Lockheed U-2
The Lockheed U-2 is a single-seat, single-engine jet built by Lockheed's Skunk Works for the CIA as a high-altitude strategic reconnaissance aircraft. From 1956 it photographed the Soviet Union from above 60,000 feet, work that ended over Soviet territory when one was shot down in 1960; U-2 photographs of Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962 precipitated the Cuban Missile Crisis. Enlarged, modernized descendants remain in U.S. Air Force service, and NASA flies the type's ER-2 variant as a high-altitude research aircraft.
Why It Mattered
The U-2 was created to solve a specific problem of the early Cold War: the United States needed to monitor Soviet military activity, and photographing it called for an aircraft that could work at altitudes where it would be invulnerable to interception. Flying above 60,000 feet, U-2s crossed the Soviet Union with cameras in the late 1950s, and their photographs showed that the feared "missile gap" in the Soviet Union's favour was a myth. When a U-2 was finally shot down in 1960, the loss became a superpower crisis, which measured how much had ridden on those photographs. A U-2 later found the missiles that set off the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the type's descendants remain in service today. The Smithsonian calls the U-2 one of the most successful intelligence-gathering aircraft ever produced.
Design Notes
The U-2 was designed in months by Lockheed's Skunk Works under the direction of Clarence L. "Kelly" Johnson, after the CIA accepted a Lockheed proposal in November 1954. The design traded almost everything for altitude: a long, narrow-chord, sailplane-like wing and a lightly built structure wrapped around a single Pratt & Whitney J57 turbojet. Early testing exposed engine flameouts at high altitude, a problem solved by developing a new low-volatility fuel. The payload was photographic and electronic: cameras and sensors were housed in the nose and in a large fuselage bay. Weight-saving shaped the whole aircraft, down to a bicycle-type landing gear that the type kept all its life. The enlarged U-2R redesign of the 1960s lengthened both the fuselage and the wingspan, improving handling and sensor payload while retaining the original configuration.
Operational History
Lockheed test pilot Tony LeVier flew the U-2 on its maiden flight on 6 August 1955, and after an accelerated test program CIA pilots began operations the following summer. A U-2A made the type's first crossing of Soviet airspace on 4 July 1956, and for four years U-2s photographed Soviet territory on flights mounted from bases in Pakistan and Turkey. On 1 May 1960 a Soviet SA-2 missile shot down Francis Gary Powers over Sverdlovsk; the incident embarrassed the United States and halted the overflights. Flights elsewhere continued: U-2s watched China from bases in Taiwan and Cuba from American bases, and on 29 August 1962 a U-2 confirmed Soviet intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Cuba, the discovery that led to the Cuban Missile Crisis. From July 1964 U-2s gathered information over Vietnam, operating continually until the fall of Saigon in 1975, and the type went on to observe the Middle East and other political hot spots. Production had ended for twelve years when the Air Force ordered the TR-1A version of the U-2R in 1979; re-engined and modernized from 1994, those aircraft emerged as the U-2S.
Afterlife
The U-2's afterlife is unusual, because the type has not retired: the Air Force still flies the U-2S from Beale Air Force Base in California, although the first aircraft were retired in early 2024 and the service plans to retire the whole fleet. Its second career, in science, began early: NASA used two U-2s to collect science data from 1971 and replaced them with two ER-2s, the earth-resources version of the design, acquired in 1981 and 1989. Based at NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center in Palmdale, California, the ER-2s work as flying laboratories studying Earth resources, atmospheric chemistry and oceanic processes, and calibrating satellites; NASA's U-2s and ER-2s have flown more than 4,500 data missions since 1971. Early aircraft survive in museums: the National Air and Space Museum's U-2C flew the first operational mission over the USSR in 1956 and has been on display in Washington since the Air Force transferred it to the museum in 1982.