Racing Classics

In April 1986, when Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi's missile batteries fired surface-to-air missiles at a Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird eighty thousand feet above Tripoli, the pilot in the cockpit pushed the throttles to Mach 3.5 and outran the missiles. What makes that moment unforgettable is that thirteen years earlier, doctors in a military burn ward had told that same pilot he would never live to leave his hospital bed. During the Vietnam War in 1973, young Air Force Lieutenant Brian Shul was flying a close-air-support plane near the Cambodian border when ground fire shot him down into the jungle. Trapped inside the burning wreckage on the ground, Shul was engulfed in white-hot aviation fuel flames until Special Forces rescuers pulled him out. At the military burn center at Fort Sam Houston in Texas, his face and hands were burned so severely that he went blind for two months, lost fifty pounds, and heard doctors whisper that his injuries were fatal. Refusing to die, Shul endured fifteen reconstructive surgeries over an entire year without giving up on the sky. When the Air Force told him a man with scarred hands could never fly jets again, Shul passed every single physical and flight test without a single medical waiver. Not only did he return to fighter jets, he passed the astronaut-grade physical required to fly the world's fastest airplane: the titanium SR-71 Blackbird. On April 15, 1986, following the American airstrike on Libya, Major Shul and his reconnaissance officer, Major Walter Watson, screamed across Tripoli at eighty thousand feet to photograph the bombed targets. Suddenly, Watson called out from the back seat that Libyan radar had locked on and surface-to-air missiles were launching toward them. Why did Shul not bank hard or dive to dodge the missiles? Because at Mach 3, a sharp turn takes a hundred miles of sky; the Blackbird's only defense is raw American speed. Shul pushed both throttles past the normal Mach 3.2 redline, watching the Mach meter climb to Mach 3.5, over two thousand three hundred miles per hour, as the outside titanium skin heated past nine hundred degrees and the missiles fell harmlessly into the sea miles behind the man who refused to stay down.