How To Fly The U-2

courtesy of the lockheed martin company2007_3_45

Pat Halloran was an F-84 pilot with some 100 combat missions over Korea when he joined the Air Force’s U-2 program in 1957. He had heard little about his new plane, so he was taken aback at his first meeting. “To see it for the first time was a kind of shock,” he says. “It looked like a big jet-powered glider, which is kind of what it was.” Before moving on to fly the SR-71 Blackbird, Halloran logged 1,600 hours in the U-2. Here’s what he has to say about piloting it.

“It didn’t have much of any ground roll. By the time you released the brakes and pushed the power forward you’d roll only about 1,500 feet with a full load of fuel, and it would just jump right in the air. You’d go up at an extremely steep angle of climb because you had to limit the airspeed. It climbed out of sight pretty fast. You could be 15,000, 18,000 feet and still be just crossing the border of the airfield. It was an extremely high angle of attack and a fast-climbing airplane.”

“[Maximum and minimum airspeeds] began to converge as you went higher and higher. It wasn’t too bad when you first leveled off, but as you continued through the flight and [went] higher, the indicated airspeeds would get lower and lower, and pretty soon you were down to, oh, maybe a 10-knot window in which you had to continue the rest of the flight. If you exceeded or bounced off the limits, either too fast or too slow, you got pretty much the same indication, so it was difficult to tell which you were encountering: approaching stall or approaching Mach limit.”

“What we had was something that Kelly Johnson had taken off the old T-33. It was what you call a fuel totalizer, instead of a counter. The maintenance people would set that on the ground, and as you continued to burn fuel, it would just click backward and give you a number to deal with as to how much fuel you had left.

“The other fuel indicator you had was a red light that came on at 40 gallons, and that was an actual measurement of the sump tank that fed the engines. The fuel was in the wings, and the wings fed this auxiliary sump tank, which was kind of wrapped around the engine. The fuel from that tank then went to the engine. I had that come on one time when I was climbing out on a training mission. There had been some maintenance performed on the aircraft over the weekend, and they had shut off the fuel tanks on the wings and forgot to put them back on again. So I was actually operating on just the fuel in the sump tank. The engine flamed out, so I had to make a dead-stick landing.”

“That was very, very difficult to do. The airspeeds were the problem. We were up to our maximum-limit airspeed, and the poor old tanker was kind of struggling in the sky to stay airborne. We refueled initially off KC-97s. That wasn’t too bad. Our speeds were a little more compatible. And then we also refueled off KC-135s, and that got a little dicey because of the airspeed. We did lose two airplanes during refueling operations. One was the wake turbulence and the other was a pilot error. The guy, he finished refueling and backed off and was going to make a high-speed pull up in front of the tanker, and he pulled a wing off. One guy got in the turbulence behind the tanker, and he was killed. He couldn’t get out of the airplane because the ejection seat didn’t work properly. We didn’t have ejection seats in the early airplanes, so we lost a number of people who could have been saved, I’m sure, if we’d had seats.”

“You could be back at idle and have all your drag devices out and it would float the whole length of the runway if it was 10 knots too fast. You also had to land the aircraft in a full stall. You couldn’t roll it on, or if you touched it on the main gear first, it would always skip back in the air, and then you’d be up in the air 10, 15 feet and no airspeed. It was very critical, and it was difficult to see and judge your height because the front windscreen was filled up with equipment. So you had to use a lot of judgment as to how high you were above the ground and just keep holding it off. But if you got a full stall, it would plunk down and pretty well stay there.”