Written by Brian Schul, former Blackbird pilot, from his book Sled Driver

There were a lot of things we couldn’t do in an SR-71, but we were the fastest guys on the block and loved reminding our fellow aviators of this fact. People often asked us if, because of this fact, it was fun to fly the jet. Fun would not be the first word I would use to describe flying this plane. Intense, maybe. Even cerebral. But there was one day in our Sled experience when we would have to say that it was pure fun to be the fastest guys out there, at least for a moment.

It occurred when Walt and I were flying our final training sortie. We needed 100 hours in the jet to complete our training and attain Mission Ready status. Somewhere over Colorado we had passed the century mark. We had made the turn in Arizona and the jet was performing flawlessly. My gauges were wired in the front seat and we were starting to feel pretty good about ourselves, not only because we would soon be flying real missions but because we had gained a great deal of confidence in the plan in the past ten months. Ripping across the barren deserts 80,000 feet below us, I could already see the coast of California from the Arizona border. I was, finally, after many humbling months of simulators and study, ahead of the jet.

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Several weeks ago I was poking around Wil Wheaton’s blog and found a link to RFJason.com who had taken an image of the Enterprise, NCC-1701 D from Star Trek: The Next Generation, and overlaid it onto real world images using Google Maps. Well, I just got my blueprints for my favorite ship, Serenity, so I thought I would give it a try with some Earth that was locations. I’m using some of the locals from RFJason for comparison, as well as some of my own places, starting with a few from Wisconsin.

Wisconsin State Capital in Madison. I know the building quite well and was really surprised on how closely Serenity matches up to it on width and length. The Capital is about twice as high.

Camp Randall Stadium in Madison, home to the University of Wisconsin Badgers Football team. Something tells me the crew of Serenity are not Badger fans…

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http://www.richard-seaman.com/Aircraft/AirShows/Edwards2005/Highlights/index.html
Goto the bottom of the page.

C-12 Huron, B-2 Spirit, KC-135 Stratotanker, MC-130 Hercules, C-17 Globemaster III, B-52 Stratofortress, F-117 Nighthawk, F-16 Fighting Falcon, T-38 Talon, F-16 Fighting Falcon and a F-22 Raptor. All in the air. All together.

Damn. Just damn.

Only thing missing is an SR-71 :p

This guy has tons of other great pictures at his site, check out
http://www.richard-seaman.com/index.html