[History.net] Behold the Lockheed U-2, as imperfect an airplane as has ever flown. A hastily designed stopgap intended to fly for two or perhaps four years at most, its fragility and truculence a destroyer of airframes and killer of pilots at an unprecedented rate. An airplane so difficult to land that YouTube is filled with videos of careening U-2s being chased by landing coaches in Camaros and Firebirds. A quasi-military spyplane that was originally ordered and paid for by civilians—that in fact was largely postulated and laid out by MIT and Harvard academics and a Cambridge entrepreneur, nary a pilot nor aeronautical engineer among them.
Some in the U.S. Air Force called it the Useless Deuce, yet the U-2 became one of the most important aircraft ever to fly. The U-2 kept us out of World War III with the Soviet secrets it revealed during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. And though its Soviet overflights ended in disaster—the infamous Francis Gary Powers shootdown in May 1960—the U-2 had already proved that Americans needn’t have worried about Soviet bombers targeting us. Mutually assured destruction, if it ever came to that, meant the U.S. would assuredly destroy the USSR.
Sixty years after the U-2A entered service, the latest model, the U-2S (an improved version of the highly modified U-2R), continues to fly carrying sensors undreamed of during the U-2’s photorecon glory days. Its intended successor, the SR-71, quickly came and went at Mach 3, and is today parked in museums. Surveillance satellites that supposedly could read license plates from space have yet to fully replace the U-2, and this remarkable reconnaissance platform’s real successor will be a drone—a UAV based on, yes, the U-2R. |