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I took this video five years ago at the Udvar- hazy center Air and Space Smithsonian near Dulles Airport, VA. This is the #972 SR-71, the same airplane that broke the record flying in under two hours from New York to London in 1974 . When I go there, it is like visiting an old friend from my past.~Linda Sheffield

At Beale AFB CA I would often hear the ROAR of the SR 71. The sound of the SR 71 has been described as the “ Hammers of Hell”. Good description. It was difficult to see the SR-71, fact is that if you’re looking for it, the odds are very good you’ll be looking in the wrong place.🇺🇸~Linda Sheffield

The B-17 ball turret gunner was a subject of American poet Randall Jarrell's poem titled "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner," published in 1945. The poem goes as follows: "From my mother's sleep I fell into the State, And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose." In 1942, Jarrell enlisted in the United States Army Air Forces, initially as a flying cadet and later becoming a celestial navigation tower operator. He provided the following explanation: "A ball turret was a Plexiglas sphere set into the belly of a B-17 or B-24, and it housed two .50 caliber machine guns and one man, a short small man. When this gunner tracked a fighter attacking his bomber from below with his machine guns, he rotated with the turret, hunched upside-down in his little sphere, resembling a fetus in the womb. The fighters that attacked him were equipped with cannons that fired explosive shells. The hose mentioned in the poem referred to a steam hose."