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Originally Posted by Ilow
it's pretty damn fast but I'm not too sure we'll see that in our lifetime, at least on a commercial basis. Also, it is my understanding that the actual maximum speed of the SR71 is quite a bit faster than the one they confess to, I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist, but it was probably Top Secret for a reason (off hand, I'd say at least Mach 5).
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Oh, you're very right. My father was doing intelligence work monitoring the Soviets during the Vietnam era, and he told me that the SR71 could more than double the acknowldeged speed. His description of a takeoff was that it would scream down the runway, get a couple hundred feet off, hit the afterburners and just disappear from sight with an awe-inspirign scream and a thundering sonic boom.