coolest part of this story is that it took only 9 months for US to build this beast. greatest generation!!!!!
No Rest for a Cold Warrior
The legendary U-2 spy planes are busier than ever as they head toward a phaseout
By Kevin Whitelaw
Posted September 20, 2007
Flying at over 70,000 feet above sea level, a lone pilot of an American U-2 spy plane scoured the rugged Afghan mountains near the southern city of Kandahar during a classified mission in mid-September. While the plane's high-tech camera was sending back detailed photographs of the Taliban strongholds below, coalition soldiers operating in the area got embroiled in a firefight with insurgents. The U-2, which flies too high to be heard or seen on the ground, was dispatched to relay images of the battle, locate any targets, and identify possible escape routes—all in close to real time. Soon after, the plane headed up to eastern Afghanistan to sweep the area for any electronic communications between Taliban fighters. The U-2's sensor picked up several suspect transmissions, and the plane was sent to take high-resolution images of possible targets. After nine hours over Afghanistan, the U-2 returned home to its base at a secret location in southwest Asia.
This mission, typical of the almost daily flights over Afghanistan and Iraq, is vastly different from the U-2's maiden mission 51 years ago. In that first operational flight on June 20, 1956, pilot Carl Overstreet flew a carefully planned route behind the Iron Curtain to provide valuable glimpses of military targets inside Czechoslovakia and Poland. It took more than two days for the film to be developed and delivered to analysts in Washington.
Workhorse. Implausibly enough, the gliderlike U-2, whose mere existence was once one of America's most prized secrets, has been adapted to the age of al Qaeda and has emerged as an indispensable workhorse in the skies today. In just the past two years, the number of U-2 missions flown has increased by 20 percent, taking its operational pace to an all-time record. "It's busier than ever," says George Zielsdorff, the U-2 program director for Lockheed Martin, the defense contractor that built the original plane in a mere nine months under a CIA contract.
In fact, demand for the plane's sophisticated set of cameras and eavesdropping equipment is so high that some are questioning the U.S. Air Force's plan to retire the legendary aircraft in the coming years. Military planners are eager to bring on the U-2's successor—an unmanned high-altitude plane called the Global Hawk. But there is one problem: A version of the Global Hawk drone that can match the U-2's capabilities is still at least two years away from deployment.
Even with the U.S. intelligence community's array of spy satellites, surveillance aircraft, and other reconnaissance tools, the U-2 still boasts unique capabilities that fill a crucial gap. While satellites steadily orbit the globe on a predictable schedule, providing only momentary glimpses of any particular scene, the U-2 can fly over a target area for hours—a trait referred to as "persistence" by Air Force strategists. "We're talking now about a strategic environment where you're not so much tracking large army formations or hard targets, but you're talking about individuals and a network," says Col. Charles Bartlett, director of the Air Force's unmanned aerial systems task force. "To do that effectively, you need to have persistence, and you need to build patterns of behavior." While the better-known Predator drone can provide similar coverage when the weather is decent, it can be audible from the ground, unlike the higher-flying U-2.
In its first life, the U-2 was a straightforward reconnaissance plane, offering revolutionary peeks inside forbidden places like the Soviet Union and Communist China. Former CIA Director George Tenet once called the U-2 one of "the CIA's greatest intelligence achievements." It was still cloaked in secrecy when it made 24 daring flights over the Soviet Union from 1956 to 1960, helping to shatter alarming myths that Moscow was building significantly more missiles and bombers than the U.S. military. The danger became all too real in 1960 when the Soviets fired a missile that exploded just behind a U-2 piloted by Francis Gary Powers, who was captured by the Soviets after he parachuted to the ground. The incident turned into a prime-time Cold War drama, and the CIA was forced to end its flights over the Soviet Union. Powers was, after a show trial, later returned to the United States in a prisoner exchange.
The U-2 took center stage again in 1962, when a flight's photographs detected Soviet long-range missiles in Cuba, sparking the Cuban missile crisis. Two years later, after China's first nuclear test, U-2 missions took air samples to assess the aftermath. "It had probably some of the most strategic impact of any aviation operation ever," says Tom Ehrhard, an Air Force veteran now at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. "We never bought enough of them." U-2s have also flown over most of the conflict zones in recent years, including Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, Bosnia, and Afghanistan.
The U-2s flying today are not, of course, identical to the ones flying in the late 1950s. The body of the plane has been updated and enlarged, and its classified sensors are so advanced that they use a combination of seven different bands of visual and infrared imagery to produce images that look almost exactly like photographs, whether in the dark or through thick smoke, dust storms, or heavy cloud cover. They "can even see through camouflage," says Dick Wientzen, who managed the development of the sensors for Goodrich Corp. "They are good at looking at differences between man-made and natural objects." This technology is used regularly over Iraq, for example, to detect improvised explosive devices placed along major roads.
Challenging ride. One thing, however, has not changed. The U-2 is still legendary in the Air Force for being one of the most difficult planes to fly—and to land. To survive at 70,000 feet, pilots wear a pressurized spacesuit. They have to breathe pure oxygen for an hour before takeoff to stave off decompression sickness (better known to deep-sea divers as the bends).
Landing a U-2 is even more challenging, because the pilot must stall the plane only a few feet above the runway. As the U-2 comes in for a landing, a sports car races behind it to relay the plane's altitude to the pilot, whose field of vision is limited by the cumbersome pressure suit. "It's like riding on the handles of a bicycle backwards and trying to steer, because the tail wheel moves, not the nose wheel," says Samuel Ryals, a formerU-2 pilot who now is the director of research and development at Goodrich.
U-2 missions are also very dangerous. At least 34 pilots have been killed over the years, most recently in 2005 on a mission over Afghanistan. For decades, officials have explored replacing the pilot with a drone that could navigate remotely from the ground. Early models of the Global Hawk, which flies as high as 65,000 feet, currently perform operations over Afghanistan and Iraq, and more powerful versions are in the test phase. Northrop Grumman, which is developing the plane, insists that the time has come when there is no longer any trade-off in removing a human pilot from the cockpit. "If we have this other technology, why are we still stuffing guys into spacesuits for 12 hours and having them eat baby food and pee down their leg?" says Ed Walby, a former U-2 pilot now in charge of business development for the Global Hawk program at Northrop. "Why would you put people in harm's way if you don't have to?"
The Air Force is salivating over the Global Hawk because it can remain in the air for more than 30 hours at a stretch, well beyond the 12-hour limit of the manned U-2. Air Force planners envision a U-2 phaseout sometime around 2012 or 2013 as new, more powerful Global Hawks go into service. But some in Congress are concerned the Air Force is moving too fast, given the heavy reliance on the U-2 today. (During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, for example, the venerable plane supplied 88 percent of all battlefield imagery.) Even though the last U-2 was built in 1989, they all have newer engines and cockpits and theoretically would be capable of flying through 2050.
The House of Representatives recently passed an intelligence authorization bill that would restrict the Pentagon's ability to phase out the U-2. "The bottom line is that we cannot afford to retire the U-2 until we make sure we have another aircraft to fulfill the same mission," says Rep. Wally Herger, the California Republican who represents the district containing Beale Air Force Base, which is home to both the U-2s and the Global Hawks.
The Air Force insists that the schedule for phasing out the U-2 is flexible, depending largely on how well the new- generation Global Hawk planes perform in tests. But the U-2 is expensive to operate, and Pentagon budget officials are eager to free up money for more Global Hawks. Today, there are 28 U-2s flying active missions from bases in California, Cyprus, and South Korea and near Iraq. "The Air Force is being very deliberate about taking the U-2 out of the inventory," says Bartlett. "We're not going to do it prematurely, but there are fiscal realities."
Special abilities. There are also some unique U-2 capabilities that could be lost in the transition to Global Hawk. The U-2 can carry a wide-angle film camera that provides very detailed photographs that are unclassified and can be shared widely. It is still used frequently to assess the damage from natural disasters, including Hurricane Katrina. The camera has also been used for three decades as a formal part of the verification provisions of the 1977 Camp David peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. The U-2 flies weekly over the Sinai and provides both sides with images to monitor the border areas. Another key advantage is the U-2's superior "standoff" ability that enables it to peer deep inside a hostile country such as North Korea while flying outside its border.
Still, the Global Hawk replacement is coming along quickly. The newer versions of the plane will carry eavesdropping equipment similar to that on the U-2 and are scheduled to deploy to bases in Europe and Asia starting in 2009 or 2010. Some in Congress continue to complain about delays and cost overruns. But much of the added cost comes from the decision to turn the Global Hawk, built originally as an experimental plane, into the U-2's successor. The Global Hawk has become very expensive, reportedly costing more than $120 million per plane, including its new sensors. Says Northrop's Walby: "We are inventing things we didn't know you could make."
For the elite fraternity of U-2 pilots, the switch to an unmanned replacement will be a bittersweet one. Just inside the U-2 operations building at Beale Air Force Base, there is a poster with a close-up photo of a U-2 pilot in his spacesuit. The caption reads: "The Ultimate Computer."
With the Global Hawk, pilots will no longer be risking their lives, but U-2 flyboys remain strongly attached to the plane they refer to as the "Dragon Lady." They describe flying it as a mystical experience in which pilots learn to read the plane's vibrations and other sensations. "You gotta be able to fight the dragon before you can dance with the lady," says Bob Ray, who logged 1,400 hours in the U-2. He is one of just over 800 pilots who have ever flown the U-2 in an operational mission. There are, says Ray, "more people with Super Bowl rings than have flown the U-2."
