U-2
courtesy of the lockheed martin company2007_3_40
The U-2 was supposed to be light, but the spy plane surprised even its test pilot. On August 1, 1955, Tony LeVier took the long-winged craft out for its first taxi tests at a secret base in Nevada. As soon as the airplane reached 70 knots, it lifted off the ground.
“I almost crapped,” said LeVier. He had not planned to fly the plane at this stage. “I kept it straight and level, and I hit the ground hard. Wham! I heard thump, thump, thump. I blew both tires, and the damned brakes burst into flame right below the fuel lines.”
The U-2, the first airplane specifically designed to spy on another country, made its unexpected leap into the sky at a time when global nuclear war seemed increasingly likely. As Cold War tensions increased and the Soviet Union lowered the Iron Curtain of secrecy across Eastern Europe, the United States anxiously searched for methods of strategic reconnaissance to determine Soviet capabilities and intentions. As one 1951 study concluded, “The problem of defense of the United States against air attack is characterized above all by lack of knowledge of what we have to defend against.”
Throughout the American military establishment, boards and panels convened to study the situation. The Air Force’s Col. Richard Leghorn proposed developing a spy plane, one that could reach 70,000 feet, far beyond the reach of Soviet aircraft and high enough, conventional wisdom said, to avoid detection by Soviet radar. The Bell Aircraft Corporation, Fairchild Engine and Airplane Company, and Martin Aircraft Company all received contracts to develop proposals for such a craft. The Air Force didn’t even approach the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, but Lockheed got wind of the project and asked Clarence A. “Kelly” Johnson to look into it.
Born in 1910 in Michigan, Johnson early on had fallen in love with airplanes. By the time he was 12 he wanted to design them. He studied aeronautics at the University of Michigan and in 1933 headed west to join Lockheed in California. There he startled the company’s experienced engineers by announcing that the Electra airplane’s tail design was unstable. Wind-tunnel testing (for which he returned to Michigan) proved him right. It was the start of a legendary career that would include World War II’s P-38 Lightning and the XP-80, the prototype for the first U.S. jet fighter.
In June 1943 Johnson promised to deliver the XP-80 in a mere 180 days. He hastily assembled a team and threw together a headquarters with walls made from shipping crates and a rented circus tent as a roof. He and his engineers called their makeshift operation the Skunk Works, after a distillery in the Li’l Abner comic strip, and they finished the aircraft more than a month ahead of schedule.
courtesy of the lockheed martin company2007_3_42
Johnson was “the toughest boss west of the Mississippi, or east of it too, suffered fools for less than seven seconds, and accumulated as many detractors as admirers at the Pentagon and among Air Force commanders,” in the words of one man who knew him. Ben R. Rich, who joined the Skunk Works during the U-2’s development and remained with the unit for 36 years, said that “he had a thick, round nose and reminded me a lot of W. C. Fields, but without the humor. Definitely without that.” Johnson may not have provided laughs, but he was a brilliant and intuitive engineer who slashed through bureaucratic obstacles and got right to the root of a problem. For example, he placed his engineers on the floor near the assembly line so they could react immediately to any difficulties and fix them on the spot. “Be quick, be quiet, be on time,” was his operating philosophy.
For his spy-plane design, Johnson proposed modifying the fuselage from another Skunk Works project, the F-104 Star-fighter, adding long, sailplanelike wings, and using a single General Electric J73 engine to propel the airplane to 70,000 feet. He also suggested saving weight and space with a launch dolly and having the plane land on a skid, like sailplanes.
Lockheed submitted the design, then called the CL-282, to the Air Force. The Air Force turned it down. Gen. Curtis LeMay, the bellicose, cigar-chewing boss of the Strategic Air Command, walked out of a briefing, complaining that it was a waste of his time.
Johnson’s design might have died there if civilian Air Force personnel hadn’t realized its potential. One of them was Trevor Gardner, a Welshman who had founded a reconnaissance-camera company called Hycon and became a special assistant to the Air Force Secretary in 1953. According to Philip Taubman in Secret Empire: Eisenhower, the CIA, and the Hidden Story of America’s Space Espionage , “no one in Washington was more abrupt and abrasive” than Gardner. He “was a tireless, sometimes punishing proponent of the need to accelerate American efforts to produce its own advanced weapons and spy systems.” Angered by the Air Force’s rejection of Johnson’s design, Gardner approached Philip G. Strong at the Central Intelligence Agency’s Office of Scientific Intelligence and told him about it.
The CL-282 also impressed Edwin Land and James Baker. Land was the inventor of a method of polarizing light, founder of the Polaroid Corporation, and father of instant photography. Baker, a Harvard astronomer and an expert at crafting lenses, had developed reconnaissance cameras during the war. In the early 1950s both men served on panels that studied reconnaissance problems the United States faced.
James R. Killian, the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was another scientist charting America’s defense needs. He chaired the Technological Capabilities Panel, which reported to President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Killian asked Land to lead a subgroup called the Intelligence Systems Panel. Baker was another member. When Philip Strong, at the CIA, told Land about Johnson’s design, Land called Baker. “Jim,” he said, “I think I have the plane you are after.”
courtesy of the chris pocock2007_3_43
Land believed the CIA should operate such an airplane. Overflights of the Soviet Union would be dangerous enough, but flying them in military aircraft could lead to war. Far better, Land thought, to have civilians at the controls. In October 1954 he pitched the spy plane idea to the CIA’s director, Allen Dulles, but Dulles expressed reluctance to take on such a revolutionary program, especially one that would trespass on Air Force turf. Land urged him to take the leap: “Quite strongly, we feel that you must always assert your first right to pioneer in scientific techniques for collecting intelligence… . The present opportunity for aerial photography seems to us a fine place to start.”
Land also went to the White House with Killian to meet with President Eisenhower. “After listening to our proposal and asking many hard questions, Eisenhower approved the development of the U-2, but he stipulated that it should be handled in an unconventional way so that it would not become entangled in the bureaucracy of the Defense Department or troubled by rivalries among the services,” Killian wrote in his memoirs.
Lockheed received a contract to build 20 spy planes at a cost of $22.5 million, upon which the Air Force developed an interest in the plane it had spurned. “We’ll let them develop it and then we’ll take it away from them,” LeMay said. He wasn’t quite able to do that, but after some interagency wrangling the Air Force received responsibility for providing the engines and the pilots for the CIA’s U-2s. The pilots first re-signed from the Air Force and then joined the CIA as civilians, a process called “sheep dipping.” (The Air Force would soon have its own U-2 fleet, although only the “civilian” program made Soviet overflights.)
On the day after Thanksgiving 1954 Allen Dulles asked Richard Bissell to run the operation. Bissell seemed an unlikely spy. He was a Yale economist who had worked for the War Shipping Administration during World War II and became a top administrator for the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after it. In 1953 he joined the agency as Dulles’s special assistant despite his complete lack of intelligence experience.
Bissell was “calm, deliberate, articulate, and a good listener,” remembered Dino A. Brugioni, a photo interpreter, but, like Johnson, he had a disdain for bureaucracy. “Don’t come in and tell me we can’t do it,” Bissell said. “Your job is to use the regulations and laws to permit me to do it.” He and Johnson soon developed a close rapport, although other engineers at the Skunk Works knew Bissell only as the mysterious “Mr. B.”
courtesy of pratt & whitney2007_3_44
Johnson started work quickly, so quickly that Bissell mailed him personal checks for $1,256,000 for immediate costs. Before long the Skunk Works engineers were putting in 60, then 70, and even 80 hours a week in their smoky, cramped workspace. The team made rapid progress, with Johnson overseeing every detail. “Nothing got by the boss,” Rich recalled. “ Nothing . And that was my sharpest impression of him, one that never changed over the years: I had never known anyone so expert at every aspect of airplane design and building. He was a great structures man, a great designer, a great aero-dynamicist, a great weights man. He was so sharp and instinctive that he often took my breath away.”
The CL-282—eventually named the U-2, with the U standing for the purposefully fuzzy designation of “utility”—offered incredible challenges, even for the Skunk Works. At its target altitude of 70,000 feet, more than 13 miles high, the atmosphere was terribly thin. Because airplanes use the motion of air over their wings to generate lift, the U-2 needed wings like a glider’s, 80 feet long and with a high aspect ratio (very long in ratio to width) and low induced drag.
The U-2’s oxygen-starved work environment also put increased demands on its engine. At altitude it would produce a mere 7 percent of the thrust it could generate in the thick air at sea level. Inlets had to gulp down what little oxygen there was, but without fatally increasing drag. The airplane’s single engine (changed from the GE-J73 to the Pratt & Whitney J57) required extensive modifications. The turbine and compressor were built by hand to make them lighter and more efficient.
The frigid temperatures—minus 70 Fahrenheit—and low atmospheric pressure would also freeze or boil away ordinary fuel, so Johnson asked Gen. Jimmy Doolittle, who was on the board of Shell Oil, if the petroleum company could create a new fuel for the U-2. Lockheed called it LF-1A. Its boiling point at sea level was 300 degrees Fahrenheit, and not even a match could ignite it. One of its ingredients was a chemical used in the popular bug spray Flit. The U-2 program needed so much fuel that it created a Flit shortage for a time in 1955.
In order to claw its way to altitude, the airplane also had to weigh as little as possible. Fortunately the CIA allowed Johnson to design to performance specifications without meeting standard but too rigid technical specifications. For instance, military specifications required airframes to withstand stresses of 5.33 G’s, but Johnson saved weight by giving his airplane a tolerance of only 2.5 G’s. The 50-foot fuselage was made from aluminum, and the wings had only a third the weight per square foot of a conventional wing.
Most airplanes had a long wing spar that ran through the fuselage; the U-2 borrowed a page from sailplane design and eliminated the spar. Instead, each wing was attached to the fuse-lage with bolts. “Pilots were scared to death flying those big flapping wings into bad weather situations—afraid those wings would snap off,” Ben Rich recalled. The long wings did have two clear advantages: They provided room to store 1,335 gallons of fuel, and the lack of a wing spar left room for a camera bay behind the pilot.
courtesy of the lockheed martin company2007_3_48
Johnson jettisoned his plan for a launch dolly and instead gave the U-2 a very light but narrow bicycle landing-gear system. The gear weighed only 208 pounds, but it made the airplane so wobbly on the ground that wheeled “pogos” had to be devised and added under the middle of each wing. As the plane took off, the pogos detached from the plane and dropped to the ground. After landing, the U-2 would slowly heel over onto one wing.
Brilliant as the design was, it would have been useless without the cameras. The era’s typical reconnaissance cameras could achieve a resolution of up to 20 feet from 33,000 feet in altitude. The U-2’s systems needed to be at least four times better. The schedule did not allow Land and Baker to reinvent the wheel, so they adapted existing cameras. The first system, called the A-1, used a modified Hycon K-38 camera with 24-inch focal length.
Baker began working on lenses for a follow-up system, the A-2, that had three modified K-38 cameras, each with 24-inch lenses of his own design. To quickly calculate the curvature, spacing, and light-bending properties for his lenses, he used a card-operated IBM computer at Boston University, and then he ground each lens himself. The resulting system was more than three times as good as anything previously available.
Next came the B camera, an all-new single-lens system with a 36-inch focal length. It took 18-by-18-inch pictures by using two pieces of overlapping 9.5-inch film that unspooled from opposite directions. Kodak had developed a new film made from Mylar, which was stronger and lighter than previous film stocks and allowed the U-2 to carry single strips of film about a mile long in each magazine, enough for almost 4,000 images. The camera weighed less than 500 pounds, with 4,000 feet of film in each magazine, and from 60,000 feet it could catch details that were only 2.5 feet wide.
Baker planned to make a C model with a 240-inch focal length, but even with mirrors and prisms that folded the light path, the camera would have been six inches larger than the U-2’s payload bay. When he informed Johnson of this, the irascible designer replied, “Six more inches? I’d sell my grandmother for six more inches!” Baker reduced the focal length to 180 inches and lightened the camera more by making the mirrors from a foamed silica provided by the Pittsburgh Corning Glass company. But the large focal length made the C camera too susceptible to vibration for good images.
The first U-2s used A-1s for test runs, but it was the B camera that became the spy plane’s primary system. The pilots’ photographic duties weren’t very demanding: They simply consulted their mission charts to determine when they had reached the target, then switched the cameras on and later off.
Tony LeVier flew the U-2’s first real flight on August 4, 1955, three days after that initial trial. The airplane once again practically jumped into the air, but it proved more stubborn about returning to the ground; as a pilot later said, it was like “trying to land a potato chip.” Johnson insisted that LeVier bring it down on the front gear first, but each time he tried, the airplane bounced back into the air. Finally, only minutes before a severe thunderstorm began pounding the region, the pilot brought the U-2 in his way, tail down. The occasion called for celebration Skunk Works–style, which meant beer and arm wrestling.
The pilots soon learned that their new airplane required careful handling. If they flew too slowly, it would stall; if they flew too fast, the stresses would tear it apart. At maximum ceiling, the difference between too fast and too slow could be as little as 10 knots. The pilots called this narrow envelope the “coffin corner” and learned to keep a very close eye on airspeed. “The coffin corner was a pretty demanding area of flight,” says Pat Halloran, who was in the first group of pilots recruited to fly the airplane for the Air Force. If the U-2 neared either its upper or lower limits, it would start to buffet, and it was hard to tell whether the problem was too much speed or too little. “It was a spooky element of flight, so you had to pay a great deal of attention to that,” Halloran says. “We had a good autopilot, so most of the time you flew the plane using the autopilot rather than doing it by hand with the control yoke.”
The pilots also learned that the early versions of the Pratt & Whitney J57 engines had a tendency to flame out—suddenly fail—because of combustion problems. “Everybody had flameouts in the early days,” Halloran says. The conditions were worse between 50,000 and 55,000 feet, a band the pilots called the “chimney.” “You had to be very, very precise as to airspeed,” Halloran says. “That was the only thing the pilot could do. And if the airspeed was off just a little bit, the darned thing would flame out on you. You dropped down to 30, 35,000 to make an air start and get back and try it again. Some people I know have tried three or four times to get through that chimney.”
The early engines also leaked oil, and the cockpit air-conditioning compressor sprayed it onto the windshield. Skunk Works engineers gave pilots a diaper on a stick so they could wipe off the oil, and they concocted a quick fix by building a filter stuffed with sanitary napkins. The airplane’s rubber seals provided another headache when they began deteriorating quickly. The culprit turned out to be the ozone found at high altitudes, and engineers replaced the rubber with silicone.
The pilots knew well that their airplane was fragile. “Its operational limits … were very close to its structural limits,” Halloran says. “Kelly used to advise us, ‘There’s no cushion on these limits we’re giving you.’ It’s not like a regular Air Force airplane, where we operated up to 80 percent of the limit of something. He said, ‘You’re operating this airplane right close to the margin, so you have to treat it with kid gloves.’” The pilots had reason to worry. In 1956 one of them died when, by some accounts, two Canadian fighters buzzed his airplane and the turbulence broke up the delicate craft.
courtesy of the lockheed martin company2007_3_49
Flying was not only difficult, it was uncomfortable. The cockpit’s air pressure equaled that at 28,000 feet—almost as high as Mount Everest—and the pilots had to wear a partial-pressure suit in case the cockpit depressurized even further. The rubberized garment squeezed so tightly that “the slightest movement—bending a knee or arm, turning the head—would rub the skin, leaving bruises,” one pilot recalled. To avoid getting the bends, when nitrogen bubbles form in the bloodstream, at times of rapid ascent, pilots spent an hour “pre-breathing” pure oxygen before a mission. The side effects included earaches and headaches.
Flying the U-2 had some pluses, though. “If the weather below was good, the view from this altitude was unsurpassed, the country a huge map come to life,” a pilot wrote. “On one flight, while crossing the Colorado River in Arizona, approaching California, I could see clearly from Monterey Peninsula on the north, halfway down Baja California on the south.”
Of course, the plane wasn’t designed for sightseeing. On July 4, 1956, the pilot Hervey Stockman took off from Wiesbaden, Germany, on the first Soviet overflight. He flew above East Germany and Poland and then across the border into the U.S.S.R. As he neared Leningrad, he peered through the cockpit’s driftsight, a downward looking periscope, and saw MiG fighters making futile attempts to reach him. He finished his mission without incident and landed back in Germany after 8 hours and 45 minutes.
The next day Carmine Vito used the same plane for the second Soviet overflight, this time flying directly over Moscow. Three more flights took place during a 10-day window Eisenhower had granted. Bissell recalled standing next to Allen Dulles as they chuckled with amazement over the first pictures. “From 70,000 feet you could not only count the airplanes lined up on the ramps but tell what they were without a magnifying glass,” he said. “We were astounded. We had finally pried open the oyster shell of Russian secrecy and discovered a giant pearl.”
Examining the oyster’s contents was the responsibility of the CIA’s Photo-Intelligence Division, which set up shop above a car dealership in a bad neighborhood of Washington. Its head was Arthur Lundahl, who was “to the field of photo interpretation what Kelly Johnson was to airplane design—a brilliant innovator who advanced the frontiers of his profession in the service of his country,” in the words of Philip Taubman. Lundahl called his operation Automat, after the round-the-clock restaurants, because he wanted people to be able to come in 24 hours a day to study the photographs they needed. (Officially it was htautomat, because the CIA didn’t begin operation names with a vowel. Lundahl said he prefaced it with the initials of his department’s security officer. )
“Time and again, we knew we were reporting information that was dispelling existing notions and intelligence estimates, and we took certain vicarious pleasure in proving the value of aerial photography over other intelligence sources,” wrote the photo interpreter Dino Brugioni. One notion the U-2 photos dispelled was that the United States was laboring against a “bomber gap.” In fact, the Soviets didn’t have nearly the offensive capacity the U.S. military feared. The bomber gap, it turned out, was an illusion created in part by the Soviets flying the same 10 Myasishchev Mya-4 “Bison” bombers over Red Square time and time again during a May Day ceremony in 1955. The ruse fooled Western observers into thinking the Soviets possessed a huge fleet of the aircraft. The U-2 photographs showed no evidence of such Bison herds.
The experts had also been wrong about Soviet radar capabilities. The Soviets tracked the overflights and made an official protest on July 10, 1956. When Eisenhower learned about the Soviet tracking, he ordered an end to the overflights.
The Skunk Works tried to fool Soviet radar with “dirty birds,” primitive attempts at stealth technology. A system called “trapeze” used bamboo poles strung outside the plane with wire and ferrite beads to scatter incoming radar signals. “Wallpaper” employed a thin honeycomb structure, also outside the plane, embedded with printed circuits to absorb them. Both systems were disappointing and adversely affected the U-2’s performance. Wallpaper even created a fatal chain of events when the absorbent structure built up heat that led to an engine failure and the death of a pilot.
That was neither the first nor the last U-2 crash, and it was certainly not the most famous. That bleak honor belonged to Francis Gary Powers, who was shot down over the Soviet Union on May 1, 1960.
Prompted by new worries of a “missile gap,” Eisenhower had allowed overflights to resume, although he insisted on personally approving each mission. Powers, the U-2’s most experienced pilot, was chosen to fly the most ambitious one yet, a 3,800-mile flight—2,900 miles of it over the Soviet Union—with targets to include plutonium factories, suspected ICBM sites, railroads, shipyards, and naval bases. Powers would take off from Pakistan and land in Norway.
He flew a U-2c, one of the original airplanes that had been re-engined with the Pratt & Whitney J75. The new engine provided 15,800 pounds of thrust, 4,600 more than the J57, but it was significantly heavier and shifted the plane’s center of gravity enough to make it even harder to fly. Under some conditions the coffin corner narrowed to a mere 4 knots.
Powers was three and a half hours into his flight, 70,500 feet over the town of Sverdlovsk, when he heard a thump, felt the airplane jerk, and saw a bright orange flash. The U-2 tumbled upside down. Both wings snapped off. He was pinned against the fuselage, half in and half out of the cockpit, and unable to reach the button that would have detonated an explosive charge to wreck the cameras. He finally fell free from the U-2 and parachuted safely into the middle of an international incident.
When the Soviets announced that they had shot down an American spy plane, American officials fell back on a pre-planned cover story. The U-2 was an innocent weather plane, they said, and must have inadvertently flown off course. But Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had an ace up his sleeve. He revealed that Powers was alive and in Soviet custody. Red-faced, the United States admitted not only to invading Soviet airspace but to lying about it afterward. On May 16 Khrushchev stormed out of a summit meeting with Eisenhower in Paris, and superpower relations hit a new low.
Powers spent 21 months in prison before being exchanged for a Soviet spy, Rudolf Abel. “Between what we had deduced and what Gary told us,” Johnson wrote in his autobiography, “it appeared that an SA-2 missile had knocked off the right-hand stabilizer while he was at cruising altitude. The airplane then, predictably, immediately went over on its back at high speed and the wings broke off in downbending. Gary was left sitting in the fuselage with a part of the tail and nothing else.”
The U-2’s cover had been blown. Never again would it perform secret overflights of the Soviet Union. Those missions had been calculated risks from the start, and the United States had played against the odds one time too many. However, despite the turmoil Powers’s flight created, many believed the gamble had paid off. The 23 successful overflights had returned about 250 miles of film that covered a million square miles of Soviet territory. “The flights provided vital data on the Soviet atomic energy program, their development of fissionable materials, their weapons development and testing, and the location and size of their nuclear stockpile,” Bissell said. “By the Pentagon’s own estimate, 90 percent of all hard data on Soviet military development came directly from the cameras on board the U-2.”
Even after the Powers shootdown, the U-2 continued to perform important reconnaissance work. In 1962 an Air Force U-2 provided the first photographic evidence that the Soviets were installing medium-range missiles in Cuba. U-2s also flew missions over Laos, North Vietnam, and North Korea. Taiwanese pilots conducted overflights of mainland China in the 1960s, and five of them were shot down. After Iraqi forces invaded Kuwait in 1990, U-2s based in Saudi Arabia flew more than 800 missions during Operation Desert Shield, the buildup to war and Operation Desert Storm.
The world has changed in dramatic ways in the decades since the first U-2 surprised Tony LeVier by lifting off the runway. The Cold War is over; the adversary on which the U-2 was intended to spy no longer even exists. The U-2’s successor, the Mach 3+ SR-71 Blackbird, has come and gone, having retired in 1990. Satellites have taken on much of the spy work the U-2 once performed. Yet the plane continues to fly, although in modified form and with new generations of sensory equipment aboard. The TR-1 (for tactical reconnaissance) is a larger version with a wingspan of 103 feet and a name change intended to distance it from its covert reputation. The ER-2 (for Earth resources) is a variant that NASA uses to conduct upper-atmosphere research, just as the U-2’s original cover story said it did. Nothing better illustrates how the world has changed than a January 2000 mission by a NASA ER-2. The pilot was not photographing top-secret military sites; he was conducting tests to study ozone losses in the upper atmosphere. Like U-2 pilots from decades past, he crossed over into Russian airspace. This time, however, he had permission.
