The final flight of Blackbird SR-71 - 9 March 1990

The other day a water main burst on Manhattan’s Upper East Side beneath a street in the 70s, a neighbourhood usually referred to as upper crust or fashionable or the part of town housing the well-to-do.

In the days when silk stockings were like mink today – worn only by wealthy women – the voting district that embraced the 60s, 70s and 80s on the East Side was known, and still is, as the silk stocking district.

I stress the toniness of this neighbourhood because although there had been two or three water-main breaks in Manhattan in the past year, the gentry had had no cause for alarm. They’d happened up in Harlem and near the river on the Upper West side, in midtown on the West Side, in more proletarian parts of town where a leaky roof, heating breakdowns, decaying tenements, have come to be part of the geography of daily life.

But as a lady of my acquaintance said, when the main broke near Park Avenue in the 70s, what are we coming to? The residents of swank apartment houses, high-rises, handsome brownstone houses were without water, heat – some of them without lift service – for several weeks. They discovered that the crumbling infrastructure of the city, like death and taxes, is no respecter of persons.

I began to take a morbid interest in this form of decay in what we used to call the power grid, and now everywhere call infrastructure, when several years ago one of the main conduits that carry the steam for the city’s heating system exploded and caused a breakdown of heat, light and power over a densely-populated section of the island. Incidentally, Americans always talked about steam heat, it was the French who invented the term, chauffage central, translated in England as central heating.

I say that that disaster happened several years ago, it may have been ten, but it marked the time when all the old cities of the east and midwest began to report a spate of bursts and breakdowns of the physical underpinnings of their water and power supply, and such over-pinnings as bridges.

The estimate of how many big main bridges in this country that are coming close to a hazardous condition varies from 600 to several thousand. By the way, I never hear about similar problems in, for instance, London. Are the 18th- and 19th-Century underpinnings made of sterner stuff than the copper, iron, steel or the splendid tough robber-baron materials that gave the American cities of the late 19th-Century foundations that were supposed to last forever? Be interesting to know.

Well, while I was listening to some testimony before a committee of Congress about the coming assault on the federal budget of repairing inter-state bridges across the great rivers, another whole department of decay came into view that we’d, I’d, given little thought to. The jets.

The jets? We’ve had them for only, well just on 30 years and most of us who’ve been flying them hadn’t anticipated the day when most of them would begin to wear out. The day is here. At least the warning is out, the day is not far off.

On Tuesday the Federal Aviation Administration, the FAA, announced a new department or rather, a new programme, a set of compulsory rules to deal with corrosion control. In 1988 a Boeing 737, one of the newer, smaller jets ripped open in midair over Hawaii, and the government, the FAA, called in the industry to review the condition of the whole jet fleet.

After 18 months this joint committee has got out a list of compulsory precautions and rules. Many of these rules are already followed by the big airlines, but so far there have been no compulsory radical guidelines for the smaller carriers.

The first conclusion was that the jets are ageing – most of all, the jumbo jets. The rules will affect, to begin with, 115 jets in service and eventually will effect all Boeing jets, at a cost of just under $2.5million per 747, the jumbo. Eventually, also means about 1500 jets will be subjected to this rigorous regular form of inspection and of course in the long run, replaced.

The long run is estimated at 25 years, just about the deadline for the old jumbo Cunarders by which time, on the big ships, the electrical wiring tended to corrode to the point where it wasn’t worth the cost of rebuilding the whole system.

The FAA rules require that all parts known to be vulnerable to metal fatigue must be replaced at specified intervals. Every plane over 20 years old must be completely overhauled once a year. Suspected corrosion in any part must be reported to the FAA at once. Places that must be inspected most often, are the underpinnings of galleys, and lavatories, and so on.

The day these rules were issued one of the marvels of aviation, the pride of the air force, was retired from service. The Blackbird SR-71 was for many years the super spy plane. For 25 years this model – which needless to say cost the earth and the sky – has flow reconnaissance flights over enemy territory, enemy undefined, though no prizes are to be offered for guessing the country that the Blackbird flew over.

It cruised at 80,000 feet and its cameras could identify, from there, the design and make of a hubcap on some innocent motor car out for a spin in the Siberian countryside. The Blackbird is a victim of the budget cuts that are going to be made right across the defence establishment, from super spy planes to the men who man the army and navy bases here in the United States.

Anyway the Blackbird was given a final whirl, to fly from Los Angeles to Washington. It did it on Tuesday in a new record, 1 hour 8 minutes and 17 seconds. It landed at Dulles International airport hard by the air and space museum which is to be its final resting place. Even now I can’t tell you how many Blackbirds are still in reserve, and the air force isn’t telling anybody the secrets of its design and capability. The obsolete Blackbird is still top secret. Security, you know.

There’s an unreal tragi-comic aspect to the retirement of the Blackbird which sooner or later must occur to anyone alive and sentient in May 1960, when President Eisenhower and Mr Khrushchev in their delegations and 600 correspondents arrived in Paris for a superpower summit and suddenly Mr Khrushchev stormed out of Paris and President Eisenhower came glumly home and there was no summit.

On 1 May the Russians announced that they had shot down over the Soviet Union an American reconnaissance spy plane and captured the pilot. President Eisenhower was highly indignant – nonsense, there was no such thing. We didn’t do such things.

Well, the Russians published enough details about the plane and its pilot to give President Eisenhower one of the most acutely embarrassing moments of his life. All right he said, but you do it.

Of course both sides did it and had been doing it for Lord knows how long. But it was then, 30 years ago, a stratagem that the American people knew nothing about. Reconnaissance spying from a great height was absolutely top secret and it was a well-kept secret.

But now we have an American president who, after the headlong course of history in the past six months, is an admirer of Mr Gorbachev – as aren’t we all – who wants to help him transform the Soviet Union into a federation of multi-party democracies, who is rooting for Mr Gorbachev to succeed.

We’ll do anything to help him and we’re about to sign another treaty to cut our nuclear capabilities and to reduce conventional forces, and join with the Russians in working out the terms of German reunification.

The days of mutual suspicion are over and there is nothing remarkable, or to be commented on, in Soviet satellites whizzing over the United States and American satellites whizzing over the Soviet Union each spying on the other, day and night, in a spirit of mutual trust and admiration.

In that spirit, as everybody knows, we have for the first time since the Cold War began, an American president and a secretary of defence who agree with the Congress that the United States can now, with confidence, drastically cut its defence budget.

It was certainly a new day when, a week or two ago, a Republican secretary of defence announced that he was going to close down army and navy and old air force bases in 23 states and prepare to relieve the soldiers and sailors and airmen and women and the maintenance crews and the civilian employees of their jobs.

The Democrats have been screaming for most of eight years to slash the defence budget, now they’re screaming about the closing of the bases, why? Because the great majority of them are in electoral districts represented by Democrats. Why? Because the Democrats were the people who saw that the bases were built in their districts in the first place for the glory and the employment of their constituents.

How did the Democrats have the luck or the power to do this? Because for most of 50 years, the Congress of the United States has been run by the Democrats. It’s an interesting reflection on what we call a two-party system.

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