🔥Each flight was equipped with 16 shots of TEB. It was the TEB triethylborane that caused the fuel to temporarily Flair up. 🔥
The NTSB lists Triethylborane [TEB] as the most dangerous material, one step below fissionable nuclear material,’ Former SR-71 Blackbird pilot David Peters.
Taken by Stuart Freer at RAF Mildenhall in 1986, the impressive photo in this post features an SR-71 Blackbird Mach 3 spy plane creating spectacular fireballs while performing at the Air Fete Air Show.
Former Blackbird RSO, Lt. Col. Doug Soifer, recalls in Richard H. Graham’s book SR-71 Revealed The Inside Story.
‘During that pass, we [Soifer and Mike Smith, the pilot] had “13 fireballs” come out of the plane’s exhaust. It looked beautiful, and people wanted to know if it could be done again. They used the picture of us with the flames coming out for the next year’s Air Fete poster. Mike and I became known as the “Fireball Twins.” The maintenance people figured it was the TEB [triethylborane] shooting out of its container and igniting the JP-7. With that start, we had an exciting six weeks in England.’
The SR-71 burned JP-7 fuel. A one-of-a-kind fuel that used an additive to raise its flash point so the fuel would not break down at extreme temperatures
The high flashpoint brings up another problem. Most jet engines use igniter plugs, nothing more than a hot spark plug. Using these igniter plugs they used with the JP-7 and drowns it out, it won’t ignite. Kelly [Johnson] put his engineers to work, and he said, ‘OK, gentlemen, how are we going to start this?’ They came up with a very unique way. Triethylborane – TEB for short. Each engine has a one-and-a-quarter pint. If I had it in a squirt gun and squirted it into the atmosphere, it would go Kaboom! – it explodes with contact with the atmosphere. And that’s how we started the engines. As the engines rotate, at the right time, it spray this amount of TEB into the turbine section, which goes kaboom, which in turn lights the engine. When you take the throttles up into the afterburner, it puts this metered amount of TEB in that lights up the JP-7. You get 16 shots for each engine.’ As far as I know, no pilot ran out of TEB on a flight, but during a long flight (12 hours ), they came close; if anyone knows of a story of when they ran out of TEB, please let me know. 
Also, there was a way that my experts told me to ignite the fuel by using something other than TB in the SR 71. Can anyone fill me in on what that was?
Linda Sheffield
