At Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., company pilot William Bridgeman pilots the Douglas X-3 Stiletto to the highest speed this grossly underpowered research aircraft will reach, Mach 1.21—and this only comes after he put the aircraft in a shallow dive. The X-3 was designed to fly at sustained speeds above Mach 2 for longer than 30 minutes at high altitudes.
The Air Force pulled a KC-135 out of storage at the “Boneyard” in early April, three weeks after another one of the service’s Stratotankers crashed in Iraq during Operation Epic Fury.