evening that called for a “revolution”.

“These gatherings will be banned,” he said.

The yellow vest movement has already announced a “third act” of its protests on Halloween and called for demonstrations outside the National Assembly and all town halls in the country.

An Icelandic web company, FlokiNET, has defended the data’s publication as satisfying a ‘legitimate’ public interest.

The United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has asked an Icelandic web hosting company to take down a site with information about tens of thousands of its employees.

On Thursday, the Icelandic company FlokiNET posted a letter it received from the cybersecurity firm ZeroFox, on behalf of DHS.

The letter accused FlokiNET of violating its terms of service by publishing a “stolen” employee dataset and asked it to “remove or disable” the information.

“The content is live and places more than 40,000 identifiable individuals at risk of harassment, stalking, and physical harm,” the letter said.

FlokiNET said the letter concerned one domain, icepi.cx, which has compiled information about employees from a range of DHS agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

Those agencies have come under intense scrutiny since the start of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign in 2025.

But the Trump administration has often refused to identify DHS agents involved in specific operations, citing safety risks.

Though FlokiNET said it refused to comply with DHS’s request, it noted that the website’s registrar ultimately suspended the domain. The employee information has since moved to a different domain.

In a statement posted online, FlokiNET defended its decision not to remove the site.

“Federal officers carrying out an enforcement programme are not private individuals while they are carrying it out,” the company said. “The public has a legitimate interest in knowing who is doing that work, under whose authority, and in which office.”

The database was first posted online on Wednesday by Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets), a group that showcases leaked government data.

In the past, DDoSecrets has released emails from convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, as well as information from the Israeli Ministry of Justice and police departments in the US.

A hacker group calling itself the “Department of Peace” has claimed responsibility for obtaining and sharing the DHS data.

Since the database was first published, other groups have spread the information elsewhere, including on sites like icepi.cx. As a result, the information is unlikely to be entirely scrubbed from the internet.

The Trump administration, however, has taken an aggressive approach to online platforms purporting to contain information about ICE employees and other agents involved in immigration operations.

Last year, for instance, the US Department of Justice pressured tech giants like Apple to remove apps that track ICE agents, including one called ICEBlock.

The move sparked backlash from Democrats and free-speech advocates, who argued that the public has a right to report on ICE’s movements.

“Blocking access to these apps at the request of the federal government raises the distinct possibility that Apple is working with government to violate its customers’ First Amendment right to record and report on the activities of their government,” Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin wrote in a letter last year, asking Apple to review its decision.

Immigration agents, meanwhile, have taken several steps to conceal their identities during operations, including wearing face masks or street clothes.

That lack of transparency has spurred criticism from human rights groups and immigration advocates, who argue that they have little recourse to pursue allegations of excessive force or impropriety during ICE raids.

Since Trump was sworn in for a second term, at least 25 people have faced gunfire from immigration agents. Six of the shootings have resulted in deaths.

Other cases have involved alleged violations of civil liberties – including unlawful arrests and racial profiling – as well as controversial tactics like car ramming and tackling.

Patrick Stewart, the acclaimed British actor who played Captain Jean-Luc Picard in “Star Trek” and Professor Charles Xavier in the “X-Men” films, has died. He was 86.

Stewart died on Wednesday in Los Angeles following “a brief and poignant journey” with Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia, spokesperson Kelly Bush Novak said in a statement on Thursday.

Although best known for his film and television roles, Stewart spent much of his career onstage, performing Shakespeare and other classics.

His career included performances as Claudius and Macbeth, a one-man adaptation of “A Christmas Carol”, and West End and Broadway productions of Harold Pinter’s “No Man’s Land” and Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” alongside longtime friend Ian McKellen.

Stewart earned some of the best reviews of his career for his 2007 portrayal of Macbeth, including his only Tony Award nomination. The Times of London described his Macbeth performance as “an enthralling creation of frailty, appetite, egotism and grim humour”.

“Nearly 50 years I’ve waited,” Stewart told the Associated Press news agency in 2008. “I learned it when I was 14. I memorized all the soliloquies just because I thought they were great. And they stuck, so I didn’t have to learn those bits of the play, which is a blessing, because learning lines has now become the one curse of this job.”

From working-class Yorkshire to Shakespeare

Raised in Mirfield, West Yorkshire, a working-class corner of northern England, the future 24th-century commander of a starship grew up without a bathroom in his house.

He joined an amateur drama group at 12 and, as a teenager, memorised Shakespeare for fun. A scholarship to the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School helped launch his acting career.

Stewart, who developed alopecia at a young age, had been bald since he was 19.

His childhood was also marked by domestic violence. His father, a former regimental sergeant major in the British Army, was prone to outbursts of “repeated violence against my mother,” as Stewart wrote in a newspaper piece. “Violence is always a choice a man makes and he alone is responsible for it.”

Stewart later became a patron of Refuge, a charity supporting survivors of domestic abuse.

From Shakespeare to Captain Picard

Stewart spent 14 years with the Royal Shakespeare Company, playing everyone from Mark Antony and Henry IV to Shylock and Oberon.

“People who were not in the company would say to me, ‘Give it a break. Why don’t you go somewhere else?’ And I would say, ‘To do what?’” he told the AP. “Telly?”

He eventually left and appeared in the 1981 film “Excalibur”. In 1987, shortly after performing in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”, he was offered a role in a science fiction series.

“I found myself in Hollywood shooting a syndicated science fiction series, which I was assured would fail,” he said.

But “Star Trek: The Next Generation” ran for seven seasons and 178 episodes. Stewart became known worldwide as Captain Jean-Luc Picard, whose command, “Make it so”, became one of the show’s best-known lines.

Stewart also played Professor Charles Xavier, the leader of the X-Men, beginning with the 2000 film “X-Men”. He returned to the role in several sequels, including 2017’s “Logan”, alongside Hugh Jackman as Wolverine.

Stewart died just days after Walter Koenig, who played Ensign Pavel Chekov in the original “Star Trek” series, which aired from 1966 to 1969.

Queen Elizabeth II knighted Stewart in June 2010. He also served as an ambassador for the International Rescue Committee.

For more than two years, Sheikh Ekrima Sabri has been barred from occupied East Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque, unable to pray or deliver sermons at the holy site.

And with his latest exclusion order extending the ban until April 2027, the Palestinian preacher – the head of the Higher Islamic Council in Jerusalem – is among those facing Israeli restrictions at the site – the third holiest in Islam and a Palestinian national symbol.

Sabri has faced repeated exclusion orders since August 2024. The latest order, issued on October 20, prevents Sabri from praying or delivering sermons at Al-Aqsa until April 2027.

At the same time, far-right Jewish religious activists have increasingly been allowed to pray at the site under Israeli police protection, going against a longstanding status quo and opposition from ultra-Orthodox Jewish religious authorities.

The restrictions began after Israeli police detained Sabri in August 2024 over a sermon in which he mourned the Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh, who was assassinated by Israel.

Sabri, one of the most prominent Palestinians in East Jerusalem, has faced repeated Israeli interrogations.

Palestinians say this is part of a campaign against them at Al-Aqsa. The Wadi Hilweh Information Center, a Palestinian human rights monitoring group, says Israeli authorities have issued more than 1,000 exclusion orders barring Palestinians from Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Old City since the beginning of 2026, including against religious figures and Islamic Waqf employees.

The centre reported an increase in exclusion orders ahead of Jewish holidays, documenting more than 40 issued over five days in early September.

Sabri told Al Jazeera that the latest extension was the fifth time Israeli authorities have issued an exclusion order against him.

He described the decision as unjust, illegal, inhumane and uncivilised, saying it was intended to silence those speaking out about Al-Aqsa.

Sabri said that he would continue defending Al-Aqsa despite the restrictions, describing the mosque as an integral part of his Islamic faith.

“These measures are aimed at diminishing the Palestinian presence at the mosque, while simultaneously allowing settlers to carry out incursions in large numbers,” Sabri said. “Such actions represent an aggressive policy targeting the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Islamic presence within it.”

Prohibited activities

Ibrahim al-Natsheh was released by Israeli police earlier this month after spending a week in detention after he was arrested while attending funeral prayers for his cousin at Al-Aqsa Mosque.

He told Al Jazeera that officers took him to a police room and handed him a six-month exclusion order barring him from East Jerusalem’s Old City. He said no specific charge was brought against him.

According to al-Natsheh, the order warns that he could face arrest and further penalties, including a fine or imprisonment, if he enters the prohibited area.

Al-Natsheh said he has received so many exclusion orders that he has lost count. He said the restrictions began about nine years ago, following an Israeli crackdown on Islamic study circles at the mosque.

Palestinian students, teachers and activists associated with the activities have faced arrests and exclusion orders.

“The orders banning us from the mosque provide no specific reason; they simply cite ‘disturbing the peace’, even though we are there solely to pray,” al-Natsheh told Al Jazeera. “Ahead of the Jewish holidays, they sent a message to me and a group of other worshippers, warning us not to approach the mosque or else we will be arrested.”

Even when he is not subject to a formal exclusion order, al-Natsheh said, Israeli police have prevented him from entering Al-Aqsa. He also alleged that officers have repeatedly arrested him at Al-Aqsa’s gates and severely beaten him while in detention.

“The path to the mosque has become incredibly difficult; it is swarming with soldiers and settlers,” he said. “We are denied the ability to reach it with any ease, and if we try, we face arrest and beatings with batons. It is deeply painful to witness what is happening to Al-Aqsa now.”

Al Jazeera has reached out to Israeli authorities for comment, but has yet to receive a response.

Diminishing Waqf role

Al-Aqsa Mosque has seen an escalation in Israeli restrictions and violations throughout 2026.

After the United States and Israel launched their war on Iran on February 28, Israeli authorities closed Al-Aqsa to most worshippers for 40 days, reopening the compound on April 9.

Meanwhile, according to the Palestinian Authority’s Jerusalem Governorate, almost 28,000 visits by Israeli settlers were recorded at Al-Aqsa between July and September.

Ma’rouf al-Rifai, an adviser to the Jerusalem Governorate, told Al Jazeera that during recent Jewish holidays, Israeli restrictions on Muslim worshippers had intensified.

These measures included closing the mosque for periods of time, preventing noon prayers on at least one occasion, and restricting access for residents of the Old City during visits to the site by Israeli settlers and Jewish religious activists.

Al-Rifai said the Islamic Waqf Department faces mounting constraints on its role in managing the mosque’s affairs.

He said Israeli police have prevented Waqf officials from accompanying Jewish groups when they entered the site, curtailed the authority of mosque guards, and arrested or barred several employees from the compound.

As a result, he said, fewer than 15 guards are now on duty during the morning shift, compared with approximately 50 previously.

He pointed out that the closure of the mosque for 40 days during the war with Iran took place without consulting the Waqf or providing prior notification, which he said demonstrated the Waqf’s diminishing role in the mosque’s administration.

“Settler incursions have undergone a shift over the past three years; they now include Jewish prayers and religious rituals, the raising of Israeli flags, and attempts to bring in sacrificial offerings,” al-Rifai said.

These changes have undermined longstanding arrangements at the compound, under which the Waqf manages Muslim religious affairs while Israeli police oversee security and access.

According to al-Rifai, Israeli authorities have prevented the Waqf from carrying out restoration work at the Bab al-Rahma prayer hall and restricted maintenance of the compound’s trees and gardens. He said the committee responsible for restoration work at Al-Aqsa has been unable to carry out its duties for years.

He warned of efforts to alter the status quo at Al-Aqsa Mosque, pointing to several proposals and developments, including demands to allow Jewish visitors into the compound on Saturdays, plans advanced by Israeli politicians to divide access to parts of the site between Muslims and Jews, and an Israeli police recruitment drive for volunteers tasked with escorting Israeli incursions at the site.

Al-Rifai said these developments represented a further erosion of the Waqf’s authority and warned that they could eventually transform the arrangements governing worship and access at the holy site.

The Russian president, speaking at the third Russia-Africa Summit being held in Moscow, has told African leaders that his country is a better partner than the West.

Vladimir Putin says Russian companies operate in Africa on an equal footing, accusing Western countries of still focusing on exploiting the continent’s resources.

Some African nations have turned to Russia for security assistance in recent years. Trade and economic ties are also growing.

And Russia has highlighted the importance of what it calls a “multipolar world” – while it seeks support from the Global South to counter Western pressure over its war in Ukraine.

So, what are Russia and African countries getting out of this gathering?

Presenter: Dareen Abughaida

Guests:

Beverly Ochieng – Associate director at Control Risks, specialising in Francophone Africa and the Sahel

Andrey Kortunov – Russian foreign affairs analyst and the former director general of the Russian International Affairs Council

Sanusha Naidu – Foreign policy analyst and senior research associate at the Institute for Global Dialogue

Israeli forces and settlers have escalated pogroms and raids across the occupied West Bank, attacking and injuring Palestinians, restricting their movement, carrying out arrests and demolishing homes.

This comes as a military offensive and siege on the Hebron governorate entered its seventh day – an operation that has displaced or besieged hundreds of Palestinian families and kept tens of thousands of students out of classrooms.

In the Qalandiya refugee camp just north of occupied East Jerusalem, Israeli forces carried out a raid that triggered clashes on Thursday. Two children were wounded, the Palestine Red Crescent Society said.

It said its teams treated a 15-year-old boy who was shot with live ammunition in both legs, and a child, aged 12, who was injured by live-bullet fragments. Both were taken to hospital.

In a separate incident, Israeli soldiers and settlers beat disabled Palestinian Mohammad Ahmad Ayesh Thawabta in the village of al-Maniya, southeast of Bethlehem, the official Palestinian news agency Wafa reported.

In the northern West Bank, Israeli forces detained 13 Palestinians, including three brothers, in raids before dawn on Thursday, the Palestinian Prisoners Media Office and local sources said. Most of the raids were in the Nablus governorate, where soldiers searched homes and harassed families.

Hebron offensive

In Hebron, Israeli forces continued raids and closures that began last week after two Israeli soldiers were killed in a gun attack. Both Palestinian suspects were also killed.

Hebron Governor Khaled Dudin said on Thursday that 537 families, comprising 3,361 people, have been forced from their homes, Wafa reported.

They include 232 infants, 326 older people, 147 pregnant or breastfeeding women and 213 people with chronic illnesses. Municipal figures put the total number affected, including those under siege, at about 5,000 people from 780 families.

Dudin said the offensive has disrupted education for about 262,000 students across 589 schools in the governorate this week, forcing schools to move to remote learning. Officials estimated daily economic losses at 10 million to 12 million shekels ($3.2m to $3.9m).

The Palestinian Prisoner’s Society said Israeli forces detained 110 Palestinians in the governorate from Friday to Wednesday. Soldiers beat two men in Dura and Wad al-Saman and arrested two brothers while they were ploughing their land east of Yatta, it said. Israeli forces also raided homes in Taffuh and Halhul, and settlers attacked vehicles at the city’s closed northern entrance, it added.

Memorials demolished

In nearby Masafer Yatta, armed settlers attacked US journalist Jasper Nathaniel and two activists in the village of Umm al-Khair on Wednesday. Russian activist Adele Shoko said on X that the settlers beat and threatened them and stole their equipment and Nathaniel was pepper-sprayed and arrested.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said Israeli forces are still operating in Hebron, blocking access and imposing tight restrictions on movement across the governorate.

They are “disrupting Palestinians’ access to livelihoods, education and healthcare. Most displaced families are staying with relatives,” OCHA said, calling for the prevention of further forced displacements and demolitions.

Israeli forces also demolished memorials to Palestinians in several parts of the Hebron governorate on Thursday. In Dura, south of Hebron city, soldiers fired a heavy barrage of tear gas before bulldozing a mural bearing the images of several of the town’s dead, including Bajis Abu Atwan, who was killed in the 1970s.

The targeting of memorials “appears to be a new pattern recently adopted by Israeli forces across all West Bank governorates – though at a higher rate here in Hebron”, Al Jazeera’s Muntasir Nassar said, reporting from Dura.

Israeli military and settler attacks across the West Bank have intensified since Israel’s war on Gaza began in October 2023.

Faculty vote will continue until next Friday and could send message that school’s president has lost their confidence.

Cornell University has begun a no-confidence vote for the school’s leadership after an alleged gang rape prompted public outcry over sexual assault on college campuses and scrutiny over the university’s handling of the case.

Faculty members started the no-confidence vote on Thursday that is expected to continue until November 6. The initiative is non-binding, but could send a message that president Michael Kotlikoff has lost the confidence of the school’s faculty.

“Hundreds of students, staff, faculty and alumni approached the sponsors of this resolution to emphasize to us that the Jane Doe case is but a tip of the iceberg,” said Paul Ortiz, the lead faculty sponsor of the resolution.

A lawsuit filed last month alleges that a female student, identified as Jane Doe, was drugged and gang raped by seven male students at a fraternity house in 2024.

The case has raised questions about whether the university acted with sufficient urgency or downplayed the alleged abuse in order to protect its reputation. The university initially shut down the fraternity and suspended the male students, two of whom were later expelled.

Faculty considered on Wednesday whether to postpone a vote of no confidence, with some urging patience and others arguing that the vote was a necessary response to institutional reluctance to take the issue seriously.

The Associated Press news agency reported that the debate took place after a group of 20 female science and engineering faculty members called on Kotlikoff to resign in a letter to trustees.

“What our community needed was clear leadership; instead, it faced a leadership vacuum,” the letter stated.

Kotlikoff sought to address the fallout in a statement earlier this month in which he listed a number of preliminary responses.

“I am deeply sorry for the harm Jane Doe suffered in 2024, and appalled that this act of sexual violence occurred within our Cornell community,” he said.

Two of the men accused of taking part in the alleged rape of Jane Doe have asked for New York Attorney General Letitia James to be removed from her role overseeing the renewed criminal probe into the case over social media posts from the attorney general expressing support for the accuser prior to her appointment.

A judge on Thursday appeared sceptical of one of the challenges, which James’ office has said are “without merit”.

In a key indication of improving ties between Poland and Ukraine, Warsaw has reportedly agreed to provide two additional MiG-29 Fulcrum fighters, badly needed 20x102mm rounds for Ukrainian Air Force F-16s and artillery shells. Relations between the two countries soured this summer over a political spat between their respective leaders, however they appear to be restoring once-close ties.

The aircraft transfer will occur “in the near future,” Lt. Gen. Dariusz Łukowski, director of the Strategy and Defense Planning Department at the Polish Ministry of National Defense, told the Polish Rzeczpospolita (Rz) media outlet. “The decision has been made, and two MiG-29s will be handed over.”

Of the two Fulcrums, one has reached the end of its service life and may be used for parts while the other is still flying, Rz added. Deputy National Defense Minister Paweł Zalewski confirmed the MiG-29 agreement to another Polish media outlet, TVP Info.

“There is an agreement regarding the transfer of two MiG-29s to Ukraine,” Zalewski said. “As regards the remaining MiGs, the matter is ongoing.”

Poland had 14 MiG-29 aircraft as of December 2025, of which six to eight were nearing the end of their service life, a Polish official said at the time. It is unclear how many are still on hand.

In addition to the jets, Rz reported that “Poland will provide Ukraine with, among other things, a supply of 155mm and 152mm artillery ammunition; 20x102mm combat rounds for the six-barreled cannons on F-16 fighter jets—used, for instance, to shoot down Russian unmanned aerial vehicles—as well as missiles for the Piorun short-range anti-aircraft systems.”

Additional MiG-29s are always welcome, as they remain the backbone of Ukraine’s fighter force even though the country has received donations of more modern F-16 Vipers and French Mirage 2000 fighters. Meanwhile, the 20mm cannon ammunition is critically needed. 

As we have previously reported, Ukraine is struggling to maintain adequate stocks of air-to-air missiles for its fighters. AIM-9 Sidewinders and AIM-120 Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missiles (AMRAAM) have been heavily used against Russian cruise missiles and drones.

As a result, Ukrainian F-16 pilots have reportedly had to ration their missile shots. This has forced them to increasingly rely on their internal 20mm cannon when suitable missiles are not available. Such a tactic is far from an ideal substitute, as you can read about here. Still, Kyiv has reportedly been seeking tens of thousands of additional rounds of 20mm ammunition.

So far, there has been no official Ukrainian response. We reached out to Zelensky’s spokesman and Polish officials for comment.

Reports about the planned Polish weapons transfers to Ukraine mark a turning point in relations between Warsaw and Kyiv, as we noted at the top of the story.

For much of this conflict, Poland has been one of Ukraine’s staunchest allies, serving as a logistics hub and providing military assistance. Warsaw’s initial donation of MiG-29s opened the door for the transfer of dozens of others from several NATO nations. That was followed by the eventual provision of the aforementioned Vipers and Mirages. In addition, Sweden has agreed to provide 16 Gripen C/D fighters, with the first aircraft expected in early 2027, while a separate agreement covers the purchase of 16 new Gripen E fighters whose deliveries are not scheduled to begin until early 2029.

Relations between the two countries reached a nadir in June after Polish President Karol Nawrocki stripped Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky of the Order of the White Eagle. It is Warsaw’s top award and was presented to Zelensky in 2023. That escalated a row between the allies over the memory of WWII. 

“Zelensky had infuriated Warsaw this month by naming a military unit after an insurgent army that took part in massacres against Poles in WWII,” AFP reported at the time.

After the stripping of the award, the rift grew more bitter, with Poland claiming Ukraine would not transfer drone technology needed to defend against Russian threats. The political kerfuffle culminated with Poland canceling the transfer of additional MiG-29s to Ukraine.

Relations between the two nations began to thaw earlier this month.

The first sign was Zelensky’s resuming use of Polish airports as a jumping-off point for overseas trips. Ukrainian officials have to travel by train to another country if they want to fly because airspace over Ukraine has been closed to non-military aircraft since the start of the all-out war.

After the medal incident, Zelensky opted to use airports in Moldova and Romania. However, on Oct. 14, the Ukrainian leader once again traveled to Rzeszów Airport in Poland.

Days later, Zelensky told reporters that stopping at Rzeszów was a signal that his relations with Poland were on the upswing.

“Our relations with Poland have indeed improved,” he said. I’m very grateful for this to both Poland and our teams, and I’m grateful to the Prime Minister [Donald Tusk]. I’m grateful to the people of Poland for supporting Ukraine. It’s very important for us to be together right now. There is only one enemy – Russia, which is deeply concerned about a strong alliance between Ukraine and Poland.”

“Even very difficult things, we’ll resolve them, I’m sure of it,” the Ukrainian leader added. “These will be mutually beneficial relations, out of respect, because of the importance of security in Europe.”

Though Polish officials are telling media outlets that deals are in place, there is still a lot that can go sideways before the aircraft and ammunition are in Ukrainian hands. Still, for Kyiv, even suggestions of a future transfer are better than having deals being called off.

Contact the author: howard@twz.com

The US tech giant is investing $15bn in a huge new data centre project in northern Finland.

Finnish police have launched a criminal investigation into suspected breaches of environmental law at the construction site of a planned Google data centre in northern Finland.

The project is part of a $15bn deal announced last month by Alphabet’s Google to invest in artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure in Finland, which the US company described as its largest investment in Europe.

Authorities have said Tuike Finland, a local subsidiary of Google, conducted forest clearing and drainage at a planned site near the town of Muhos, before the environmental impact assessments required under Finnish law had been completed.

“We are investigating whether the company’s operations have breached the Water Act and resulted in environmental damage,” Detective Superintendent Kari Pakanen told the Reuters news agency on Thursday, adding that a guilty finding could lead to a corporate fine.

Pakanen declined to say whether any individuals could become a target of the investigation, and a Google spokesperson said the company would cooperate with the police investigation and continue to focus on maintaining compliance at its sites.

Tree felling prompts local anger

Videos and photographs showing the scale of the forest clearance at the site of the data centre, and Google’s initial reluctance to address the issue in the days after the news broke, have prompted widespread anger in Finland, where there is a high level of respect for the natural environment among the public.

“All the outrage and dismay directed at Google, I can very much share that, especially when we are talking about the parent company valued as the third-largest in the world,” Finnish Green MP Oras Tynkkynen told Al Jazeera. “There is just no excuse. You have to know the legislation of the country you are operating in; you can afford to hire the best legal experts to help you navigate the local legal requirements.”

Finnish authorities ordered Google to stop work at the data centre site at the start of October, and the latest information from the police highlights shortcomings in the drainage and water management at the site.

Tynkkynen called Google’s actions “unforgivable”, but cautioned that while the anger being directed at the US tech giant was justified, it was also diverting scrutiny away from legacy Finnish forestry companies, which he says are “by far the biggest contributors to biodiversity loss in this country”.

What is Finland’s appeal for data centre construction?

Finland’s cool climate, low-carbon electricity and government endorsement of AI projects have contributed to making the country one of Europe’s main destinations for data centre investments in recent years.

Finland, similar in size to Germany – but with one-seventh of the population, less than six million people – has had less vocal opposition to data centre buildouts than other places, including in the United States.

AI data centres are among the main drivers of a projected rise of up to 40 percent in Finland’s electricity consumption in the coming years, if all agreed grid connection projects go ahead, grid operator Fingrid has said.

Google’s planned investments in Finland include data centres, electricity grid improvements and clean energy and battery projects to power services such as Gemini, Search, Maps and YouTube.

Supporting Google’s plan, Finland’s Prime Minister Petteri Orpo said in September that the deal would be a boost for the economy, playing down concerns that it would suck up energy and push up power prices.

Dearborn, Michigan – Jake Lang, a far-right provocateur in a bulletproof vest, shouts anti-Muslim obscenities on a bullhorn outside a rally featuring former US President Barack Obama in Detroit.

His associates, wearing crusader-themed accessories – including a tin shield featuring a black cross – hold campaign signs for Mike Rogers, the Republican Senate candidate in Michigan, who is in a close race with Democrat Abdul El-Sayed.

If it weren’t for the bigoted slogans, the people lining up around them to attend the campaign event for El-Sayed and other Democrats could have mistakenly thought the protesters were in Halloween costumes.

“Get the f*** out, Muslims,” Lang shouted. “The crusade is coming. Self-deport.”

Lang may appear like a fringe agitator. But Muslim American activists say the bigotry he is spreading is going mainstream, especially in the context of the Senate race in Michigan.

Anti-Muslim attacks against El-Sayed have been perpetuated at the highest level of the US government, including by President Donald Trump and his cabinet members.

Suehaila Amen, a prominent Arab and Muslim advocate in the Detroit area, said bigotry against her community is reaching an all-time high.

“They make immediately post 9/11 look like a walk in the park for us. This has been absolutely disgusting to witness,” Amen told Al Jazeera.

One of Lang’s allies, Pastor Lorenzo Sewell, is an official faith adviser to the Rogers campaign.

Sewell helped Lang organise an anti-Muslim march in the Detroit suburb of Dearborn – home to a large Arab and Muslim community – in August.

Abdullah Hammoud, the mayor of Dearborn, said the city – which has long been a target for anti-Muslim provocateurs – has been receiving an increased number of threats in recent months.

“The general public is unaware of how many threats are aimed towards the city of Dearborn on a daily basis, via social [media], via our dispatch when they’re calling 911 or calling our call centre, and lobbing these threats against the residents of the city each and every single day,” Hammoud told Al Jazeera.

“That does worry me.”

Escalating attacks

While the Rogers campaign did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment about the Republican candidate’s links to Sewell, Rogers defended his focus on El-Sayed’s background, saying it was for national security.

“This is not about the way you pray; it’s the way you think,” Rogers told reporters after his debate with El-Sayed earlier this month.

Local leaders say their community is not cowering in the face of such threats and Trump’s near-daily attacks, and is pushing back through civic engagement and rallying around the El-Sayed campaign.

“Trump is a fascist,” Hammoud told Al Jazeera. “I think the best thing we can do, the best response, is to send Abdul to the US Senate, somebody who’s got two doctorates, someone who is a son of this country, a son of the state, someone who is the captain of his high school team … I think that that’s the best response that we can give fascism.”

Trump has repeatedly mocked El-Sayed’s name, misrepresenting it as Mohammed, and called the Democratic candidate a “jihadist”.

Amen said Arab and Muslim Americans are used to being targeted for their names, but when the president does it, it legitimises bigotry and racism.

“It’s not just some loser that lives around the block who may call you a racist expletive; it’s the loser who lives in the White House,” she said.

Amen added that Arab and Muslim communities are going about their daily lives and organising politically despite the escalating attacks, stressing that they reject attempts to cast them as foreigners or outsiders.

“We are an integral part of the fabric of this nation, whether people like it or not,” she told Al Jazeera.

Republicans across US target El-Sayed

As the Senate race intensifies, Rogers has been baselessly accusing El-Sayed of ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran.

Last month, Rogers went as far as agreeing with a social media post calling El-Sayed, a doctor and former public health official, a “terrorist”.

Trump has suggested that El-Sayed would be a physical threat to the Capitol, saying that he would want him to go through a metal detector.

At an event in western Michigan earlier this week, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr incorrectly claimed that Arabs do not produce literature or science and “don’t win Nobel Prizes”. He argued that the Muslim Brotherhood – which only briefly held power in Egypt between 2012 and 2013 – has destroyed Arab civilisation.

Texas Senator Ted Cruz joined in on such attacks, describing El-Sayed as a “jihadist leprechaun”.

Cruz warned that El-Sayed, a Michigan-born and raised father of two with a medical degree and a doctorate in public health, could end up on the Senate Intelligence Committee and endanger national security.

“If I am correct that he is a passionate supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood, there is a very real risk that Americans will die as a result,” he said.

On Wednesday, Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy invoked Dearborn – one of the safest and fastest-growing cities in Michigan – to drum up fear of immigration.

“Look at what’s happening in Dearborn, Michigan, for God’s sake. We’re not going to let that come to our state of Ohio,” he said.

Trump supporters weigh in

El-Sayed, who is of Egyptian descent, has avoided focusing on the attacks, calling them “deflections and deceptions”.

It’s not clear how attacks linked to El-Sayed’s Muslim faith and Arab heritage will affect the race.

About 38 percent of respondents in a survey of potential voters conducted by Michigan State University said a candidate being a Muslim would make them less likely to offer support to their campaign.

After a Trump rally for Rogers in Port Huron, northeast of Detroit, where the president spent most of his nearly two-hour speech attacking El-Sayed, some attendees appeared to agree that El-Sayed may be a threat to national security.

As the US president spoke, shouts of “traitor”, referring to El-Sayed, erupted from the crowd.

Trump supporter David Beamer, whose son died in the 9/11 attacks in 2001, spoke at the event and questioned El-Sayed’s American identity.

“Abdul has a birth certificate. The birth certificate says he’s a citizen of America. You know what? A birth certificate doesn’t make you an American,” Beamer said.

Al Jazeera asked Duane Crempa, a 72-year-old Republican in a Batman mask who attended the Trump speech on Sunday, whether he believes that El-Sayed is a “jihadist” as Trump claims.

Crempa said he is a good judge of character. “Yeah, there is something not right with him. That’s all I’ll say; there’s definitely something not right,” he added.

Jermaine Miller, who also was at the rally, told Al Jazeera he hopes El-Sayed is not a “terrorist”.

“But I mean, it sounds convincing, but it is believable,” he said of Trump’s allegations that the Democratic candidate is a “jihadist”.

‘It’s awful to live this way’

In the Detroit area, Arab and Muslim advocates say the issue is bigger than a Senate seat, arguing that such rhetoric endangers their communities and risks ripping the social fabric of the state.

“We’ve seen the increase in hate marches and hate speech and people being very comfortable sharing their hateful views online and coming into our city and harassing people for no reason – people who are just trying to live and function in this country,” Amen said.

“It’s been tremendously heartbreaking to watch our community constantly have to question why people are maliciously maligning them in public.”

Earlier this year, two gunmen killed three people outside a mosque complex in San Diego in southern California in what authorities said was a hate crime.

Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, who represents Dearborn and parts of Detroit, said she fears for her two Muslim boys, Adam and Yousif, amid the rise of hate with the election campaign.

“Yesterday, we were all watching the football game, and we literally had to turn off the ads every time in between [plays] because we didn’t want our babies to see these awful, racist ads,” Tlaib told Al Jazeera.

“It’s awful to live this way right now.”

With petrol in Michigan nearing record highs, Arab and Muslim advocates say their communities are being scapegoated to cover up the shortcomings of the Trump administration, including the war in Iran.

Abdelhalim Abdelrahman, communication director for American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), said the attacks against El-Sayed amount to “disgusting Islamophobia” that serves as a distraction.

“Abdul El-Sayed’s name is a visibly Muslim name, and it’s being treated as inherently suspicious, as if a Muslim American cannot willfully execute their duties as an active member of Congress to protect the American people,” Abdelrahman told Al Jazeera.

At the Trump rally in Port Huron, one of Trump’s allies appeared to weigh El-Sayed’s candidacy against petrol prices.

Brian Pannebecker, a retiree from an auto manufacturing company Trump invited to the stage on Sunday, stressed that Michiganders need to vote for the Republican ticket.

“I don’t care if they’re paying a buck and a half more a gallon for gasoline. That is no excuse to vote for a socialist Islamist for the US Senate,” Pannebecker said.

Couple say they are ‘prisoners of conscience’ being made into an example by Pakistan’s military-backed authorities.

An antiterrorism court in Pakistan has sentenced prominent human rights lawyers Imaan Mazari and her husband, Hadi Ali Chattha, ⁠⁠to 10 years in prison on terrorism-related charges.

Judge Tahir Abbas Sipra announced the verdict on Thursday, following their trial inside Adiala prison in the garrison city of Rawalpindi.

The couple were found guilty of putting “the security of [the England and Wales Cricket] team at risk”, the judge wrote, adding that it “clearly shows the intentions and objective of the accused to create a sense of terror”, according to a copy of the court judgement obtained by the AFP news agency.

At the same time, the ruling conceded that the security breach was “a very common nature ordinary type of incident apparently of removal of a barrier”.

The case relates to an October 2024 incident in which the couple removed road barriers in the capital, Islamabad, along a route designated for the touring England cricket team.

The couple were indicted on October 7, accused of obstructing police and inciting public interest, and pleaded not guilty.

In statements seen by the Reuters news agency, the couple denied the charges, while calling themselves “prisoners of conscience”, adding that ⁠⁠they were being targeted for their human rights work.

In their defence document, the couple had earlier said they were “being made an example to further cement the chilling effect against those who stand (or want to stand) against tyranny, oppression and injustice”.

Relatives criticise judicial process

Shireen Mazari, who is Imaan Mazari’s mother and served as Pakistan’s human rights minister under incarcerated former Prime Minister Imran Khan, said it was a “sham trial without any due process”.

Mazari told the Reuters news agency the couple “were not permitted to defend themselves through their own lawyer, and were not provided with key legal ⁠⁠documents”, adding that the defence would file a petition against the verdict in the Supreme Court.

Amnesty International called the convictions “an indictment of Pakistan’s justice system.”

“It was a test of the judiciary’s ability to uphold the principles of justice and the right to fair trial. It has failed that test miserably,” said Amnesty’s Yasmine Ahmend.

“It is clear that these ‘anti-terrorism’ charges are being used to punish Imaan and Hadi for their human rights advocacy,” she added.

Mazari and Chattha have been in custody since January 23, in a separate case over their social media posts.

A lower court sentenced ‌‌them each to 17 years the next day under Pakistan’s Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act, which critics have said is designed to quash antigovernment dissent online.

Although the Supreme Court later suspended those sentences, police re-arrested ‌‌the couple the same day in the security breach case.

“Imaan and Hadi’s re-arrest dispels any pretence that the charges against them are anything other than a politically motivated attempt to punish them for their human rights work”, said Babu Ram Pant, Amnesty International’s Deputy Regional Director for South Asia, adding that the case demonstrates once again the authorities’ willingness to weaponise the legal system against critical voices.

Pakistan’s ⁠⁠law minister, Azam Nazeer Tarar, has repeatedly said the country’s judiciary is independent.

Few humans have flown a jet as high or as fast as Adelbert “Buz” Carpenter. During his six years as an SR-71 Blackbird pilot, the now-retired Air Force colonel flew 230 missions, frequently exceeding three times the speed of sound. Over the course of nearly 800 hours flying one of the world’s most iconic aircraft, Carpenter soared over Cuba, skirted North Korea and tracked Russian nuclear submarines in the Arctic. He also had a few close calls, in one case narrowly avoiding disaster.

With the possibility that NASA could be returning the SR-71 to its test fleet, the Blackbird is back in the news and we wanted to dive deep into what it was like to fly the jet and get some thoughts on the latest SR-71 rumors from someone who piloted it. We couldn’t think of anyone better than “Buz” Carpenter.

Before joining the Blackbird program, Carpenter flew recon missions during the Vietnam War as an RF-4C pilot among other assignments. He now serves as a docent at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum’s Udvar Hazy Center.

Some of the questions and answers have been lightly edited for clarity.

Q: How did you become an SR-71 pilot? Walk me through your decision to join the program. What made you want to fly it? What was the qualification process like?

A: Well, it was a multi-step process… You had to fill out all this paperwork. You had to send them your flight records, all your flight checks, your physical records. What are your professional ratings in the Air Force? Do they rate you as superior? 

The home base was Beale Air Force Base in California. If they liked you, you got called back for about a week. The first two days were a modified astronaut’s physical. I mean, they checked everything. You had a series of interviews. As a pilot, I had to fly with two current SR-71 pilots, not in the SR, but in the companion trainer, the T-38. 

At any time, there were only 11 of us qualified to fly the SR-71. That’s how small a group it was for the whole program. Only 85 of us ever flew operational missions… So you can see it’s a pretty small group.

Q: Did pilots have to be invited to apply for the SR-71 program?

A: Oh, you had to apply for it. When there was a pilot in the program and he knew somebody he used to fly with that was really super, the invitation would be: ‘fill out the paperwork, and once we get the paperwork and look you over, we’ll call you back’ and go through the same routine that I went through. 

You’ve got to go through the physical. Sometimes it was shortened because they knew the person. A couple of them were actually T-38 instructors at Beale Air Force Base, and their invitation was a lot shorter because they had all the records there. They knew who you were, and they knew how you could fly.

About a week before Christmas, 1974, I got a telegram that says ‘you’ve been selected. You will report to Beale Air Force Base July 1975 and commence training in the SR-71.’ I couldn’t have been happier.

Q: What was the training like?

A: The first thing you’re going to do is you’re going to get checked out in the T-38, even though we had all flown it earlier. You had to become [requalified] in it, because as long as you’re in a program, you’re going to continue to fly the T-38. 

Once you actually started the program, you’d be paired with your navigator, who then assumed the title Reconnaissance Systems Officer [RSO]. And in my case, it was the wonderful Capt. John Murphy. We trained and flew together for four years. 

Your first month or so was mostly academics, because the airplane was so different. You had to learn the systems because the airplane operates in a very hot environment — an average temperature of almost 600 degrees [Fahrenheit]. The airplane grows three to four inches in length, an inch or two in width — it’s 93% titanium to deal with the high temperatures [associated with supersonic flight]. So during flights, you are going to have to deal with systems that are now straining or starting to fail because of the heat environment they’re operating in. So it is imperative that you understand exactly how this airplane is engineered, and what kind of options you might have if you start getting failures.

Then you start getting into the simulator, and obviously it’s a kind of crawl-walk-run type of a deal. This was the first simulator I’d ever seen that was a computer simulator. Up until that point, they called them part-task trainers. It had all the switches and everything, but it didn’t fly like the airplane. Like you’d be in the trainer and they want to simulate a fire. Somebody would bang against the side of this thing, and yell ‘fire’ and turn on the fire light, but they were just watching what you were doing. The SR simulator flew exactly like you [would fly the plane]. 

So even before John and I started training, we would find times when the simulator wasn’t being used at night, and we would go down there, and fly this simulator. And if you did something wrong, it reacted exactly how the airplane would react. I mean, it could crash if you did something bad enough.

There’s no visual. The simulator could move a little bit motion-wise, not severely. It would react exactly how the airplane was going to react, but you couldn’t see anything. Your first visual of what the airplane was like was going to be on your first flight in the airplane. 

That’s when you’re going to see what does a takeoff look like in 20 seconds? What does it look like to get behind a tanker and refuel? And as importantly, what does it look like to come back in at 175 indicated [airspeed] and land this airplane on a runway? It was a tremendous training aid because when you came back later on when you were doing your six weeks in Japan, maybe you took some vacation, but the first thing after that they’re going to put you in the simulator for four hours and see how you react to emergencies. It was very complex and defining. We washed people out who could not maintain the level of proficiency that we expected if you were going to fly this airplane.

Q: Could you practice refueling as well?

A: You could do takeoffs, because it was like an instrument takeoff, and you could do ‘quote’ instrument landings, but you had no visual to see how this whole thing would come together. Air refueling we didn’t mess with it because there wasn’t enough you could see. When you came to an air refueling in the simulator, they would just fill you up and say, ‘okay, you’ve been refueled.’ Because you needed the visual picture to understand what you’d be doing behind the tanker.

Q: Tell me about the first time you donned the pressure suit, which you had to wear to withstand the pressures of flying at altitudes of up to 80,000 feet or more.

A: If you were going to fly, you came in two and a half hours early. You had to pass a physical before every flight to make sure your sinuses and blood pressure and a number of other things were okay. You would then have a meal of steak and eggs, just like the astronauts, high protein, low bulk. They would brief you on the status of your airplane, and then about an hour and 15 minutes prior, you would go down where your suits were being maintained, and you’d put on cotton long johns because you’re going to perspire a little bit. Not profusely, but occasionally, if you were low on fuel. The fuel was the cooling system for the airplane, and if you’d been flying at the higher speeds, and you were low on fuel, the suit would heat up a little bit. 

They’d suit you up. I’m going to stop there. The first time you ever suited up, you’re not going to the airplane. They’re just exposing you. It was a [NASA] Gemini suit that had been modified, and you put on the cotton long johns. You had two people that helped you into the suit. The suit is lying on the floor like a coverall. So you’re going to come through the back of the suit. You put your legs on like you would a coverall you’d have at home. You then put your arms through the sleeves, and at that point, the two technicians would grab that helmet ring, and they would lift it up, and then you would duck underneath and come up and stand.

So now the suit is fully on you, and the helmet ring is sitting on your shoulder. The first time you do that, it probably takes 25 minutes, because they’re explaining to you, this is the easiest way to do it. This is where you should step. This is how you get your legs in. This is how you get your arms in. And then the next thing they’re going to do, they’re going to hand you your helmet. 

The suit weighs about 40 pounds. If you’re claustrophobic, this is not a program to be in. It’s not overpowering, but it’s your work suit and something to get used to. It’s not that uncomfortable in a sitting position because that’s where you’re going to use it most of the time, sitting in the cockpit. 

They’re going to hand you your helmet, and in the helmet — which most people can’t see — there’s a seal that comes around your face. So once you get the helmet on, you’re going to crank down the seal so it seals tightly, because you are going to be breathing — once the visor comes down in the aircraft — you’re going to be breathing 100% oxygen until you land. The reason for that is that the cabin is pressurized to 26,000 feet to reduce the pressure on the airplane. So they want to reduce the nitrogen in your blood. You’re just like a diver when you go from sea level to 26,000 feet. It’s like a diver who’s been diving coming back up to sea level. So by breathing 100% oxygen, you get the nitrogen out of your system, and you avoid the bends.

There were very few, and possibly no episodes like that in the SR program, but in the U-2 sister program, they maintained an altitude of 28,000 feet, and they had to pre-breathe oxygen before they ever went out to the airplane. Because once they got to the airplane, start up, they go straight to altitude. When we take off, it takes us a half hour from the time our visor comes down, breathing 100% oxygen, before you can take off, and then you’re going to go to a tanker to refuel. So by time you were through at the tanker, you’ve been breathing oxygen, pure oxygen, for over an hour. And the reason for taking off light and going to a tanker: Early in the program, the test program, I think we lost two airplanes doing tests due do heavyweight takeoffs and aborts.

So to preclude that, instead of taking off with 80,000 pounds of fuel, we would take off with 40,000 pounds of fuel. It reduced the wear and tear on the tires, so we could accelerate quicker, less stress.

But there was a second piece. When the Concorde crashed in Paris in 2000, it lost two engines on one side. They could never get the airplane going fast enough. The airplane stalled. The powerful engines caused the airplane to roll over.

On the SR, it had been forecast through the simulations that if you lost one of your afterburners, lost an engine right after takeoff, there wasn’t enough airflow over your flight controls because you have to keep the other afterburner going. You were going to do the same thing. You were going to roll over and crash. So if you had a full load of fuel, it would take you about maybe 20 seconds, 30 seconds to get above 350 [knots] because at 350, you had more than enough air going across the flight controls to control an engine-out condition. By reducing the takeoff weight down to 40,000 pounds, that dead zone where you didn’t have control was probably 15 seconds. Never happened, but that was part of the theory behind why we took off with half a fuel load. 

We took off with heavier fuel loads, occasionally. I think I may have taken off once or twice with a full load. It was a fairly rare exception, but we would take off with 50,000 pounds. I’ve taken off with 60,000 pounds a couple times.

Q: How was your first flight? When was it?

A: You’re not going to be impressed. My first flight, I think, was the 16th of July, 1976, and your first flight in the airplane is subsonic. You’re going to be fully suited up. You’re going to take off. It’s going to be the first time you ever see a takeoff. The takeoff is 20 seconds, and in 20 seconds, you’re going to go 4,500 feet from a dead stop. You’re going to lift off doing 230 miles an hour as you bring the nose up and accelerate to 400 knots. You’re going to pass through 20,000 feet less than two minutes from the time you start your takeoff roll, and then you’ll level off at 25,000 feet and head out to the tanker.

On your first flight, you’re going to spend almost an hour and a half on the tanker, and that’s to teach you how you refuel this airplane behind our special tankers. Almost all the guys had prior refueling experience, so you’re helping them adjust to a new type of refueling regimen per se. 

Occasionally, you’d get a guy who had no refueling experience, and that was more difficult to try to teach somebody for the first time how you do refuelings. And one of the trickier things with the tankers, you’d hook up with a tanker, and they’re doing 315 [mph] to 325 [mph] at 25,000 feet. That was where we liked to refuel. So, not every time, but it was not uncommon that by the time you were passing through, having accepted 70,000 pounds of fuel, you’re starting to get power limited, and there were two things you can do. 

The preferred thing was you would light the left afterburner to the min-burner [minimum afterburner], and bring the right engine back to a point it would be your modulator. But now you’re going to put the rudder in, because you’re going to be slightly cocked, because your left engine is in min-burner, and what we want you to do is not drop off the boom. 

Strategic Air Command, our parent command in the Air Force, wanted you to drop off the tanker, stabilize, light the left burner, adjust the airplane speed, pull in and refuel. The critical thing for us in refuelings is that we wanted to have full tanks at the end of the air refueling point, and if it’s a timed mission, we would need to have that all done at a certain time because maybe there are other airplanes or satellites or that they’re going to use us as a cue. 

So basically, I never dropped off, and as an instructor pilot, I taught my students to be able to light the afterburner, put the rudder in, use the right throttle as a modulation, and stay there. One of the good things in our tankers that others didn’t have, we could talk to the tanker crew through the boom, and the outside world couldn’t hear us. So, particularly on operational missions, when we’re running radio silent, we could give the tanker instructions that we wanted passed on without having to break radio silence. 

Q: How did you prepare for your first flight?

I probably had a 150 hours in the simulator. I felt very comfortable. Came in like I told you for the physical, and we talked with my instructor about what we were going to do that day, and got suited up. I wouldn’t say so much nervousness, but anticipation. 

You’re going to have your first flight. You go up, and when you get up in the cockpit, you sit down. You put your arms on the side rails, and those same two people, men or women, that suited you up are now going to reach in and make all the critical connections. This is the first time you’re really going to see the whole process with the dual oxygen system, your comm system, hooking up your survival pack, your parachute, everything.

You go through the same thing you’ve done in a simulator, but now you’re in the aircraft. You’re gonna, for the first time, be able to taxi it and get a feel for how sensitive are the brakes and find out what your turning radius is. Every airplane has a different radius, and how much do you anticipate when you start to make a turn as you’re heading out? You taxi on out when it’s that time. Go to the end of the runway, and they’ll do one more inspection to make sure everything looks good on the airplane, and you’ll just kind of go through, and then you’ll call the tower, and you’re cleared on the runway.

And once you’re cleared for takeoff, what you’ll do is you’ll release the brakes as you bring the power to mil [military power—full power without afterburner]. You’ll quickly check your engines. The instruments look good… You go to full afterburner, and you’re on your way. And like I said, the takeoff portion takes about 20 seconds. When you hit 180 [knots], you’re going to start bringing the nose up because you don’t have any flaps, so you’re looking for the airplane to start getting a lift because of the speed, and so you’re going to lift off with a 210 indicated, 210 translates to about 230 miles an hour, and then continue the nose up to 15 to 20 degrees because you’re going to be accelerating pretty quickly.

Like I said, you pass through 20,000 feet less than two minutes from the time you start. You just go through the routine. You’re gonna see the tanker. I’d seen many tankers before. Of course, this my first time in the SR. 

SR-71 Takeoff at Edwards Air Force Base

One advantage to me and guys coming out of fighters is that sometimes fighters had the same behind-the-power-curve problem [when refueling], so you would end up having to light one of your afterburners and do the same process in a fighter because of the weight of the fuel. And maybe we didn’t carry bomb loads in the RF-4, but maybe I had three tanks, a center tank and two wing tanks that increased my weight up to the point that I was actually starting to slip behind the power curve.

You come back in, and the instructor is going to demonstrate the first landing, and then you’re going to go back out, and he’s going to have you do an ILS — instrument landing system — approach and touchdown, and then you go back out, and you may do a second one, or you may do a precision radar approach. And then you’re going to get into visual approaches. You’re going to come down, and into the runway, you’re going to go around with a closed pattern, so you can get more practice touch-and-goes until you get it down. If you’re in the traffic pattern, when we had about 7,000 pounds of fuel left, we would land the airplane at that point. We never wanted to get really low in case something should occur because we needed to have enough fuel to get down to McClellan or Sacramento Airport [to divert].

SR-71 Blackbird Arrives at RAF Greenham Common Airshow (IAT) 1983

Q: How long did your first flight last, how fast did you go and how high?

A: That first flight was two and a half hours. I reached about 25,000 feet, and probably hit 0.9 Mach for a little while. Then you fly around. You do not go supersonic. Your first supersonic flight is going to be your second flight.

Q: Did you first fly in the two-seater (SR-71B)? 

A: We all flew in the two-seater first as a pilot for our initial pilot checkout.

Q: How does the B-variant fly differently from the A?

A: The SR-71 B-model flies just like the A-model mission operational aircraft.

Q: Was there a tradition to celebrate your first flight?

A: There were some people that met you. I think my family was there, but that’s not the important flight. That’ll come two days, two flights later. You know, people, other current crew members, pilots, and RSOs and my instructor pilot will come out and say, “Hey, congratulations, Buz.” But then, the real important one: your second flight. You’re gonna take off. You’re gonna go to the tanker. You’re gonna refuel, but now you’re gonna drop off the tanker, and you’re gonna start. And you go supersonic. You would start a climb from 25,000 feet at 0.9 Mach, and you would climb up. And we typically would go up to 33,000 because they did not want you supersonic below 30,000 feet because of the shock.

So at 30,000, 33,000 feet, you push the nose over, go full afterburner, and as you’re coming down, you’re going to accelerate really fast. And this is the high drag zone of the SR-71. So as you’re coming down, you’re going to go through the speed of sound very easily. Now you’re going to see [Mach] 1.05, 1.1, and about that point, then you’re going to start bringing the nose up and pick up your climb speed and basically use that climb speed until you’re fairly high up when you’re going to pick up a Mach, and that first supersonic flight, you’re going to fly it at 2.8 Mach, and I know this may sound unique, but at 2.8 Mach, this airplane is actually quite docile.

Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird: Afterburner

That’s the low speed. The sensitivity of the airplane is still there, but it’s fairly low. 

Your third flight is Mach 3, and you do the same practice, you do the refueling. You come back in. You shoot patterns, but when you land this time, people come out, typically the wing commander, and he’s got a Mach 3 tie tack he’s going to give you. And all kinds of people are going to be out there because this is a significant time; you’ve had your Mach 3 flight. But there’s something else significant with it. You get to buy the bar that night, and we were always glad to buy the bar because that meant we’d finally had our Mach 3 flight, and we were part of the group. 

Q: What was it like when you reached Mach 3 for the first time?

A: The aircraft actually reacts quite well. The thing that surprised you, or not surprised you, but it’s the first time you get to see the curvature of the Earth, the beautiful black sky up above, and the blue below you. It’s also very quiet. You are in a spacesuit, but you’re traveling at three times the speed of sound. The sound’s behind you. You can feel vibrations in the airplane.

Later on, when you’ve flown this airplane for a while, you can actually feel at certain times when boost pumps are kicking out because that particular fuel tank is going dry, and little sensitivities like that. You’re very busy monitoring the cockpit instruments to make sure the airplane is doing exactly what you want it to do, because it can deviate. And what they’re looking for is we want pilots and RSOs that are going to make sure the airplane is doing what the mission calls for and the way it’s supposed to be flown.

So there’s an adjustment as you change temperatures aloft. The airplane’s going to fly a little differently, so you’re going to make adjustments. If you’re going from warm air to colder air because of a frontal passage, as soon as the engines get that colder air, the airplane wants to accelerate because now the air is denser, and the engines are producing more thrust. It’s a dynamic environment. This is not the kind of airplane that you sit back and put the autopilot on and let it do its thing. 

You have an autopilot on, but the only thing the autopilot does is keep it on that track that the mission was planned for. 

We don’t put any altitude hold on, because we allow the airplane — as it burns off fuel — to continue to climb. So you’re in a constant climb as the airplane becomes lighter and lighter, and with that, your fuel flow continues to go down. The higher you go, you’re carrying less weight. The amount of fuel you’re burning per mile or per minute is dropping, because the engines are becoming more and more efficient. It’s the only airplane in the world — because the way our engine inlets and nozzles are engineered — that the faster we go, the less fuel we burn. You talk about any other airplane you can think of. If you’re going to go faster, it’s going to cost you on fuel. It’s not the case with the SR.

Q: What altitude did you reach on that first Mach 3 flight?

A: 81,000 — 80,000 feet, something like that.

Q: How difficult was it to get used to the SR-71’s cockpit and all its additional gauges?

A: The core part of the cockpit were the attitude indicators, and it was very much like the F-4-type airplanes, the RF-4 that I came out of. You just had a lot more round dials and gauges because of the supersonic flight that was going to be involved with this airplane. In the RF-4 during test flights, I needed to bring the airplane, I think to 2.1 Mach. And you only did it momentarily because you were burning a tremendous amount of fuel, so you didn’t have all the different things that you were monitoring. 

In the SR, you developed a way to cross-check so that you were constantly making sure that the engines and everything were performing correctly. That’s part of what you’d learned already in the simulator, and now you had it in the airplane. And now, you could see how some of the conditions — like actual operating engines and changing weather environment — affected you when you’re flying the airplane.

Q: Weather and atmospheric conditions play a big role in how the SR-71 flew, right?

A: That’s correct. Early on, when they were flying — we never overflew Russia or Red China — but we’d fly right on their border, and some of the early flights off the north coast of Russia. It may sound kind of strange to you, but there was some really warm air. You study in school that at 80,000 feet, the outside air should be about minus 50 degrees, 55 degrees, somewhere in there. The pressure is about 0.4 pounds per square inch. I’ve seen air as warm as minus 40. Now you’ll say, ‘But gee, that doesn’t seem like a big deal.’ It’s a huge difference on the engine because now the air is a lot thinner. But I’ve also seen the other scale off the north coast of Russia. I’ve seen minus 90 degrees. Now, when you starting pumping minus 90 degree air into the engine, it really wants to race because now the air is that much denser, and the engines are producing more thrust.

Q: How difficult was Blackbird to fly? How did it compare to other aircraft? What was the biggest challenge to learning to fly at speed and altitude? 

A: One of the biggest challenges, if you came out of a fighter airplane, is that we could pull seven Gs. That’s what they were built for. The SR-71, because it expands in flight with heating, the G limit is 1.7 Gs. You’ve had that in a sharp turn in the car, clearly on a roller coaster, and that’s why we were limited to 45 degrees of bank because that’s 1.7 Gs being pulled. Now, if the airplane is cold, has not expanded, we can pull 3 Gs, but you can see it’s a much, much more limiting. Like if you’re cruising at Mach 3 and you want to make a turn, the radius is going to be around 75 degrees, around 75 miles. So you’re looking at 150 miles from where you are until you get over to do a complete 180 degree turn heading the other direction. So there’s a lot more of a planning factor on how much because you can’t yank and bang this airplane because when it’s expanded, you could bend it and titanium is really hard to repair.

Q: Did that ever happen to you?

A: It didn’t. But at an air show in England, one of the guys pulled more Gs than he should have, and the airplane flew once or twice more. And everybody said there was something wrong with this airplane. It was grounded. I don’t know how they got it back to the States, but it never flew again.

Q: How did the chine surfaces, those sloped surfaces at the edge of the fuselage, affect flight?

A: They gave you more lift. Other than that, it obviously limited your visibility somewhat because they’re flared out.

Q: Give me a sense of your visibility in the SR-71 cockpit. What can you see and what can’t you see?

A: Well, one thing, you’re in a spacesuit. So, think about from the middle of your body, you can’t see aft of where your arms are. That’s all by feel. So everything you do in the cockpit, your sense of feel is considerably reduced. As you look forward, the two side windows are great for looking around. Many times we have multiple tankers because of how far the tankers had to go to be in our refueling position. 

For our refueling track off the north coast of Norway, those tankers had to fly five hours to get there. So we would typically have three tankers to make sure that they could give us the fuel we needed. The windows you used most were those two pie [-shaped] windows in the front, because that’s what you’re going to be looking through when you take off. That’s what you’re looking through when you’re refueling, and that’s what you’re looking through when you come in to land. Now the side window you might browse a little bit when you come in to land to see, particularly in the trainer [SR-71B], how am I aligned with things that I know are along the runway to make sure I’m in the center per se. Because once you bring that nose up in the trainer, you can’t see forward. The runway disappears.

SR-71 Cockpit Checkout

Q: Did you have any close calls during training?

A: Not during training. Later flying operationally, I did. I took off from a runway where the wind was exceeding 50 knots, and the airfield was closed. This was in Okinawa, but Washington, D.C., wanted the flight off because it was critical that the SR show up in an area at a certain time. 

I came back from another flight to Kadena where water had gotten into some of the systems. One of the afterburners didn’t light. I couldn’t get it to light, so I came back in. It’s a dual runway. The weather was about 200 feet [ceiling], half a mile visibility, and the radar controller put me on the wrong runway. And as I was breaking out [of the clouds], there was a DC-10 full of passengers, so I had to go around, and I’m starting to lose instruments. Doing a circling approach in an SR-71 is really hard, but fortunately I had been stationed there before, so I kind of knew the ground track I needed to maintain, so I could come around and successfully find the runway and put it down, which I did.

About the same time period, around 1979, 1980, coming back from a night mission to RAF Mildenhall, there had been some thunderstorms through England, and the weather in England was terrible. There was not an air base that was above minimums, so I was told that there was a tanker airborne waiting to give us fuel so we could fly to Madrid to Torrejón Air Base, the U.S. Air Force base there. But we were going to have a special mission in two days. The White House or the national security advisor had directed it, and I knew if I flew to Torrejón, by the time you got all the support equipment down there, there was no way we could make that mission.

As SR pilots, we had different rules than the rest of the pilots in the Air Force. If you’re a regular pilot in the Air Force and the airfield goes below minimums, you mandatorily have to go to the alternate location. You can’t shoot an approach. That was not the case in the SR-71. We had the option to shoot the approach to see if we could land, and if we couldn’t land, then you went to the alternate. 

One of the things in the back seat, the RSO had a periscope. He could look straight down, and he could also adjust the periscope so it could look, I think, 35 degrees forward. So that particular night, I mean, it is pea soup fog. I mean, it is terrible. I’m coming in. Oh, and the ILS had been hit by lightning, so there was no ILS. I’m using a British radar controller, who is good. 

As we’re coming in, my back-seater John said, ‘Okay, I’m looking down, and I can see you’re on center line because I can see through the periscope the lights passing underneath the airplane.’ So we landed the airplane successfully. I brought it to a stop. The controller had forgotten to tell Mildenhall that I was coming in to land. They thought the airfield was closed, so when I called them and said, ‘Mildenhall Tower, this is so-and-so. Send out progressive [taxi instructions]. I can’t find the taxiway to be led back to the hangar where I have to put this airplane.’ And the controller came back and said, ‘You can’t be here. We’re closed.’ I said, ‘We’re here, sitting on the runway. Just get me a follow-me [truck] to get me back to where I need to park.’

Q: Tell me about the RSO relationship during flights. What was the RSO’s role and how did you communicate?

A: If you flew an operational mission, it had to be with your formed RSO. Couldn’t be with anybody else. The RSO ran the navigation system, the star tracker, did any updates required there. The RSO turned on and ran the cameras. Radar nose if it was going. The RSO ran the checklists. The defensive systems were all in the back. All the indicators about whether we were being tracked or being shot at — that was all in the back. He did the radio calls on training missions over the United States. I would do them in the traffic pattern, taking off and landing, but the rest of the radio calls were done from the back seat as we went from center to center. 

He was the orchestrator back there. The pilot flew the airplane, took care of the refueling, made sure that it’s on track, and we’re doing what we’re doing. But the guy in the back is the one that’s the synthesizer.

The cockpit is really small. It would have been really tough to have carried a map and folding it and trying to move it. So the [the map was on 35 millimeter film], and it moved at your ground speed, and would show you, ‘okay, you got a turn coming up. This is the fuel you should have. RSO, you need to turn on this camera. You need to check that your defensive systems are on and working before you enter denied airspace.’ So the RSO was a very critical function. We trained and flew together for four years.

Q: Walk me through your first operational mission. When was it? How was your preparation process different from others, and what did you do? What was the mission?

A: Um, I won’t say it was a vanilla mission, but it was the one where you’re going to go to Kadena because we can keep track of you the best there, and the missions are more controlled. So your first operational mission, you would have flown a local mission where you’re mostly flying around the island and doing stuff and just landing at Kadena. That would have been March of ’77, and your first mission. The thing that makes it different is you go through the same preparation, but the day before, you’re going to go in and do more of a mission planning. What does the mission look like? Where are the turns? Where are the things I need to be concerned about? And then the day of the mission, they’re going to come in and say, ‘Okay, this is what the weather is. This is what any intelligence activity you need to know of. These are special instructions from the State Department that might provide additional limiting factors on you that you have to take into consideration.’

That’s all around the time you’re having your breakfast, getting ready to go. You go down, you suit up like you normally would. There’s no difference in starting the airplane up. It’s a little more critical this time to make sure your tankers are where they’re supposed to be, and typically your first mission is probably going to be along the Korean DMZ. It’s going to be a two-and-a-half-hour sortie. You’re going to take off. You’re going to refuel at 25,000 feet. Head up the west coast of Korea. You’re going to see the Yellow Sea. Make a big sweeping right turn, and you’ll come north of Seoul. You go very close to the DMZ all the way across. Do a big turn over the Sea of Japan. Come back the same direction along the DMZ. Then turn south and come back and land, and this will probably be your first operational mission.

Q: What were you collecting? What kind of sensors did you have?

A: Oh, we would have the side cameras that could look out about 30 miles in. We might have the nose camera. The electronic sensors could pick up any radio, radar, other type of electronic signals out to about 350 miles anywhere around us. So you’d be sensing what the North Koreans have that was active at that time to better understand what their defense posture is, where missile sites were located, and things along those lines.

The side camera was a camera controlled by the computer. All you did was turn it on because of the astro tracker. We navigated directly off the stars, we didn’t navigate off the ground. We guaranteed the president 300 feet anywhere in the world traveling at 2,200 miles an hour. This is long before GPS, and so the president and the people around him had great — six presidents used us — comfort knowing that we would go where they wanted us to go, and in all likelihood we’d come back. 

We weren’t going to get shot down, which never happened, so they wouldn’t have to deal with some kind of a hostage situation or some kind of a diplomatic problem. That was just part of it. 

Later on, when I flew a flight for President Carter when the Saudis and the Yemenis were at war over their border, the nose camera was in there. The nose camera took a picture 72 miles wide, 36 miles either side of center, and in the center your resolution was two to four inches. You can see people, you can see tanks, cars, all kinds of things. You cannot recognize faces.

There’s another nose that came in while I was flying, probably in 1977, a ground-mapping radar, because there’s parts of the world where the sun rarely shines. So if you’re waiting for that picture, you may never get it. So you can’t see people with that. Cars are hard to identify. It’s more of an electronic blob, but a ship, an airplane, things like that, that would be on the ground or at sea, there’s enough radar return that most of the time they may not be able to give it the exact airplane or ship, but they know what kind it was, so that day or night, in any weather, when an enemy is trying to move things around that you can’t see, you could actually pick up what their activities are.

Q: You talked about working with other assets for collection missions and a lot of coordination. What did those include?

A: Other assets in our coordinated collection missions included other aircraft, ships at sea, land sites collecting and satellites overhead. Timing was important on these operations. I had as many as 28 sensors I was stimulating the Russians for.

Q: Give me an overall sense of your operational missions. What were the goals and what permissions did you need?

A: There’s something that’s still done today called the ‘Beige Book,’ and they go through, and it’s all the services, including submarines, and all that. Okay, what are we interested in? What are we going to plan? How important is the target? How much risk do these targets pose to the collectors, but also politically? If we do this, are there political consequences? And this goes to the whole government, including the State Department, CIA. So they publish this. 

Now, when something occurs like the battle with Yemen that just pops up, then things are reprioritized.

Overflights are typically approved by the president, but sometimes by the National Security Adviser. Not below that level per se. The missions where you’re flying peripherally around Russia, around China, other places in the world, those would be approved as part of the monthly schedule. Places we overflew. I mean, we overflew Cuba every 45 days. We did work in Central America. After I left, I think there were some that went down to Colombia. I am one of the only two pilots that ever took the airplane to Diego Garcia. Originally, we were looking at that as a possible base to use to go image Iran and come from a different direction than we had in the past because they were much like today, harassing ships with their missiles and other stuff. We flew over North Korea a couple times.

Q: Did you ever fly over North Korea?

A: I didn’t, but the airplane did. 

Q: How did you navigate?

A: We used the star catalog. We had 58 stars that were the northern stars that we used for tracking. To give you an idea. Took them an hour and 45 minutes to load our mission in the tracker, and we called it after the fact R2-D2 because it always knew where we were. It was told exactly where it was on the face of the earth to start. After we started the engines and we’re ready to taxi, when you came out of the hangar, if it was a clear day or clear night, within two minutes, the RSO in the back seat would get a starlight, and what that told you is we’re now automatically tracking the stars day or night, and it was a really accurate system.

It was a wonderful system to fly with, but it also gave the planners and our leaders [the confidence] that if we can fly within 300 feet, like let’s say the north coast of Russia, well, most airplanes are going to have to put you a couple miles off just because we’re not sure exactly where you are. In our case, we could fly maybe 500 feet off their international border because we knew we would be exactly where we were supposed to be, and that was one of the great advantages.

Another great advantage was we had great range. There was a special mission that I flew. The Navy had lost track of a couple boomers [Russian nuclear ballistic missile submarines]. They’d come out of Murmansk, up there in northern Russia, and had slipped through what we call the Greenland-Iceland-U.K. gap, and so we were tasked for a quick reaction. And in this particular case, there was a a second SR that took off after me. To show you the importance of the mission, if I was not mission-capable at Goose Bay, the second SR, one hour behind me, was going to pick up the mission.

I was fully ready, so we proceeded across the Atlantic north of Norway. We refueled again. We did the double pass past Murmansk. I saw [the Russian submarines] once or twice making their way to the Arctic Ocean on the surface as the inland waters were too shallow to dive.

We refueled again off the north coast, crossed the Atlantic, refueled over Goose Bay, Labrador, came across Canada, and at 8:20 in the morning, Saturday morning, I landed back at Beale Air Force Base.

Q: What other countries have you flown over?

A: I’ve flown over Cuba. Obviously, flown in the Middle East, over Egypt, down to Yemen. Over West Germany. In the Pacific, we did more peripheral flights, and peripheral were sometimes actually more sensitive because they put you close to the border, and there were a lot of potential political issues.

For instance, around 1978 or 1979, I had a major emergency on the DMZ, and to follow what I needed to do to clear the problem — which had to do with the inlets — I needed to roll the airplane out, but I was already in a turn. If I’d rolled the airplane out, I would have overflown North Korea, which would have possibly been a political violation. So I had to keep the airplane in a turn. The airplane was damaged. I had to land at one of our U.S. Air Force bases in South Korea and have maintenance come up and work on the airplane, just to avoid a possible incident. 

I’ll show you the difference between presidents. When President Ford’s term was coming to an end, he knew that President Carter felt it was immoral to overfly other countries and unethical. So we were flying over Cuba every 45 days to keep track of the Russians and the Cubans per se. So, on his last day in office, President Ford had tasked us: you were to take off, you’re to overfly Cuba, you have to land back in California. This was on the 20th of January, 1977. Not later than 10 minutes before Carter takes the oath of office, I was in the wing commander’s office when we called the White House and said, ‘Mission complete, aircraft on the ground.’

For a year, we didn’t overfly anybody because Carter thought it was immoral, and then he realized the Russians were doing stuff in Cuba we weren’t seeing. There were, you know, parts of the world that the SR had unique capabilities that he was foregoing because of his political view. So that changed.

Q: Why?

A: It changed because we were having intelligence failures, because we were being surprised with things that were taking place that our collection systems, had they been used like they were designed, would have probably picked up.

Q: Was the SR-71 used as a psychological weapon against adversaries?

A: Sort of. We sometimes flew over heads of state greeting each other and they would be covered with an excellent sonic shock wave to remind them they were doing things counter to U.S. and/or NATO policies. In the three days before Noriega decided to leave Panama, SR-71 aircraft overflew his home with the sonic boom to advise him it was time to go.

Q: Did you ever fly over China?

A: We did not overfly China. U-2s did, but the SR never overflew China. Now this will surprise you. Sometimes I’ve flown missions that the Russians knew ahead of time that I was going to be right on their border at a certain time, and the reason for that was that they really wanted to shoot down and get their hands on an SR. So when we would be into an area like other reconnaissance airplanes, they would hardly pay attention to it. We would go in the area, and a lot of their radars and other stuff would come up very closely, monitoring what we were doing. 

So I landed in Okinawa, Japan, and the head of NSA for the Far East had been there and asked me, ‘Was there any unusual activity today?’ And I said, ‘No, about the same number of fighters tried to come up to intercept me, and I never had a missile fired at me.’ And he said, ‘Well, that’s unexpected. We told the Russians yesterday where you were going to be today, hoping that we’d get some greater fidelity on the collection.’ So they had great confidence we were going to come back.

Q: How close did the Russian fighters get to you?

A: Not that close. We were really a tough target. They would try to make a head-on [interception] with a conversion [turn]. Well, by the time they made a conversion, they had the same problem. They had to be above Mach 2 to come after us. By the time they made the turn, we were 100 miles down the road.

Q: The SR-71 had a reduced radar signature. Did this help in its survivability, or was it the speed and the electronic warfare capabilities that largely kept SR-71 crews safe?

A: It was a combination of capabilities that gave it such a remarkable survival capability. To start with, the stealthiness made it hard to find until it was very close to you, significantly compressing an enemy’s reaction timelines. Extremely high speed, Mach 3.2, and incredible altitude, up to 85,000 feet, put its operations in a difficult area to attack. If they did get contact and decided to engage you — all the missiles of our era had to be guided to the high-speed maneuvering target as they did not have onboard guidance capability. When the electronic jamming system became active, the adversary lost their ability to communicate with their missile, so basically it followed its last command and went stupid.

Q: I have seen reports that Blackbirds evaded about 4,000 missiles fired by the Soviet Union, North Vietnam, North Korea and India. Is that accurate?

A: No, it’s not.

Q: How many would you say? 

A: The number of missiles wasn’t well-tracked. I flew a mission on the Korean DMZ, and they were playing with me. When I say playing, they were using their long-range [radar]. Then the acquisition radar came up that was trying to ready for the missile, but the missile was never armed. 

Six weeks later, my buddy had three missiles fired at him. So there were probably no more than 100. Part of the thing was they gave up. I mean, particularly over Vietnam, that’s where most of the missiles were fired, and they were just not working. And how many missiles do you want to fire to try to get an airplane?

The Day N Korea Fired A Missile At SR 71 Blackbird

Q: What were the orders if things went terribly wrong? Were there places you absolutely could not land at and had to destroy the aircraft instead of letting it fall into enemy hands? What about if the crew was captured after ejecting?

A: The aircraft was not to go into enemy hands. And in some cases not even allies’ hands. If the aircraft was impossible to control and out of control — ejection might be your only option. It was the safest USAF aircraft I ever flew. There were a total of 12 ejections in the test program and in operations. None were ever caused by enemy actions. There was never a USAF SR-71 crew member ever killed flying this aircraft — an incredible record! We all went to a special survival school to understand what we might expect if captured by an enemy which never happened or came even close to happening.

Q: What was the closest interception threat?

A: Probably the closest the Russians ever got to a successful intercept had nothing to do with their initial work. There’s a crew; they’re flying the Baltic, so they’re Mach 2.8. They head up past Lithuania, Latvia, and as they beam Estonia, the right engine explodes. The turbines come apart. So now you’re a single-engine airplane. You’re not going to be at Mach. You’re going to be probably around 12,000 feet subsonic. So the crew announces Mayday, starts a turn. They probably overflew some Soviet airspace. They start this big turn. The Swedes pick up the fact that they hear a Mayday call, and they have a pair of [Saab] Viggens that are airborne that are actually armed.

So as they make the turn, they descend. Get the airplane under control. The Russians send five flights of MiGs to come out. They’ll also send out a rescue helicopter with the idea maybe they can capture the SR crew. Some of those MiGs that were coming out we were sure were directed to shoot down the SR if it wouldn’t follow their signals.

But when they got there, all of a sudden they find there’s a Swedish Viggen on either wing. So the Russians decided this is not a good idea. Halfway down, the two Viggens were low on fuel. The Swedes sent two more Viggens up that replaced them, sat on the wings, continued their mission, and when they got to a certain point, United States Air Force F-15s came out of Germany, intercepted, joined with the SR-71, and led it to a safe landing on an air base in northern Germany. 

The mission was classified for years and years. The Swedes wouldn’t even acknowledge it took place because they were a neutral country per se. One of my classmates from the academy, who was a lieutenant general, found out about it and said, ‘We’ve got to do something.’ So, in a very rare occasion, they put through the paperwork, and those four Swedish pilots at a ceremony in Stockholm were given United States Air Force Air Medals for what they did that day to save the airplane. That’s the closest that we ever came to actually losing an SR-71 that would have been related to combat. (You can read more about that award ceremony in our story about the event here.)

Q: What’s the highest you’ve flown? What’s the fastest?

A: My top speed is 3.35 Mach before I slowed it back down to 3.2 Mach because we got into cold air and the airplane really wanted to accelerate. My highest altitude is a little over 85,000 feet. Those were in the late ’70s, early ’80s. I don’t remember the specifics. 

The high-speed one was off the north coast of Russia when I got into really cold air. You can’t just come out afterburner to try to slow the airplane down because you risk then having a compressor stall. So what you had to do was force the airplane into a climb, and as it was climbing, break its ability to maintain that speed. So once you got it back to the speed you wanted, you’d kind of lower the nose to where you wanted to cruise and go from there.

The faster you went in this airplane, the more dangerous it was, and the more sensitive it became, and that was part of the reason why 3.2 Mach — that’s where the inlets and the engines and the nozzles and everything was optimized for, because they were really afraid you had what we call an “unstart.” That’s when you lose a shock out of one of the inlets, and now the other engine is producing 100%. This engine is still running, but it’s only producing 30%. The airplane goes into a violent yaw and can pitch up on you. They were afraid there wasn’t enough flight control to be able to control the airplane.

Q: Was it harder to fly at that speed?

A: It’s just more sensitive. As you made inputs, the airplane was more reactive, and you had to be on your toes because if you had an unstart at that point, you needed to make sure that you prevented the airplane from doing a yaw slice and particularly pitching up.

One time off the coast of China around 1978 or 1979, I had an unstart and the nose started up. Of course John [the RSO] knew that we had an unstart, because you can’t miss it. You get banged up in the cockpit. I had to stick full forward, and I told John, I said, ‘we’ve got about three or four potatoes.’ That means in three or four seconds, if that nose doesn’t stop climbing, we’re going to have to leave this airplane because it’s going to disintegrate.

Q: You flew over Area 51 and later oversaw its funding when you were at the Pentagon. What is it like?

A: When I did the test flights in Area 51, I had to go through and do some briefings and sign off on stuff. I’m an Area 51 guy. I mean, I’ve been on the ground there. I was responsible for their funding for a couple years, and I used to take guests out there on certain occasions who needed to see something or understand something. It’s great. It looks like the movie The Martian. It’s God forbidden, but it’s a great place to do classified testing because it’s the only place in the country we can do that pretty much successfully. 

Before I left the Pentagon, I completed the paperwork to withdraw 75,000 more acres of land that sat on a hillside. So now your closest point to have a direct view of the complexes is from 26 miles away at [Tikaboo Peak].

Q: Let’s talk about the present. Obviously, the Blackbirds are big news with rampant speculation about the future of Tail 844. What do you know about this, and what do you think that NASA is planning for it?

A: I think we know a number of things. The airplane’s been outside for what 30 years, so it may need some repair. NASA is trying to inspire the current and future generations about X planes. 

One right now that’s got everybody’s attention is the X-59 that will start flying over the United States here pretty soon, and it’s to measure whether we have successfully come up with a shape that reduces the intensity of the Mach shock wave. Because where this will lead to is there’s a couple companies… that want to create a supersonic transport. One of the limitations on the Concorde, no European country would ever allow it to overfly. Nor did we, because that tremendous wing space created a really significant shock wave on the ground.

In the SR-71, we broke windows. I can remember a particular Cuban overflight. I came around, I did a descent over Mississippi. My tanker was over Mississippi. I refueled. Gave me enough fuel to get back to California. When I landed, the director of operations for the wing had left a message that when I got out of my spacesuit, give him a call. So I called him. I said, ‘Col. Lawson, what can I do?’ And he goes, ‘Oh, Buz, how’d the mission go?’ And I said, ‘You don’t ask me how the mission goes, unless there’s something you’re particularly [interested in]. What is it?’ He says, ‘Well, Hattiesburg, Mississippi. There’s 30 houses that have fewer windows, and we’re pretty sure it was you.’

We couldn’t predict where the shock would go. Now [what] we know from some of the tests is, that when you’re in a turn, a turning descent like I was, sometimes the shock wave actually concentrates and becomes more violent than it would if you’d passed over straight and level. So what the X-59 is trying to do is see if they can successfully get a shape and controls, so they can build this supersonic transport that, in fact, can fly over normal airspace.

Q: Former NASA Blackbird engineer Tim Connors told us that he thinks that they’re going to use Tail 844 as a high-speed engine testbed. What’s your assessment of that?

A: It doesn’t make sense. It is high speed, but we’ve done all that. All that data is there. I mean, we’ve got hundreds of hours at Mach 3 and above that they don’t need to, and we’ve got air chambers now that can run the air at those Mach speeds to take a look at. I mean, they’re looking at the hypersonic. They’d like to have an engine like the J-58 that you could take off at a normal speed, and somewhere around Mach 3, you could open valves or do something that you could then accelerate to Mach 5 or Mach 6, and then when you were through with what you wanted to do, come back, and then go down through the Mach 3…2…1, and recover safely back at wherever you want.

Author’s note: Being able to test this exact transition area between Mach 3 and Mach 4, approaching hypersonic, potentially for a combined cycle engine like Buz describes, is what some think NASA will use the SR-71 for.

I mean, basically that’s what the SR did. Except we went to Mach 3. The big transition in the SR-71 took place in Mach 2. Because when you hit Mach 2 or thereabouts, that’s when those bypass tubes, the six of them around the engine, started bypassing air around the engine, and the air, the engine inlet, everything became a pseudo-ramjet. Because the faster you went, the more thrust you were creating by the ram thrust, not by the thrust being created by the engine itself. The engine had to run; it was critical to the whole process, but the vast majority of the larger part of the thrust was being created by the bypass.

Q: Do you think other aircraft came after Blackbird, even experimentally, that broke its speed records? If so, why haven’t we seen them all these years later?

A: No operational jet-powered manned aircraft has come along to break the significant records we set 50 years ago.

Q: So what is NASA going to use Tail 844 for?

A: I think they’re going to try to see how useful is it. Something that’s sat outside with blowing sand and everything else — it’s really hard to know.

Q: How how difficult will it be for modern test pilots to fly Tail 844 or whatever aircraft is created from this project? 

A: It would be challenging because there’s no simulator that works, and the simulator helps you go through all the things that you might face to successfully save the airplane. I mean, we consider the SR a national asset, so the last thing we were going to do was eject from the airplane. If you don’t have that simulator, it’s going to be much more difficult. 

Q: And the simulators don’t exist anymore?

A: The simulator sits down in a museum in Texas. It’s not operable.

Q: Was boosting the speed of the SR-71 ever discussed during your career, and if so, what were the options considered to make that happen?

A: It was. The idea was that they were going — I can’t remember where it was a water injection or something — that they could take the SR up to 3.5 and beyond. I may have this wrong, but the SR shape and the materials that make up the body of the airplane, I think are good up to [Mach] 3.8, maybe even 4, and this was going to be a water injection that for 10 minutes you could take the airplane up to a faster speed. I think it was [Mach] 3.5, but it may have been [Mach] 3.6. But when they looked at the weight and all the different things, it was the Lockheed proposal. The decision was made. You didn’t gain that much by raising the speed because we were fully authorized to go to [Mach] 3.3.

I’ll tell you a number of my contemporaries never went there. When I was an instructor pilot, I made sure my student went there because if you needed to go there, I wanted you to feel the sensitivity of the airplane when you’re at those speeds.

Q: So was the idea to flow liquid to cool the air going into the inlets?

A: I think that’s where it was. It was in that area, but it’s been so long. I don’t remember. But that never went anywhere, and it only gave you 10 minutes. Because the critical temperature on the airplane was not the airplane. In the cockpit, the CIT — compressor inlet temperature — we were not to exceed 427 centigrade, which is about 800 degrees [Fahrenheit]. Pratt & Whitney said beyond that point, our modeling says that you’re at a higher risk of the engine failing.

Q: Conners told us that during his time in the SR-71 program, he investigated whether it was possible to get the Blackbird close to Mach 4. Do you think a Blackbird could approach Mach 4 with the proper modifications?

A: The question is, what will Mach 4 give you? And I think the focus is more on unmanned vehicles that are Mach 5, Mach 6.

Q: Why?

A: You look at the weight that’s in an airplane to keep a man alive — that’s quite a penalty you’re paying. And when you get up to Mach 5 and Mach 6, the temperatures you’re dealing with are — it’s on a curve that is accelerating up, and the materials you have to use and try to put a person in there — it doesn’t make sense.

Q: How would the shock waves affect the ability to exceed Mach 3.3?

A: Obviously, they’re going to become steeper. At Mach 3.2, the shock sits just on the outer lip of the inlet. That is dealing with part of the shape of the airplane. Again, this is what was designed as your optimum speed.

Q: If you were a betting man, what would you say the odds are of the Blackbird flying again?

A: I could see it if they wanted to fly it for inspiration, particularly subsonic. The airplanes I’ve flown a couple times subsonic because we had some maintenance problems. 0.9 Mach. It’s a sweet airplane.

Q: Do you see it flying again?

A: I think part of the problem is engines that haven’t been used in those numbers of years. How difficult is it going to be for you to put them back in service? Because there’s no spare engines. When the program was taken apart finally in 2007, a number of those engines were ground up. Foolishly, they were ground up. So there’s not a lot of spares out there.

Q: So what’s NASA’s goal for Tail 844?

A: I think the goal is inspirational. I give tours regularly at the Air and Space Museum, and you’ve got multi generations that still love the SR. I just came back from organizing an SR-71 weekend down at the Museum of Aviation at Robins Air Force Base, and people come from all over to talk to us and see the airplane. When you look at it, young people can’t believe this airplane — like the one in the Smithsonian — came off the production line in 1966. It came off the production line before their parents were born. Yet you look at it, and partly because of the Star Wars influence, you think, ‘Oh, is it a space plane? Is it an airplane?’ I mean, it is something that creates visions and dreams, and I think that’s what NASA is trying to get back to: use it as a a dream generator to fly again. I don’t know. A number of people have already said that they can’t believe it’s going to fly. So it could fly, but I would say that the odds are against it.

Q: You’re at docent at the Udvar Hazy Center. What’s the scuttlebutt there about the plan for Tail 844?

A: They’re as clueless as everybody else.

Contact the author: howard@twz.com