Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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
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.
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.
Wow, I thought the SR-71 replaced the U-2 decades ago...
SR-71 wasn't really a U-2 replacement, just a different tool in the toolbox, that made it better suited for some tasks (getting someplace quickly and not getting shot down) and not as good at others (staying airborne in an area for a long time watching, operating within a reasonable budget). It's not surprising the U-2 has lasted so long. It was very well designed for what it does from the start, and much like the same-era B-52s we still keep flying, remains pretty damn good at what it needs to do to this day.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Just about everything in that sentence is wrong.
.8 and burned fuel at an average rate of 15 970 kg / hr. The 747-400 which is currently in service has a base range of 6400 NM (and up to 8000 NM for the 747-ER, nearly double!), burns about half as much fuel per hour, and cruises at about mach .85. And the 747-400 was first introduced 30 years ago! I don't have the stats for the newest iteration, the 747-8i, but Boeing claims it will be "be 30% quieter, 16% more fuel-efficient, and have 13% lower seat-mile costs with nearly the same cost per trip" than the 400.
A 747 from 1969 doesn't have the same engines as a modern 747, nor does it take the same time to fly the same distance. A 747-100 had a maximum range of 4500 NM, a top speed of mach
And that's without going into the increases in capacity, passenger comfort, and avionics that have happened in the past 50 years. This is just minor advancements on an old airframe; the biggest applications of advancements in materials science and aircraft design are for clean-sheet designs like the 787 or new military aircraft like drones.
The point of this article, though, is that the military-industrial complex's days of cozy, no-bid contracts and inflated vehicle costs are quickly coming to an end, not that we'll never be able to design better aircraft than Kelly Johnson's team did in the 1950s.
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.
How arrogant are these apes. This one here claims to know so much of their limitations, yet still can't figure out how the basic forces of gravity or electromagnetism work at the subatomic level. No no, It's True; I'm not making this up! You must read this, It's hilarious!
....
It writes of unaffordability and knows nothing of different planetary economic models, even though they've just barely to explore this system. They still have a STOCK MARKET that dictates worth based on feelings instead of instantaneous financial reports! Ha haha!
Their transportation is yet slow and ground based because they are all still trying to drive the machines themselves! This one believes that personal flying systems are unattainable even though one of his kind has build himself one from mass produced model airplane parts! (Ridiculously, it's still controlled via organic pilot.)
They've barely begun to harvest their Sun's power; Can't even leverage their own planet's magnetic field or even LIGHTNING for that matter!
With this sort of thinking they'll never join the races of the stars... Let us leave the primitives be, but first ensure the probe records all instances of their "How it's Made" broadcast for it's the only anthropologically valuable transmission.