Err you come back in, you have to stall the airplane. The men and women that fly the U-2 – they’re going up for 10 sometimes 12 hours at a crack – you’re in that same pressure suit environment. So it was the very best pilots that were selected to fly the U-2. They need to be able to have an instinctual relationship with that aircraft. The pilots needs to be able to feel the movement of their aeroplane. It's designed to give off its best in the rarefied atmosphere of 70,000 ft close to space and in the thicker air closer to earth, that makes it a very difficult prospect for the pilot to fly, especially as he's on oxygen, he's fully suited up, almost like an astronaut, eating food out of a tube and drinking water out of a tube. It required props under each under each wing. To complicate matters, the U-2 was not exactly a particularly easy aircraft to fly.Īll of the trade-offs that Kelly Johnson had to make to enable that aircraft to fly at such height and to take those images made it incredibly difficult for the pilots.Įven just taking off and landing, to preserve that narrow, pencil thin fuselage. It was agreed that the overflights would be operated by the CIA rather than the military, so that in the event of being shot down, the flight was less likely to be perceived as an act of war. So everyone knew that the U-2 was a deliberate violation of international norms and everyone knew that eventually the U-2 would come a cropper, that it would be shot down, but nevertheless the need for better information than we had was so great that we went ahead with it anyway.Įvery flight was at risk of being perceived as an unauthorized invasion of another country’s airspace. Herbert York: The U-2 flights started precisely because we were uncertain about what was going on and we wanted to know more about it, in particular President Eisenhower. The aircraft had a flight ceiling of 70,000 ft, initially believed to be beyond the reach of Soviet fighters, missiles and radar.Įven so, every U-2 mission was dangerous, but they risk was deemed essential. Just 8 months after being given the contract, Skunkworks delivered the first U-2 - effectively a high-flying powered glider that operated on the edge of space. They turned to engineer Clarence Kelly Johnson and his team known as the Skunkworks. And crucially, it needed to be able to come back time after time. It needed to carry the right sort of equipment to take those images. It needed to be able to fly over long distances. It needed to be out of the range of Soviet air defences, particularly aircraft, so it couldn't be shot down. Now, as air defences got better, as each side began developed aircraft that could intercept bombers, that could fly up and shoot down enemy aircraft, one of the crucial things was, if you're going to take good quality photographs, you need to do it at height.īut in order to do that, that aircraft had to have some very, very special properties. Under the code name "Bald Eagle" the USAF began to solicit designs for an aircraft capable of the dangerous reconnaissance overflights of the Soviet Union. The gathering of photographic aerial intelligence was deemed essential. No information had come out of the Soviet Union since the Second World War, and the US government was increasingly talking about a missile gap, and the idea that the Soviet Union were technologically superior. In the mid-1950s, the United States was desperate to know what was going on behind the Iron Curtain.
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