Somewhere over the Libyan desert on the morning of 15 April 1986, the reconnaissance officer in the back seat of an SR-71 called out a warning to his pilot. Walter Watson was seeing missile launch signals on his defensive panel. Up front, Major Brian Shul did the only thing a Blackbird crew could do. He pushed the throttles forward.

The story, told in Shul’s 1991 book Sled Driver, is one of the most retold in Blackbird lore, and it is circulating again on social media. Most of it is well supported. Some details have grown in the retelling, and the most dramatic figure in it has never been independently confirmed.

The morning after El Dorado Canyon

Operation El Dorado Canyon was the American answer to the bombing of the La Belle discotheque in West Berlin on 5 April 1986. On the night of 14 to 15 April, F-111Fs from RAF Lakenheath and Navy A-6 Intruders from two carriers struck targets in Tripoli and Benghazi. Because France and Spain refused overflight, the Lakenheath jets flew the long way round, a round trip of roughly 6,400 miles with repeated air-to-air refuelling. The full story of the raid is in our El Dorado Canyon feature.

Washington needed to know what the bombs had hit, and satellites could not deliver the pictures fast enough. The job went to Detachment 4 at Mildenhall. Lt Col Jerry Glasser and Lt Col Ron Tabor launched first, at 05:00, in 64-17980. Shul and Watson followed at 06:15 in 64-17960 as the back-up. Heading south, Shul watched the F-111s coming home, passing head-on thousands of feet below.

Across the Line of Death

In 1973 Muammar Gaddafi had declared a line across the mouth of the Gulf of Sidra and claimed everything south of it as Libyan water. He called it the Line of Death. In Shul’s telling, 960 crossed it at 2,125 mph, and from 80,000 feet Libya looked like “one huge sandbox”.

Deep inside the country, approaching the final turn of the photo run, Watson reported missile tracking and launch indications. The SR-71 carried no weapons. It had electronic countermeasures to confuse enemy radar, and it had speed. Shul accelerated. By his account the Blackbird eased up to Mach 3.5 as it climbed through 80,000 feet, covering a mile every 1.6 seconds, well past its normal Mach 3.2 limit. The crew held course, finished the run, and left what Shul called a parting sonic boom over Tripoli before slowing once clear of Libyan airspace.

What the record supports, and what it does not

The core of the story holds up. Paul Crickmore’s history of SR-71 operations in Europe records 64-17960, call sign Tromp 31, launching at 06:15 on 15 April with Shul and Watson aboard. The aircraft number, the crew, the base and the timing in the viral version all match.

Three details deserve a correction or a caveat. First, the viral version opens with a missile climbing toward the jet, then a second one. Shul never described seeing a missile. What Watson saw were launch and tracking signals on the defensive systems panel. Reports say Libyan batteries fired during the reconnaissance flights, but neither Blackbird crew that morning reported sighting one.

Second, the speed. A mile every 1.6 seconds is about 2,250 mph. If that is accurate, 960 briefly flew faster than the SR-71’s official absolute speed record, 2,193.2 mph, set by 64-17958 in July 1976. It is entirely plausible that a Blackbird crew under threat went past the book limit; Mach 3.3 was already permitted in emergencies. But the flight data from that sortie has never been published, and the exact figure rests on Shul’s own account. Glasser, who flew his own run over Libya earlier that morning, gave his speed as Mach 3.15.

Third, the backstory. The viral post says Shul had been shot down in Vietnam. He was shot down in 1973 flying a T-28 Trojan on close air support missions near the Cambodian border. The rest is accurate: he could not eject, crash-landed into the jungle, was burned so badly he was not expected to live, spent two months in intensive care and went through 15 operations. We tell that part of his story, and the later dispute over his SR-71 career, in our Brian Shul profile.

The pictures, and the flights that followed

For all the drama, 15 April did not deliver everything Washington wanted. Morning fog around Tripoli cut out part of the optical coverage, so more sorties were ordered. On 16 April Shul and Watson flew as the primary crew in 960, but the aircraft suffered a sensor failure. On 17 April another crew flew 64-17980, with Shul and Watson again as back-up. Some of the Benghazi imagery was released to the press, deliberately degraded so as not to reveal what the cameras could really do.

Shul left the Air Force in 1990 and spent the next three decades telling this story and the LA Center speed check to audiences across America. He died on 20 May 2023 in Reno, moments after finishing one of those talks. SR-71 64-17960 survives at the Castle Air Museum in California.

The Libya run endures because it is the purest expression of what the Blackbird was: no guns, no missiles, no stealth worth the name, just altitude and a speed nothing else could match. The exact number on the Mach meter that morning may never be known. The result is not in doubt. 960 came home.

Sources: Brian Shul, Sled Driver: Flying the World’s Fastest Jet (1991); Paul F. Crickmore, Lockheed SR-71 Operations in Europe and the Middle East (Osprey); The Aviationist, “Crossing the Line of Death at 2,125 mph” (April 2026); The Aviation Geek Club; Castle Air Museum; FAI speed record data.