The history and engineering of the U-2 Dragon Lady spy plane, a living legend of aviation

On August 1, 1955, Skunk Works, Lockheed Martin's secret division, took off for the first time with a legendary aircraft.

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The U-2 Dragon Lady is an atypical aircraft designed to fly in extreme conditions, almost at the edge of space, and on very long-distance and long-duration flights. It is a subsonic aircraft. Unlike the SR-71 Blackbird, the key to its success lies not in its speed, but in its flight altitude: it can reach 21,000 meters (70,000 feet). Because of this, the pilot must wear a pressurized suit.

The designer of the U-2 was another legend in aviation history: Clarence Leonard "Kelly" Johnson, the American aeronautical engineer who designed such famous aircraft as the P-38 Lightning and F-104 Starfighter">F-104 Starfighter fighters, and the aforementioned spy plane. href="https://www.outono.net/elentir/2024/03/02/the-fascinating-engineering-and-lesser-known-details-of-the-sr-71-blackbird-spy-plane/">SR-71 Blackbird. In the case of the U-2, Kelly designed a jet aircraft with glider-like wings, in order to improve its range. Kelly succeeded admirably: the U-2S can fly 11,280 kilometers without refueling.

The early versions of the U-2 were powered by a Pratt & Whitney J57-P-37A turbojet engine, producing 10,200 pounds of thrust. The U-2C version incorporated a more powerful engine, the Pratt & Whitney J75. In the 1980s, the U-2S variant was fitted with an even more powerful engine, the General Electric F118, the same engine used in the B-2 Spirit bomber.

Lockheed Martin built a total of 104 U-2 aircraft. Currently, its only operator is the United States, although it was also used by the Republic of China (Taiwan) Air Force between 1960 and 1974. The first user of the U-2 was the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which had four detachments of this aircraft between 1956 and 1974 in Germany, Turkey, California, and Japan. Today, it continues to be operated by the U.S. Air Force (USAF) for strategic reconnaissance missions and by NASA for scientific missions.

The U-2's first spy mission took place on June 20, 1956, when a CIA plane flew over East Germany and Poland to take photographs. Soviet MiG-15 and MiG-17 fighters and anti-aircraft missiles of that era were useless against the Dragon Lady, due to its high flight ceiling, far beyond the reach of the USSR's air defenses. For years, the U-2s flew with impunity over Soviet territory without the communist dictatorship being able to do anything to shoot them down.

In the late 1950s, the US painted these aircraft with a matte black livery to make them harder to detect at night. USAF U-2s still sport this livery today. The U-2's fortunes ran out on May 1, 1960, when the USSR shot one down for the first time while it was flying over Soviet territory. The pilot, Francis Gary Powers, was captured and released in a prisoner exchange in 1962. The wreckage of his U-2 is still on display in a museum in Moscow.

If you want to know more about this fascinating aircraft, this Thursday the channel Learn from the base published an interesting video about the engineering of the U-2, showing what it looks like inside, how it works, and its particular way of landing, which I already talked about here:

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Main photo: Defense Visual Information Distribution Service. A USAF U-2 landing at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii, on June 13, 2017.