Born in Quantico, Va., at age 9 Shul went to an air show and saw the Navy demonstration squadron Blue Angels perform. “I’m like, ‘Whoa’” when he saw them, he said later. “It reached in, grabbed my soul, never let go.” After graduating from East Carolina University (in History) in 1970, he joined the U.S. Air Force. He was sent to Vietnam, where he flew 212 support missions for the CIA’s “Air America” before being shot down in 1973. Shul crash-landed in the jungle near Cambodia, suffering burns over 60 percent of his body, but he managed to evade enemy soldiers and radio for help. He was rescued by a Special Forces pararescue team, and was evacuated to a hospital in Okinawa, but doctors doubted he would survive.
After two months he was airlifted to the Institute of Surgical Research at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, where he spent a year as, he put it, “119 pounds of blood and gauze” — and endured 15 surgeries and nearly daily physical therapy. Worse, doctors told him he’d never fly again. “I kept saying, ‘God, just please let me die. I can’t do this. You picked the wrong guy. I’m not strong enough.” But after seeing children playing outside his window, he decided he must survive. “When you lie on your back for a year, you get in touch with what’s important in life and yourself and you learn that you have an inner strength greater than any muscles your body ever provided,” he said. “I was highly motivated to get back to flying, even though I knew there was a one-in-a-thousand chance.” When he was discharged, doctors warned him he’d never walk again, either, but two days later he was at the controls of an Air Force fighter jet. Not in combat, of course: he became a flight instructor for the A-10 Thunderbolt II, as well as being on the team that demonstrated the capabilities of the attack jet.
He also got to fly with the Blue Angels himself — and the USAF Thunderbirds. For his last assignment in the Air Force, he volunteered to fly a very special jet, and he was accepted to fly the SR-71 Blackbird — the world’s fastest jet — as long as he passed the astronaut-style physical exam. He did, with no waivers needed.
Shul may be best known as the pilot in a classic story he told many times in public presentations. It happened while he was flying the SR-71 over southern California; “Center” is the non-military air traffic control, and Aspen 20 is the SR-71’s radio callsign:
I heard a Cessna ask for a readout of its ground speed. “90 knots,” Center replied. Moments later, a Twin Beech required the same. “120 knots,” Center answered.
We weren’t the only ones proud of our ground speed that day, as almost instantly an F-18 transmitted, “Ah, Center, Dusty 52 requests ground speed readout.” There was a slight pause, then the response, “620 knots on the ground, Dusty.”
[Then Shul and his recon officer jumped in.] “Center, Aspen 20, you got a ground speed readout for us?” There was a longer than normal pause. “Aspen, I show 1,942 knots.” [1,942 knots is 2,234 mph, or 3,595 kph.]
“No further inquiries were heard on that frequency,” Shul said.
Shul is the only SR-71 pilot (there were only 93) who ever flew three missions in three days: over Libya to document terrorist camps for President Ronald Reagan in 1986. Ground forces fired a missile at him, but the SR-71 easily outran it. He once said he told his reconnaissance systems officer, Maj. Walt Watson, who rode behind him to operate the cameras, radios, and electronic jamming equipment, “that if we were ever captured, he was the spy and I was just the driver. He told me to keep the pointy end forward.”
After retiring from the Air Force as a Major in 1990, Shul wrote books (all out of print) and was an accomplished nature photographer, in addition to an inspirational — and instructional, for military pilots — speaker; example talk below. He collapsed while giving his famous SR-71 presentation for an audience in Reno, Nev., on May 20. He was rushed to a hospital where he was pronounced dead from cardiac arrest. Brian Robert Shul was 75.
June 2026 Update
Since writing this entry I’ve seen a number of online posts which say, to put it kindly, Shul’s “air traffic controller” story is exaggerated, if not completely false. Some assert that civilian ATC radars couldn’t (and still can’t) provide readouts in the four-digit range.
Add to this the excerpted comments of Maj. Gen. Patrick J. Halloran, USAF (Ret.), one of the original pilots and later wing commander of the SR-71 program, in a letter in the July 2012 issue of Air Force magazine, emphasis added:
[T]he listing of Brian Shul in the section of the article which dealt with ‘Famous Fliers’ has generated a landslide of negative comments from former crew members. As the designated ‘Godfather’ of the program, much of that mail came to me. I appreciate and respect the medical challenges that Brian overcame to return to flying status after his crash in [southeast Asia], but the Blackbird program presented new and totally different challenges. He remains the only SR-71 pilot removed for ‘cause’ in the history of the program. His squadron commander and wing commander had a long and appropriate list of negative activities to justify that action. He hardly qualifies as a ‘famous flier’ by Blackbird standards. He is not a member of the Blackbird Association.
Make of it what you will, but I too “appreciate and respect the medical challenges that Brian overcame to return to flying status after his crash”. It is also hard to know if his recovery stories (e.g., “I was highly motivated to get back to flying, even though I knew there was a one-in-a-thousand chance.”) are also exaggerated.
Something about the mystique of the SR-71 brings out macho bravado in some types. In the early 1990s, one of my colleagues at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory was bragging to me that he was invited to fly one of the SR-71s assigned to NASA after the planes were retired by the U.S. Air Force. A couple of them were assigned to the NASA Ames-Dryden Flight Research Facility (now the Neil A. Armstrong Flight Research Center) at Edwards AFB.
I knew this out-of-shape man to be …well… “unlikely” to be a candidate for such duty, even as a back-seater. Not to mention that I was not aware of any project he was working on that would qualify him for such work. He “disappeared” not long after; though I don’t recall the circumstances, there were some layoffs around that time (which I survived), and that is the most likely scenario.
In this Nov. 2016 talk at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Vietnam-era attack pilot and retired Air Force major Brian Shul, author of Sled Driver: Flying the World’s Fastest Jet (* out of print, and very hard to find, and thus very expensive), reveals fascinating details of piloting the SR-71. Using his rare aviation slides and stories as a vehicle, he tells a broader inspired story of hope, overcoming obstacles and daring to dream.