Aging U-2 Will Fight On Into the Next Decade

Hugh Pickens writes "For more than half a century, the CIA and US military have relied on a skinny, sinister-looking black jet, first designed during the Eisenhower administration at Lockheed's famed Skunk Works in Burbank, headed by legendary chief engineer Clarence L. 'Kelly' Johnson, to penetrate deep behind enemy lines for vital intelligence-gathering missions. Although the plane is perhaps best known for being shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960 with the subsequent capture of pilot Francis Gary Powers, the U-2 continues to play a critical role in national security today, hunting Al Qaeda forces in the Middle East. The fleet of 33 U-2s was supposed to be replaced in the next few years with RQ-4 Global Hawks, but the Pentagon now proposes delaying the U-2's retirement as part of Defense Department cutbacks." (Read on, below.) Hugh Pickens continues: "The Global Hawk drone, costing an estimated cost of $176 million each, has 'priced itself out of the niche (PDF), in terms of taking pictures in the air,' says Deputy Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter. 'That's a disappointment for us, but that's the fate of things that become too expensive in a resource-constrained environment.' The Pentagon has determined that operating the U-2 will be cheaper for the foreseeable future but it won't disclose how much operating the U-2s will cost for security reasons. 'It's incredible to think that these planes are flying,' says Francis Gary Powers Jr., Powers' son and founder of the Cold War Museum in Warrenton, Va. 'You'd think another spy plane, or satellite or drone would come along by now to replace it.'"

Comments

There's nothing to change

[Anonymous Coward]

It can't. Aerodynamics is pretty much a settled science, so is turbine technology, Newton's Laws, and kerosene. There's a reason why 40 year old planes still look like planes today, as opposed to 40 year old computers.

So I'm always surprised when Space Nutters think there are magical materials and fantasy technologies out there...

Re:There's nothing to change

[DesScorp]

Ah, so the human race has progressed materials science as far as it will go? We already know about all possible alloys, composites, and construction techniques? Science has unraveled all the mysteries of the Universe, all the way down through the quantum level? No possible advances in propulsion technology? Think again.

Materials science is the only place left to go. We saw the future, and it was unaffordable. Flying cars? Jetpacks? Supersonic airliners? All do-able. All prohibitively expensive and inefficient and unsuited for mass productions. You should read an article called The End of the Future. It sums up something I've suspected for quite some time: while we've made advances we could never dream about... computers, biotech, etc... the advances we did dream about never came, and never will (at least not in our lifetimes or those of our children or grandchildren). All those dreams of colonizing planets, traveling to other stars, floating cities, etc, ran into the hard shoals of reality, both physical and fiscal. Humanity is now actually slowing down, after a century of constantly going faster. 50 years from now, whatever Boeing is producing at it's plant will look largely like what they've been making since the 707; a fat tube with slightly swept wings and jet engines in pods underneath. It may be made of plastics and have advanced computers, but it'll carry around the same number of people and go about as fast as current airliners. The future... the one we wanted... really did die.

Re:There's nothing to change

[type40]

A 747 from 1969 and a 747 form today are very different aircraft. Sure they share the same basic airframe, but that's where the similarities end.
Yes they fly the same route, at the same altitude, in the same time However a modern 747 does it requiring less maintenance, less flight crew, and using less fuel.

Aircraft manufactures are hyper conservative when it comes to materials and processes. Their product is very expensive to develop and if it fails has the potential to kill hundreds if not thousands in a single shot, only to then be the lead story on every news outlet worldwide. Boeing is only now starting to use composite construction in the 787. Yeah, they're 40 years late to the parity but last thing they want is the 787 to be the new DC10.

Re:There's nothing to change

[The Grim Reefer]

Those are totally different functions and flown in completely different environments. TFA was about the U2 and that was what I was comparing to. Plenty of F-16s were shot down. Of course they were designed as a jack of all trades type of aircraft. And they were a hell of a plane for being as cheap and versatile as they are/were. The F-35 looked like it was going to be a great replacement on paper, but has turned into a bloated pig in reality. Still, not a single SR-71 was ever shot down, so regardless of the hours flown, that's a perfect record for that statistic. Even with the millions of flight hours F-16s have, a lot more than zero of them have been shot down.

Re:There's nothing to change

[Ol Olsoc]

Materials science is the only place left to go. We saw the future, and it was unaffordable. Flying cars? Jetpacks? Supersonic airliners? All do-able. All prohibitively expensive and inefficient and unsuited for mass productions.

Because many of those things were ideas that in retrospect were not all that smart. Nuclear airplanes and cars are very stupid. Yet they were once proposed and in one case a lot of money was spent on research. Jet packs? They exist already. But hardly practical. The thrust from the ground version is severely limited in energy, and what ar ewe giong to do with the "fly across the English Channel" one?

But that isn't what I'm thinking of. The U2 is a fine example of it's craft, and what could we build that would be all that much better? We could design a new plane that would be incrementally better, and the design process would be incrementally easier.

Bu we are just about at the edges of what we are capable of doing with the current technology.

But before we get the stupid reference to the "Everything has been invented" meme, let me explain.

The next wave of progress will not be anything like what we have now. I don't know whether it will be in something like Zero point energy, or some other far fetched concept, but I do believe there will be something will be coming along that will make almost everything we make these days look almost silly.

Ironic timing. My boss worked on the U-2...

[Anonymous Coward]

... in his first job as an engineer. He retired yesterday.

Cuts

[clarkkent09]

It's a shame cause RQ-4 Global Hawks are sexy. But yeah, the days of spending crazy money on cool toys are over, at least for now. I'm all for strong national defense but I'm sure that our military can do the same job with a lot less money if they really put their mind to it.

Re:Cuts

[Sir_Sri]

It's not like they couldn't get some global hawks (or similar) but maybe... not so many? It's like aircraft carriers. Ok so you have 11 supercarriers, (+ 2 under construction). Would US standing in the world be significantly harmed if you only ran 9 or 10 for a few years? Or just 9 or 10 permanently. Given that the only other big carriers in existence or under construction are french and british, and they'll have a total of 4 between them, it seems unlikely that the US is in a serious risk for say, the next decade.

The U2 is still in business because it's cheap, and gets the job done against enemies who can't or don't care to fight back. So trying to decide on a replacement is a difficult exercise in knowing the future. The chinese and russians can (and have) shot them down, but they're more big scale satellite intelligence operations anyway. Day to day movement of chinese or russian forces is mostly low priority because they aren't about to shoot at you, and if they do, using 10 year old global hawks might not be any better a plan than 50 year old U2's.

Re:Cuts

[Sir_Sri]

And that's different for everyone else how?

That's why the UK and france signed a joint air group operations agreement. By the time the 2 QE class ships are built in the UK The french CDG will be getting old, so between them they will be lucky to have 1 at sea, one ready, one training and one in maintenance. It's relatively rare to have more than 1/3rd of a fleet operational at any given time no matter what.

The US likes to use aircraft carriers because it has them. Not because it needs to use them*. Why is there an aircraft carrier in the perisian/arab gulf when you have land bases in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and Saudi? The only reason to put a carrier there is that you have one, it's tour rotation is up and may as well use it for something and put it somewhere action might happen. You could just as well base aircraft on land, and sure, you have marginally longer flying distances, but you wouldn't need to pay for a carrier.

*I don't mean everywhere. There's a legitimate reason to position them next to say, a Chinese carrier or russian forces and so on. There are still big oceans. But even if the US active selection of ships was reduced from 4 to 3, and then 2 in reserve and 4 in various states of repair and refueling hat would not meaningfully impact the US's strategic operational capability - the navy sure, but not the overall US capability. If you're going to go to war with a country that has more than one carrier, you're going to get more than 2 weeks notice. Even Iraq, the first or second time, you had several months of buildup time (and could have arbitrarily taken longer if you wanted it). If you need 4 aircraft carriers to go after al qaeda in afghanistan they're winning and you're throwing money away like well, drunken sailors.

Technically, they're not U-2s anymore...

[trims]

They were re-classifed as TR-1(x) models in the mid-80s.

The U-2 is not longer a "traditional" spy-plane (i.e. photoreconnaissance of fixed points of interest). It had all the high-res photography equipment replaced with side-band IR and wide-angle low-light cameras. Bascially, they turned it from a "oooh, look at that neat weapons complex" single-frame photographer into a massive photo Hoover (or Vax, for our Brit friends).

Turns out, the U-2 is massively useful here: incredibly high service ceiling, newer semi-stealth improvements in materials, and a batshit crazy loiter time. It outlived the SR-71 because it turns out point-recon is better done by LEO satellites, and the SR-71 can't loiter. Or go slow enough to photograph a wide area well.

I'm kinda surprised that the Global Hawks are more expensive than the TR-1, though, given that the TR-1 now required non-trivial maintenance, and human costs to fly. Then again, this is 1950s technology, and the B-52 shows that if you can figure out where it works, well, high-tech doesn't always mean better mission success.

Now, if only they'd cancel those stupid Littoral Combat Ship programs (yeah, we're building 2 production versions, cause we couldn't decide which sucked less), we could look at some significant savings...

-Erik

Re:Technically, they're not U-2s anymore...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not all were classified as TR-1 in the 80s, just the ones produced in the 80s. In the 90s, they were all reclassified as U-2. It is a great airplane, and extremely useful. I suspect it will be around for a while, since it flies higher, has a greater payload, and more flexible than the Global Hawk (ie. it doesn't need to be reprogrammed to be re-tasked it in flight). FYI, I have over 600 hours at the controls of the U-2, flying over Iraq, Korea, Bosnia, and other well know hot spots. The current U-2Ss are completely different than the U-2Rs that I flew. I personally knew 4 of the folks that the Times article referenced as being killed on an operational U-2 mission. Long live the dragon lady, the pilots that fly here, and the outstanding crews that maintain her!

SR-71

[Bensam123]

It does really make you wonder why the SR-71 is retired and these flying bricks are still flying. The SR-71 can fly higher, faster, longer, stealthier, has better instrumentation, and lets face it, it's just a heck of a lot cooler as it's standard practice to avoid surface to air missile was just fly faster... The SR-71 was and still is a engineering marvel compared to everything around including this hunk of crap.

This could easily be replaced by a UAV or even standard aircraft. I can only imagine the only reason it being around is the airforce is playing favorites with contracts.

Re:SR-71

[toygeek]

Actually, the U2 can't be replaced so easily. Yes, they could *make* one but it took a huge team to make the U2 work, and Kelly Johnson was no dummy with its design. The problem is that you have to justify spending the time and money and materials to make a new one that works so much better that its worth the expenditure.

Oh, and the SR-71 was engineered for somewhere around Mach 5 or 6. Its stated top speed was Mach 3, but lots of planes can do Mach 3, and they don't need all the fancy stuff the '71 did. And, I talked to a retired traffic controller who once saw a '71 light up a civilian transponder so traffic could be vectored around it (it had an emergency apparently), they clocked it around 4000mph. Kelly Johnson wouldn't authorize the throttles to be opened full, he wasn't sure what would happen. Some neat stuff about the blackbird.

with no Soviet Union, there is no point

[decora]

the entire buildup of aerospace in the United States in the 20th century was due to one, and only one, factor. The Cold War. Without the Soviet Union, there would be no Apollo Mission, there would be no Mercury program, there would be no Space Shuttle. The entire thing was a gigantic nuclear brinksmanship contest between two gigantic countries who narrowly missed blowing each other to bits in a holocaust.

And what of the Soviets? If they had no Cold War they wouldn't have been into space either. Korolev would never have gotten funding from the Politburo unless he had claimed (dubiously) that he could stick nukes on top of his space rockets (err.. i mean missiles comrade, of course).

Re:Politics and technology

[DerekLyons]

One thing that stood out to me is that the real reason we're still flying the U-2 is that Dick Chaney killed the SR-71 program, which was kind of an evolution of the U-2 program.

That's what Ben Rich claims. What Ben Rich fails to tell you however is that the special tankers needed to refuel the SR-71 were just about worn out and badly in need of replacement - at a time when the USAF could barely get enough tankers for the rest of the force. (A problem we're still wrestling with.) He also doesn't tell you that many of the SR-71's systems were wearing out and spare parts were getting scarce, requiring cannibalization between airframes to keep them flying. He also doesn't tell you about the extreme expense involved operating the SR-71 even without these mounting costs... Etc.... etc...
 
Overall Ben Rich is not a very reliable source for much of anything outside of his direct experience. (I.E. design, engineering, manufacturing.)

Re:Wait, what?

[Anonymous Coward]

A couple things...

1. The Air Force (and I believe some other services) has been cutting manpower numbers for years and are continuing to do so. They're getting rid of a lot of officers now and talking about a 15 year retirement option.

2. Despicable conditions for U2 pilots? Come on, I wouldn't say any Air Force pilots have to deal with despicable conditions, but especially not U2 pilots. Do you think they fly from forward bases? You think they would risk flying the U2 out of a base in the middle of Afghanistan? I'm pretty sure they take off and land at permanent US bases in friendlier countries.