I'm not military, so forgive the ignorance. But what was the reason for the pilots being Christians In Action instead of pure Air Force on the surveillance platforms?

political (e.g Gary Powers)

Yeah, familiar with that, hence the question. LIke I said, sorry for the ignorance, but I'm slow today. But could it not be more complex to have a person that's part of an intelligence service (spy) get captured vs. a person that is just military?

Check out that second link I posted above. It might have the mishap that you saw listed with some info about what happened and the fate of the crew.

USMCFLYR

From what I've read the crew could apparently bailout at maximum speed at maximum altitude because the air pressure at that height is so low that it is the equivalent of a much lower speed at lower altitude. Any of that make sense? :D

You are correct. Max normal operating altitude was about 85,000 feet. At that altitude, its normal cruise mach of 3.2 equates to an equivalent airspeed of about 310 knots. That dynamic pressure is very survivable in a normal flight suit. But since the SR-71 guys all wore a full pressure suit (space suit), there was really no concern about the speed. The concern was when one of the engines coughed (unstarted) at speed. That sometimes led to an inflight breakup, and the resulting lateral G forces could be more than a human could tolerate.

Carl

Political and Turf considerations. Theoretically, a "civilian" CIA pilot had more plausible deniability if captured. That might work for low-key clandestine work, but there obviously wasn't any deniability with something like the SR-71.

It didn't work for Gary Powers. Actually a military officer might be afforded protection under the geneva convention in some circumstances, while a civilian could be easily shot for spying.

Well, that's the entire point I'm getting at Rick. If an operative gets captured somewhere in a foreign land under the guise of a business man or something else, the deniability is relatively easy. If a guy survives the ejection or forced landing in a multi million dollar/sophisticated spy plane that takes a huge support system just to get going is another thing.

That's exactly what I'm trying to figure out. Like the USSR (or other adversary) would ACTUALLY have believed that the pilot of an above scenario is a "civilian" employed by a well know intelligence entity and therefore could really be denied?

We still split ops. There are greater concerns than deniability, they were not so ignorant back then that they thought a guy bailing out of an SR-71 could pass himself off as a lost businessman - the concern was actually cold war vs hot war. Having CIA officers conduct ops was expected in the surveillance/counter-surveillance game, the only repercussions for those ops being exposed were nasty letters and embassy staffers being expelled. Conducting military ops over a sovereign nation could be considered an act of war.

Gotcha, thanks. Interesting to think about what was done for the sake of what you said during that time (and currently) just to skew the perception of what is really going on.