Question About How Fast the SR-71 Went

Ok, AFAIK the SR-71 was able to go mach 3+, but not hypersonic, so I think I am messing up somewhere, but I don't know where.

After several agonizingly long seconds, we made the turn and blasted toward the Mediterranean. 'You might want to pull it back,' Walter suggested. It was then that I noticed I still had the throttles full forward. The plane was flying a mile every 1.6 seconds, well above our Mach 3.2 limit. It was the fastest we would ever fly. I pulled the throttles to idle just south of Sicily, but we still overran the refueling tanker awaiting us over Gibraltar.

So 1.6 miles/second x 60 seconds/minute x 60 minutes/hour = 5760mph.

Put that into Nasa's mach calculator at 80,000ft, and you get mach 8.722.

So, am I wrong, is the pilot wrong, or is the plane hypersonic?

Yeah. You obviously didn't read the statement right ... it's 60sec/(1.6m/sec) which comes out to some 37.5m/min. That ends up being around 2250mph.

It's not 1.6mile/second, but rather 1mile/1.6second.... ;)

Ahhh, gotcha. Never a good idea to do math late at night.

Don't do arithmetic in public! :D It's embarrassing!

(Quote from my calc prof)