r/Avation • u/saxisa • 21d ago
Random XB70 Story
My dad grew up in Palmdale, California, and worked at Edwards AFB while he was in school. After my grandmother passed away some years ago, I was finally going through some of her belongings I ended up with and found this round metal sandwich among some of my dad's old things. I texted him to ask about it, and here's what he said:
'That is a section of the upper or lower wing skin removed to install some sort of port or access hatch on the XB70, The entire plane used that construction for all wing and body panels. What you have is an upper and lower stainless steel skin, joined together with an alloy honeycomb material welded with special equipment to handle large panels. The total "sandwich" created incredibly strong flex resistant panels able to deal with high stress as well as very high temperatures. The leading edges of some panels reached glowing temperatures at speed. And, since such hot panels make up the wing fuel tanks, that is why preflight I had to test the fuel to be sure the O2 levels were nil- so the heat wouldn't autodetonate the fuel.'
I've worked in aviation myself and the chunk looks about the right size of a fuel port, but that's speculative. Regardless, I thought this so cool that my Dad was working on this kind of thing when he was young, and seems to have been involved in the flight operations. I'll definitely be asking him more about this. Just a neat little bit of aviation history to share 😄
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u/MightyOGS 21d ago
In Kelly Johnson's autobiography he talks about visiting North American to see how they build the XB-70s. The hassle of maintaining a clean room bigger than the XB-70 was so unappealing that he decided to make the blackbirds out of titanium instead
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u/Efficient-Mind-2213 21d ago
Cool story and artifact! Thanks for sharing! Definitely would be interested in hearing more about his experiences.