Dragon Hearts
The brotherhood of pilots who have mastered the U-2 is a tiny group that takes enormous pride in flying the Dragon Lady.
By Lane Wallace
Photographed by Dean Tokuno & Jim Koepnick
March 2009
There is frost accumulating inside the windows of my cockpit. I reach a gloved hand up and scrape a clear opening in the ice. The long, graceful lines of the left wing extend almost 50 feet into the impossibly thin air surrounding us. Normally when I fly, I'm off the surface of the planet, but still deep within the ocean of air that cushions and protects us from the vast and icy universe beyond. But today, even the majority of that atmospheric ocean lies beneath me. I'm not so much flying in it as I am surfing just beneath its surface.
I look out along the long, dark wing of the U-2. If I leaned closer to the window -- no mean feat in a cumbersome space suit and helmet -- I could probably look down and identify some of the individual landmarks below. Certainly the U-2's cameras and sensors are powerful enough to discern even minute movements in equipment and personnel on terrain lying more than 14 miles beneath us.
But at the moment, my focus is not local, but global. At an altitude of well over 70,000 feet, my world is bigger than it's ever been. Ocean and mountains are contained in a single glance; the California coastline seems to rise in front of us as we make our way south, even as the land and sea drop away to either side. The curve of the Earth is only faintly discernable, even at this altitude. But it's there, a multi-hued, bending arc of horizon that belies the foolish notion that any place on Earth is flat.
Ringing the brown-and-blue hues of the planet's surface is a narrow band of white haze. That would be our atmosphere. And even though there's still a long distance between us and the formal boundary of Space, the U-2's wing seems to be skimming along the top of that precious atmospheric haze. Above the haze, there's a thin line of light blue, where enough water molecules still exist to create the illusion of color. Above that, the sky gets progressively darker, from midnight blue to black.
I look left, then right, and finally just sit quietly, in awe of the planet I call home. It's such a complex place -- at once a vast and powerful rock, spinning slowly through the cosmos, and a unique and delicate ecosystem sustained by an impossibly fragile cushion of air. An ecosystem, I remind myself, that I have left in order to purchase this view and out-of-planet experience.
I sit back and contemplate the surreal nature of the U-2 pilot's world. My breath echoes inside my helmet with the raspy, regulated rhythm of Darth Vader -- an appropriate analogy because, like Anakin, I cannot survive here without the machinery I'm attached to. And it's not just about portable oxygen. Above 63,000 feet -- a point known as "Armstrong's Line" -- the liquid in a human body boils. Hence the pressure suit. There is no margin here. And everything is an effort. Turning my head. Taking a sip of water. Reaching for a pencil. Even flying the plane is better done by autopilot, because at altitudes above 70,000 feet, a mere 10 knots can stand in between our stall speed and redline -- the infamous "coffin corner." And, as the name implies, straying either side of that narrow window tends to end the same way: badly.
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The portable "pogo" wheels underneath the wing; the TU-2S in flight at low level.
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We don't belong here.
Somewhere in the back recesses of my brain, I can't escape the feeling that we're surreptitious infiltrators -- rebels who've cunningly figured out a way to slip out of our world into the forbidden edges of another, where only creatures who don't need oxygen, air pressure or heat can survive. Isn't this what led Icarus to his doom?
That we are able to successfully operate aircraft in such a hostile environment is amazing. That we've been doing it for over 50 years is mind-boggling.
The U-2 was a product of the Lockheed "Skunk Works." It first flew in 1955 -- a single-point design that paired the basic fuselage of an F-104 with an 80-foot wing to produce a plane capable of sustained flight at extraordinarily high altitudes. But to achieve that goal with only a single, early-generation jet engine, every other "normal" aircraft requirement was jettisoned.
The U-2 is a tailwheel aircraft -- the last one remaining in the Air Force inventory -- but its two landing gear are set in a tandem configuration along the centerline of the fuselage. For taxi and takeoff, portable "pogo" wheels, which drop away after lift-off, are placed underneath the wings. But they're not available for landing. So bringing a U-2 back to Earth is, as pilot Maj. Cory Bartholomew puts it, "like landing a bicycle on a runway." A tailwheel bicycle, no less. Even with a good landing, one wing will eventually drop and contact the runway, shielded from damage by titanium wing skids. But good landings are an elusive commodity in the U-2.
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