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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.'"
Now why are buying cheap crap for chain the falls apart real fast in other areas?
So I'm always surprised when Space Nutters think there are magical materials and fantasy technologies out there...
When I first saw the headline, I thought they were referring to the band.
American Third Position
Finally, a real choice!
this doesn't mean they still can't put on a good show. "Aging U-2 Will Fight On Into the Next Decade" is just an inflammatory headline. Bono and The Edge may have a few wrinkles now but they got...
what?
oh, never mind
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
For a minute there I thought the article was referring to that awful group from Ireland.
... in his first job as an engineer. He retired yesterday.
Might just be a ploy to get a discount on the replacement..
Wow, I thought the SR-71 replaced the U-2 decades ago; and the SR-71 has been retired for years. Why can't the government just use Google Earth, Maps, etc? It would be a kudo for the 'do no evil' company. Serge could hire Bono to declare, "U-2 replaced by YouTube."
latency.
-- Terry
I was once taken to a secret testing facility in a place Where the Streets Have No Name, to examine the current state of the U2. I was not impressed with its performance. At first it had a Rattle and Hum, and after extensive testing exploded in an Unforgettable Fire. There'll be Helter Skelter if they don't get this under control.
I asked the official who was giving me the tour what they planned on doing about it. He said "we plan to replace it, but we Still Haven't Found What We're Looking For". However, he continued to show Pride in the current model.
I didn't like doing this on a Sunday, Bloody Sunday, so I told him I was leaving for a Discotheque. With or Without You.
I know the US military is being cut back substantially; but, given that so much military activity this past decade was off-budget (e.g cost of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan), I wonder how much the cutbacks will impact the official US debt, if at all?
I realize debt is debt, whether it's officially acknowledged or not; but since this seems to be primarily sold as budget reduction I'm curious to see how it's being handled.
#DeleteChrome
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
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
I'd say that's because the 117 has been retired for 4 years
If I remember correctly, the U-2 some years ago swapped out the original engines for essentially modified B-2 bomber engines (the F-118), which cut the fuel consumption and allowed for longer flights at altitudes above 70,000 feet. I believe that with the J57 and J75 engines, the U-2 maxed out at around 73,000 feet; the F118 could probably take it to over 76,000 feet.
Expanding skin and dripping fuel? Sounds more like the SR-71...
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
I really enjoyed Ben Rich's book on Skunk Works. 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. Chaney argued that spy satellites replaced the need for airplanes to do surveillance. Turns out the reason he said that was because he was associated with companies that were into spy satellites and he didn't want the SR-71 to compete for that market. Such a shame that politics played such a large role in the neutering of America's capabilities. Most sad of all was that McNamara ordered the destruction of all plans and tooling for the SR-71. Even if the SR-71 was too expensive to fly, that's still a real crime that much of what was learned in that program has been lost.
The U-2 is probably much much cheaper to operate than the SR-71, so it's possible the SR-71 would have died anyway. But certainly politics played a huge role in its demise.
Sadly, in the current political climate it's doubtful Skunk Works would ever produce anything like the U-2, the SR-71, and the stealth fighter. Maybe it's a blessing though. The government seems hell bent on spying on even American citizens. I dunno.
http://www.blackbirds.net/sr71/fallblackbird.html
https://www.google.com/search?q=Skunk+Works%3A+A+Personal+Memoir+of+My+Years+of+Lockheed
Pretty sure that's the SR71 you're thinking of; the U2 is subsonic and probably doesn't have the same expansion issues.
Well, if it's still relevant, why decommission it ?
After all, the Russian Air Force has decided to maintain their own 1950's bombers, Tupolev Tu-95 "Bears", at least till 2040. Because they're fast, cheap to fly, and fuel-efficient.
In a time where oil is scarce and budgets are tight, I'd be happy as a citizen if my own country were to make such a sensible choice. Instead of paying billions for outdated, non-stealthy, gas-guzzling Rafales that no other country wants to buy...
In Soviet Russia, our new overlords are belong to all your base.
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.
Most of the advanced military technology in use today is first generation which usually means more expensive. If a particular technology proves useful and reliable the manufacturing process can be made more efficient to lower the cost. A great deal of the expense when creating new technology is building the tools necessary to actually move the technology from the drafting table and computer modeling to the real world. Once those tools and plants are in place it can also lower the costs. PCs were relatively expensive when they first hit the market but the introduction of commodity hardware and better manufacturing processes played a factor in bringing the costs down. Just building the chip manufacturing plants was expensive and while they are constantly being updated they are not building from scratch every time a new chip design comes out. Cell phones used to be $1000+ when they first hit the market but now we have cheap throw away phones and even the newest cell phones are either free or very cheap depending on your service plan. Most of the defense budget cuts are in the operational areas such as reducing the number of troops. Leaving Iraq and hopefully Afghanistan will save a lot of money. I doubt there will ever come a time when the government won't fund a promising new military technology because of the budget. It is private companies that develop new technologies and pitch their ideas to the military. If the technology is worthwhile and the US refuses to fund the development there are other countries in the world who might. Projects such as the rail gun (EM based weaponry), EMP generators to take out electronic infrastructure without doing any physical damage, integrated drone networks (Constellation program), and the X-37B program used for providing orbital capabilities are just a few examples of ongoing technology development that won't suffer from budget cuts. And don't forget about those programs under development that are not in the public domain. Even the military can keep a secret occasionally. Funding new military technology development can also lead to releasing the technology for non-military uses and a lot of the defense contractors count on this to generate future revenue.
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.
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
I just spent 90 minutes reading about aircraft on wikipedia!
Aging U-2 Will Fight On Into the Next Decade
... in mysterious ways.
Every end has half a stick.
It's time to give it up (Score:3, Insightful)?
Funny maybe, but insightful? Seriously...
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
Gary Powers survived his U-2 being shot down. He died in the crash of a helicopter he was piloting in 1977. However Major Rudolph Anderson died when his U-2 was shot down over Cuba in October of 1962. How many U-2's could you build for the cost of one SR-71? Lockheed's contract for the first 20 U-2's was $22 million dollars.
I actually wanted to read what you wrote there, but it really needs some line breaks.
Either put in <br> or post as Plain Old Text (in the Options button below the text-entry box) and you'll make it a lot easier for people to read.
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
...and it still hasn't found what it's looking for.
The Department of Defense is making cutbacks? I can't believe what I'm hearing!
Well, "cutback" in a certain, culturally specific sense. What we're talking about is a DoD "cutback". A DoD cutback involves keeping one program on indefinite life support while the scope and costs of its replacement swell to grotesque, unrecognizable proportions. A DoD cutback is roughly like changing horses in midstream, only we're expecting the horse we ride in on to give birth to the horse we intend to ride out on while we're in the drink.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
One of the coolest things I saw when I was living in RAF Akrotiri, Cyprus, in the early 80's was a U-2 being chased down the runway. i guess they have another pilot on the ground talking the plane down.
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).
"DoD cutbacks" also do not involve spending less money at the present or at any time in the future, and virtually always involve spending even more. The word "cutback" merely implies that the estimate of how much more money will be spent *might* be less than a previous estimate. It is also of note that all estimates are lower than what is actually spent, sometimes by a mere 5%-10%, often by an order of magnitude or more.
When the military talks of cutbacks, it is akin to a 4-pack a day smoker promising that they will only smoke 4.5 packs per day next year rather than their originally intended 5, and that if they do smoke 5 packs a day they'll look into light or ultra-light variants, and that if they actually smoke 6 packs a day they will seriously consider smoking a cheaper or generic brand at least 5% of the time.
Or, to use a car metaphor, military cutbacks are the equivalent of taking a job that is 1 mile closer to home to save on gas, then buying a Hummer and moving 10 miles farther away. The savings from the commute to the new job compared to the new job are, technically, an improvement over the situation you would have had otherwise, but the net effect is still that you spend a lot more money on your commute.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
NASA and NOAA fly the U2 under the name of ER-2 out of Dryden and the Mojave. Oddly enough they are doing the real research that was the originally disclosed cover mission of the U2. Life imitates propaganda. More info: http://www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/news/FactSheets/FS-046-DFRC.html
Accident? Not at all. It was designed for a very specific niche, and it's only countries with enormous spending habits that will design for such specific niches. So, perhaps it is a very American design.
It's hard to say about the design itself, but the niche is certainly not unique - A-10 is basically the modern equivalent of Soviet Il-2 back in WW2.
That's 10 minutes I'll never get back, you bastards!
Have gnu, will travel.
Planes are about and require pilots; drones are about technology. The military likes nothing better than pilots in airplanes. Pilots make for good publicity, training for leadership, and provide manpower statistics which look good in force deployment reports.
Keeping U2 pilots, which are saving us from terrorism, under the despicable conditions of low pay and consequential low morale is an easier way to lobby for increases in military spending. Drones don't have wives who can complain to a camera.
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
They have to call out the exact altitude and information about drift to the pilot because of the unique circumstances of landing a U-2. The U-2's wings must be fully stalled to land due to the strong ground effect generated by its wings. This, coupled with the bicycle landing gear and strong sensitivity to wind make it among the most difficult planes in the world to land. The chase car provides extra guidance without which a safe landing can have very long odds.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
The maintenance on carriers can take significantly longer than one would expect, meaning that of the 11 supercarriers, only four (Washington, Stennis, Vinson, and Lincoln) were in a deployment state. Two others (Enterprise and Eisenhower) were listed at the end of 2011 as surge-ready (could be deployed with about two weeks of prep, though Enterprise is scheduled for retirement later this year), and one (Bush) was in dock at the end of a deployment. Nimitz seems to have just finished a year-long incremental improvement, Truman has been undergoing repairs since last spring and isn't due to return to the fleet until summer, Reagan just started a year-long incremental improvement, and Roosevelt is refueling, a job that won't be done until 2013. Ford won't be joining the fleet until at least 2015.
So this means that of the 11 in the fleet, only four are deployed, two are deployable, and five are not yet in a usable state. Though the numbers vary by maintenance, repair, and refueling needs, at any given time you can figure that only half of the carriers are available. This may change as more Ford-class vessels come online, but that will take decades to complete.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_XB-70_Valkyrie
Quote: "Designed by North American Aviation in the late 1950s, the Valkyrie was a large six-engined aircraft able to fly Mach 3+ at an altitude of 70,000 feet"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-25
Quote: "The MiG-25 was theoretically capable of a maximum speed of Mach 3+ and a ceiling of 90,000 ft (27,000 m). Its high speed was problematic: although sufficient thrust was available to reach Mach 3.2, a limit of Mach 2.8 had to be imposed as the turbines tended to overspeed and overheat at higher speeds, possibly damaging them beyond repair"
Mig 25's couldn't handle doing Mach 3 for very long because their engines were made for unmanned drones, not because the airframe couldn't handle it.
What you quote from wikipedia about the SR-71 is what we are TOLD about it. The reality is that the friction heating at Mach 3+ is not a huge hurdle. The XB-70 had no extensive provisions for it. If you read more about the '71 you'll find out about the great lengths that the engineers went to to keep the skin of the aircraft and its internal systems cool- none of those are needed at Mach 3 or even 3.2, as shown by the MiG-25 being capable of 3.2 without anything unusual.
The cones on the SR-71 were there to take the '71 past what a turbojet engine can do. Read what you just posted. It bypassed the engine and went straight to the afterburners. Engineers solved the ramjet problem in the 50's man, they just stuck a jet engine in the middle of it. The maximum speed wasn't limited by the compression as quoted, it was INCREASED by it. Do you really think that the official documentation is going to say "Oh yeah we designed the engine to surpass mach 3 by a long shot"? No, because the official top speed is classified.
Now, you said name 3, and I'm going to name a plane that the SR-71 has more technology in common with than anything I've mentioned:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_X-15
As an experimental plane it used heat treating with a nickel alloy to handle the speeds. How fast you say? Mach 6.72. This is the only plane I've mentioned that had to had heat treating for the fuselage like the '71 did, and it went Mach 6+
So, before you call my theory about the top speed of the '71 /nonsense/ do your homework instead of just quoting from wikipedia and going "see! it says so!"
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
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.
As someone who flies, which usually implies taking off and landing as well, large span (>=80ft) sailplanes quite often I wouldn't want to comment on flying a U-2 in detail, but can comment a little on the long-wing-center-wheel-only aspects of the trade.
In fact, the longer the span of the wings gets, the more inertia you have around the roll axis. As a result you are much more likely to drop a wing on takeoff (which is 'run' by someone holding a wingtip for the first few seconds of the takeoff roll) when the span is rather short. The same goes for the wing dropping to the ground at the end of the landing roll.I reckon it'd be rather hard to run the U-2's wing by hand until the ailerons have some effect so they use those wheels that fall off after takeoff.
For landing sailplanes usually have quite effective airbrakes for glide path control (and somewhat counter the ground effect) that the U-2 lacks AFAIK. Given the length of typical military runways I honestly doubt that you couldn't get the thing down by simply letting the kinetic energy dissipate while flying in ground effect with the engine idle. It's rather difficult to float a certain time along the ground (no airbrakes) in gusty winds without ever accidently bumping into it so it's probably much better to stall the thing onto the ground in a controlled way and then use the wheel brake. Since in sailplanes one can do crosswind landings with up to 20 knots crosswind without too much hassle the U-2 jockeys probably could do the same and more *if* they had the same visibility through the canopy as we do. The trick is to fly with the planes nose into the wind along the runway's centerline and then 'decrab' the plane using a hearty whack on the rudder just before touchdown so that the wheel will roll along the runway instead of skidding... Probably not an easy thing to do with limited visibility and the intertia the U-2 certainly has.
Yeah, yer right, the world has gotten so much safer in the years since WWII. Why in a few more years, we'll be singing kumbaya world-wide. Chinese territorial claims will go away when they realize the insanity of them. Islam will solve its civil war started in the 600s, and it will decide to let the rest of the infidels live in peace. India and Pakistan will snuggle bunnies and agree to divide Kashmir. Iran will stop trying to nuclearize the middle east and the the Muslim countries will welcome Israeli investment. Decreasing oil supplies will make everyone decide to work together. Water, sheesh, our world is made of water, once every country realizes this, their water claims will be abandoned.
The future's so bright, we'll all be wearing shades.
Are they still using Chevy El Caminos for chase cars?
That's what they used when my father was in the Air Force (up to 1976).
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
The wars have also changed, we won't be going up against Russia anytime soon. Further China is more of an economic threat than a military threat. Their military expanse is more a response to worldwide US presence, they are not as quick as US to invade a country.
So U-2 would do just fine against Taliban and even Iran. Why spend more money when the needs have changed, hell a bi-plane from WWI will do just fine against Taliban.
They use Mustangs, Camaros, and GTOs, as far as I've heard.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
I hadn't thought of it that way, but it makes sense now that I think about it. I've never flown anything bigger than a 182, so I don't have the intimate knowledge of large wingspan aircraft. I've seen some videos of landings gone bad in U-2s where they tip a bit until the wings are digging into the soil, at which point they usually yaw sharply (and the chase car comes to a rapid stop). That's not a plane I'd want to try landing without a few thousand more hours in my log book--a significant amount of which would be in craft such as the sailplanes you mention.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
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.