Fast Acting Doors

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the U-2.  Several weeks ago I read “Lost in Enemy Airspace,” the excerpt from Michael Dobbs’ outstanding book “One Minute to Midnight… .” that was published by Vanity Fair in June 2008.  Then I read a current news story about the Dragon Lady being replaced by the Global Hawk unmanned RPV.  And then, today — in the New York Times of all places — a fabulous Op-Ed written by Cholene Espinoza, former U-2 pilot, on the 50th anniversary of Francis Gary Powers being splashed by a Soviet SAM. I can’t resist stealing some of the real pilots’ thunder, but this bird — another Kelly Johnson Skunk Works project — was just about un-flyable.  Espinoza writes about its airspeed envelope at altitude.  At the edge of space, the difference between a stall and an un-recoverable nose dive from overspeeed is just six knots.  Imagine being alone and having to pay attention to that while wearing a space suit and seeing nothing but empty sky hour-after-hour.  OR, experiencing pilot Maultsby’s dilemma of trying to navigate at the North Pole — at night! 

It’s better in their words:

By Cholene Espinoza as appeared in the New York Times, May 7, 2010

FIFTY years ago today, the Soviet Union announced that it had shot down an American U-2 spy plane and that its pilot, Francis Gary Powers, was alive.

It seems like a long-ago event from the cold war. That may be why, in this era of satellites and drones, most people are surprised to learn that the U-2 is not only still in use, but that it is as much a part of our national security structure as it was a half-century ago.

Every decade or so there is chatter about replacing the U-2. And yet, thanks to its remarkable technological and operational capacity and flexibility, the U-2 has in recent years been used to find homemade bombs in Afghanistan, drug lords in Colombia, mass graves in the former Yugoslavia and budding nuclear weapons programs in the Middle East. It has also been critical in non-military missions like measuring ozone levels and mapping disaster zones.

This time, though, it looks pretty certain that the Air Force will follow through on its plans to retire the U-2 as soon as it can field a Global Hawk drone retrofitted with electronic eavesdropping devices.

I flew the U-2 during the 1990s, and I received this news as if I had learned that an old friend was dying. It may seem odd to grieve for a machine. But the U-2 is no ordinary vehicle. Some in my world call flying the plane a religion, others a calling. For me it was a gift.

The U-2 is nicknamed the Dragon Lady for good reason. You never knew what to expect when you took it into the air, no matter how seasoned a pilot you were. This was an unfortunate consequence of its design. The trade-off of a plane built light enough to fly above 70,000 feet is that it is almost impossible to control. And 13 miles above the ground, the atmosphere is so thin that the “envelope” between stalling and “overspeed” — going so fast you lose control of the plane, resulting in an unrecoverable nose dive — is razor-thin, making minor disruptions, even turbulence, as deadly as a missile. The challenge is even greater near the ground, since to save weight, the plane doesn’t have normal landing gear.

As I was told before one of my tryout flights, “Landing the U-2 is a lot like playing pool. It’s not so much how you shoot as how you set up your shot.” Or, as my former wing commander said, “We’ve all had moments when we could just as easily have made one tiny move the other way and ended up dead.”

Getting the plane up and down was not the only challenge. Staying airborne — and alert — for countless hours, looking at nothing but sky, was another. I learned the hard way, for example, that you can get diaper rash from Gatorade.

Other risks were less benign, as I found when I was the ground officer for a pilot who radioed, “My skin feels like it’s crawling.” He had the bends so badly from changes in pressure that when he landed his body was covered with huge welts. Had the weather not cleared in time for him to land, these bubbles of nitrogen might have lodged in his brain or optical nerve — as they had in other U-2 pilots.

Were the risks worth it? Absolutely. The advantage of having a human being in the pilot’s seat of a reconnaissance plane is overwhelming. A person can troubleshoot problems in mid-flight, with creativity that a computer lacks and a proximity to the problem that a remote-control pilot can never achieve. A pilot also has unique situational awareness: I’ve been on more than one mission in which I was able to distinguish promising details that a drone would have missed.

It was worth it personally, too. I’ll never forget the adrenaline surge of landing what was basically a multimillion-dollar jet-powered glider on its 12-inch tail wheel from a full stall while wearing a space suit. And I’ll always remember the peace of sitting alone on the quiet edge of space, out of radio contact for hours.

The new generation of drones have their merits. But flying robots, no matter how advanced, can’t measure up to the courage and commitment of a pilot who is risking her life for the sake of the mission.

Reconnaissance will outlive the U-2, but there will always be a divot in the hearts of those who have seen the curvature of the earth, the stars seemingly close enough to touch, and known the satisfaction of having completed a mission with the Dragon Lady.

And from Michael Dobbs:

Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska

Saturday, October 27, 1962; 4 a.m. E.D.T. (12 a.m. Alaska)

Charles W. Maultsby fervently wished he were somewhere else. He could have been racking up combat experience over Cuba like many of his fellow U-2 pilots. Or the brass might have sent him somewhere warm, like Australia or Hawaii, where the 4080th Strategic Wing also had operating locations. Instead, he was spending the winter in Alaska, where it was bitterly cold and you rarely saw the sun. He had tried to get some rest before his long flight to the North Pole, but had managed only a couple of hours’ fitful sleep. Pilots had been entering and leaving the officers’ quarters all evening in their heavy snow boots, laughing and slamming doors. The more he tried to sleep, the more awake he felt. In the end, he gave up and went down to the operations building, where there was a vacant cot. He set his alarm for eight p.m. on Friday night Alaska time, four hours before takeoff.

The mission was to collect radioactive samples from the Soviet nuclear tests at Novaya Zemlya. Compared with flying a U-2 over hostile territory and taking photographs of missile sites, the assignment lacked glamour. The participants in Project Star Dust did not usually fly anywhere near the Soviet Union. Instead, they flew to some fixed point, such as the North Pole, to inspect the clouds that had drifted there from the nuclear-testing site, more than a thousand miles away. They collected the samples on special filter paper. Often there was nothing, but sometimes, when the Soviets had conducted a big test, the Geiger counters clicked away furiously.

Maultsby was used to the routine. As the pilot of a single-seater U-2, he would be on his own for nearly eight hours. He had plotted the route ahead of time with navigators. For most of the way, he would take bearings from the stars, with the help of a compass and sextant. A search-and-rescue team, known as Duck Butt, would tag along for part of the trip, but there was little they could do if something went wrong. It was impossible for them to land on an ice cap. If Maultsby had to bail out, he would be alone with the polar bears. “I wouldn’t pull the rip cord” was the advice he got.

The pre-flight ritual was always the same. After waking up from his nap, he went to the officers’ mess for a high-protein breakfast of steak and eggs. The idea was to eat something solid that would take a long time to digest, thereby avoiding trips to a nonexistent bathroom. He changed into long underwear, put on a helmet, and started his “breathing exercises,” inhaling pure oxygen for an hour and a half. It was important to expel as much nitrogen as possible from his system. If the cabin depressurized at 70,000 feet, nitrogen bubbles would form in his blood, causing him to experience the bends, like a deep-sea diver who comes to the surface too quickly.

Maultsby climbed into his flight suit. It was designed to expand automatically in response to a sudden loss of cabin pressure, forming a corset around the pilot and preventing his blood from exploding in the rarefied air.

A half-hour before takeoff, Maultsby was attached to a portable oxygen canister and transported to the U-2 in a van. He settled into the cockpit and strapped himself in. A technician hooked him up to the internal oxygen supply. The canopy closed above him. Neatly sewn into the seat cushion was a survival kit, which included flares, a machete, fishing gear, a camp stove, an inflatable life raft, mosquito repellent, and a silk banner proclaiming, in a dozen languages, i am an american.

Maultsby’s compact build—he was only five feet seven—was a plus for a U-2 pilot. The cockpit was exceptionally cramped. To build a plane capable of soaring to a height of 14 miles, the designer, Kelly Johnson, head of Lockheed’s “Skunk Works” project, had ruthlessly cut back on both the weight and size of its fuselage. He dispensed with many of the features of a modern airplane, such as conventional landing gear, hydraulic systems, and structural supports. The wings and tail were bolted onto the fuselage rather than being attached with metal sheets. If the plane was subjected to too much buffeting, the wings would fall off.

There were many other unique design features. To gain lift at high altitude, the plane needed long, narrow wings. Maultsby’s U-2 was 80 feet wide, wingtip to wingtip—nearly twice the distance from nose to tail. The sailplane-style wings and light airframe would allow the plane to glide for up to 250 miles if its single engine ever lost power.

Flying this extraordinary airplane required an elite corps of pilots. Training was carried out at “the ranch,” a remote airstrip in the Nevada desert. Also known as “Area 51,” the ranch was already becoming notorious as the site of numerous alleged U.F.O. sightings. Most likely, what people were seeing were U-2 spy planes, glinting in the sun.

At midnight Alaska time—four a.m. eastern daylight time—Maultsby roared down the runway. He was an hour out of Eielson when he flew over the last radio beacon on his way to the North Pole. It was on Barter Island, on the northern coast of Alaska. The Duck Butt navigators wished him luck and said they would “keep a light on in the window” to guide him back on his return, six hours later.

Aurora Borealis

6 a.m. E.D.T. (2 a.m. Alaska)

After 11 years in the air force, Chuck Maultsby was known to be an outstanding pilot. He had served two years with the Thunderbirds, the air-force aerobatic team, maneuvering his F-100 Super Sabre through a series of spectacular loops, rolls, and corkscrews. Prior to that, he had survived 600 days as a Chinese prisoner of war after being shot down in combat over North Korea. With his trim mustache, darkly handsome face, and amused eyes, he looked like a shorter version of the British actor David Niven.

After Barter Island, Maultsby would be relying solely on the age-old techniques of celestial navigation—the methods used by Magellan and Columbus—to keep himself oriented. Prior to his departure, navigators had prepared a stack of celestial charts for various points along his route. Maultsby kept them by his seat. When the clock indicated that he should be halfway to the North Pole, he pulled out the stiff green card that showed his assumed position and the precise alignment of the stars for this particular time of night. If he was on track, the soft orange light of Arcturus, the brightest star in the northern celestial hemisphere, should have been visible to the right of the plane’s nose. Another bright star, Vega, would be located slightly higher in the sky, toward the northwest. The North Star, Polaris, would be almost directly overhead, indicating that he was getting close to the North Pole. The constellation Orion, the Hunter, would be behind him, toward the south.

He tried to shoot several of the brighter stars with his sextant, but “streaks of light dancing through the sky” made it difficult. The farther north he got, “the more intense” the lights became. He had run into the phenomenon known as the aurora borealis.

In other circumstances, he might have enjoyed the spectacle, which was unlike anything he had ever seen. The dark night sky outside the cockpit was alive with flashes of orange and violet and crimson, twirling and twisting like streamers in the wind.

Dazzled by the aurora, Maultsby found it hard to distinguish one star from another. His compass was no help. In the vicinity of the North Pole, the needle would be jerked automatically downward, toward the earth’s surface, and north and south became impossibly confused. Unable to obtain a proper fix on the stars, he had only a vague idea where he was located or where he was headed. The last few fixes before reaching what he thought was the North Pole seemed “highly suspect” to him, but he stubbornly held his course.

Flying a temperamental plane like a U-2 was difficult enough at the best of times. There were so many variables to consider and calculations to make. Designed to soar to extraordinary heights, the U-2 was one of the flimsiest planes ever built. He was flying at an altitude known to U-2 pilots as “coffin corner,” where the air was so thin that it could barely support the weight of the plane, and the difference between maximum and minimum permissible speeds was a mere six knots. If he flew too fast, the aircraft would fall apart. If he flew too slow, the plane would stall, and he would nose-dive. He could not allow his eyes to stray too long from the airspeed indicator in front of him.