This RC SR-71 of course doesn't implement the most technically challenging features of the actual aircraft: ramjet propulsion and titanium skin. It's a very cool looking toy though.
There's also one at the Pima Air and Space museum, near Tucson, AZ. Considering that and a minuteman silo are the only things worth seeing within 100 miles of Tucson (kidding, but not by much, the "Landmarks of Tucson" article on wikipedia is 10 entries long, with 3 entries actually in Tucson), I'd recommend keeping it for when you need to go to this hellhole, and doing more interesting things in or around Seattle.
http://www.museumofflight.org/aircraft/lockheed-m-21-blackbi...
If you're in Seattle and have an opportunity, visit the Museum's restoration facility at Paine Field in Everett (at the opposite end of the runway for the 747/widebody factory.) It's a nondescript warehouse manned mostly by super kind volunteer retirees. Unlike the roped-off museum experience, at the restoration facility you can touch and pick up things. The last time I was there I held a Merlin piston in my hands. So cool.
They did a full Mach 3 overhead pass (at 50k feet I think) and also a bunch of slow and high speed passes before it landed and it did a close up crowd taxi-by. The engines at idle have a unique noise, different than any other jet they had.
From the front its a higher pitch noise due to the fact that you're hearing the eddies off the compressor (the engine had no slow RPM fan like most military jets), and from the back like the worlds largest hair dryer.
At take off, it sent up a rooster tail of dust from the runway that went for a half mile.
Sad that they retired the bird. Kelly Johnson was a super hero engineer.
I'd feel more comfortable writing some autopilot landing code for the thing than to trust myself to not ruin months of work.
$100 (US foam kit, order electronics etc., straight from HobbyKing in Hong Kong) or so and few evenings work and you can make something like this... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPATzx-Nx-4
Just google for 3D foamies, I have one and it's enormous fun. Can be flown like a regular r/c aircraft also, not just for stunts, and they will carry keyring cameras easily, just tape it on.
The reason that the SR-71 surprised me is that it seems like it doesn't have that much wing area (which is probably somewhat counterintuitive given the length), and it wasn't flying at a significant upward angle like those foamies.
