hello everybody welcome back to mega-projects i and your host simon whistler as always and this one well you know i look at what does well in the past hello they are you guys like military planes huh well how about this one the lockheed u-2 it's another one of these that kind of blows my mind when you consider like we're talking about something that was made in the past but is still in service today even with satellites and all of that stuff you will soon see why because well we cover it all in this video and let's jump in [Music] since the Wright brothers conducted their first flight in 1903 humans have held a fascination with aviation we marvel a Concorde speed and design we stare in awe as an Airbus a380 the largest passenger airliner in the world heaves its massive bulk into the sky by the way rgeous notre we have covered concorde on this channel as well as the soviet version the concorde ski although they calls it something else and if you'd like us to cover the a380 can also do that certainly a mega-projects not sure if it's got enough appeal but you know what to do use the comments back to it most aircraft are made to be seen but some are not the skies above the Soviet Union during the 1950s and 1960s were a pretty dangerous place to be but a groundbreaking little plane and it's equally audacious pilots dared to venture where many thought impossible the u2 is a name you may have heard many times yes as a band but the chances are that you may never have seen one in real life the very nature of the aircraft means they're often simply undetectable phantoms of the skies this is a spy plane which fundamentally changed how surveillance was done in the post-world War 2 era operating at altitudes that other aircraft couldn't hope to match it was able to penetrate deep into the heart of enemy territory but like much that arrived during the Cold War this is a story about ingenuity political intrigue and adventure that borders on the utterly reckless this was a real cloak-and-dagger tale and or began back in 1945 so that's where we start the relief that the United States felt at the end of World War two was soon replaced by two things firstly a determination to never be caught out like there were at Pearl Harbor and secondly the belief that the Soviet Union now posed a threat that needed to be addressed seriously and quickly the Soviet Union remained somewhat of an enigma after the largest conflict the world had ever known the air of cooperation and friendship quickly evaporated between the Soviets and the Americans and was soon replaced by distrust and suspicion military troops realized that the best information they had on the Soviet interior was from German photographs taken by the Luftwaffe during the war and it was recommended that similar flights take place to gauge so via capabilities and perhaps even intentions yeah that information was pretty out of dates that looking at old Google Maps it's like why is there a roundabout here helped by altitude flying was needed because from the 1950s the Soviet Union began vigorously protecting its borders from foreign aircraft it was believed that an altitude of over 60,000 feet would be enough to stay out of range of the mig-17 which was the Soviets best interceptor aircraft but could barely reach 45,000 feet just to be sure a target of 70,000 feet was set for any potential surveillance flights which is twice as high as the typical cruising altitude of a modern-day passenger liner the only problem was no aircrafts at that time could fly that high using the codename bald eagle the US Air Force give contracts to Bell Aircraft Martin Aircraft and Fairchild engine and airplane to develop proposals for a new type of reconnaissance aircraft however officials at Lockheed corporation got wind of the project and decided to submit their own unsolicited proposal a design known as the CL 280 was Lockheed feeling a bit left out this proposal was rejected by the Air Force in favor of the Bell 16 designs submitted by Bell Aircraft because of doubts about the CL 2 8 news engine and landing gear however it was not just the US Air Force that was mulling over high altitude flights at that time the CIA depended on the military for its reconnaissance flights but was eager to carry out its own missions doubts about the Bell 16,000 meant that the CIA stepped up their interest in the CL 218 and were eventually joined by the Air Force's well with a joint project between the military and intelligence agency emerging that contracts that Lockheed received in March 1955 for the first 20 aircraft was for twenty two point five million dollars around 215 million dollars today so as kind of Wirth Lockheed taken out parts the first one point two six million dollars about 12.5 today was apparently mailed to the house of lead engineer Clarence Johnson in February of 1955 to ensure that work continued throughout the negotiation phase Lockheed agreed to deliver the first group of aircrafts by 1955 with a final coming in November 1956 this is a schedule of the company not only managed to keep they actually beat it and they also brought the whole project in about 3.5 million dollars under budget which is 33 million dollars under budget today and they were not being sarcastic the military process was kept as secretive as possible with the CIA he could keep the new plane and their involvement with it well under wraps the usual purchasing of materials and instruments took on a much more covert aspect when Johnson needed to place an order for ultimate is calibrated to twenty four thousand four hundred meters that's 80 thousand feet from a company's instruments maxed out at 45,000 feet the CIA obliged by setting up an entire cover story about annex Barrowman to rocket aircraft the manufacturing of the u2 was done Lockheed skunkworks factory in Burbank California by the way the skunk works is a whole super interesting it's not really a mega project but I could definitely cover on one of my other channels but skunk works super interesting anyway the testing of the plane was a bit more complicated because they couldn't do it in such a residential area instead the prototypes were all dismantled and flown to a new recently acquired facility in the Nevada desert a facility that would soon become known as air probably guessed area 51 it was at this point that the name was changed to you to the you stood for the rather ambiguous utility rather than reconnaissance and the - well there was already a u1 and u3 so I guess it kind of made sense by the way the u1 is this tiny sea plane the u3 it's just tiny monoplane so it's kind of weird that they just slotted it in between those two although I guess the Soviets would have never guessed what it was like yeah two tiny planes and a super-secret warplane the u2 is an extraordinary aircraft but when it first appeared most agreed it was kind of a pain in the ass to fly this was mainly down to its design and of course it was all made even more tricky or when you're flying over enemy territory the u2 was built to minimum weight requirements which meant very little margin for error while flying so every plane in operation has a never exceed speed and a stall speed both of which calculated by aircraft designers and manufacturers essentially flying above the never exceed speed can bleed to fatal structural problems while flying below the stall speed will stall the plane and just leave it plummeting towards the earth the life of the pilot is made considerably easier the wider these two numbers are apart modern 747 for example will typically not go below 125 to 165 miles per hour in flight and won't exceed 570 to 600 miles per hour which leaves plenty of room to operate however flying at high altitude doesn't give you much of a gap in a u-tube with 21,000 300 meters 70,000 feet the margin between the two speeds is just 12 miles per hour 19 kilometers an hour which is an unbelievably fine line to remain within in fact on most missions a pilot would fly the u2 at just 6 miles per hour above its stall speed of 75 miles per hour which is really slow for a plane by the way the landing gear was unlike anything seen before instead of using the traditional tricycle landing gear the u2 uses a bicycle format with two wheels at the Front's close together and two at the back also close together then there are zillions called pogos under each wing for stabilization these pogos that only attached when the plane is taking off and they're just left behind on the runway the method of landing was also very different obviously they're super close together the plane is designed to operate well at high altitude but is a monster the closer you get to the ground at lower altitude the higher air density and lack of power assistive control system makes the u2 a bit of a bucking bronco to land apparently as a you tube comes in to land a chase car follows it closely behind driven by a second u2 pilot who communicates the plane's altitude as it nears the earth once it was just 61 centimeters two feet above the runway the pilot initiate to stall and the aircraft falls to the runway a process sometimes known as a controlled crash by the way there is an amazing video of this on YouTube which I probably can't use there because of copyright issues but it's a camera in the chase car so the car pulls up to the runway chases the plane down and you can see everything that's going on it's awesome definitely check it out after this video now you too have landed unassisted when needed but the danger involved with the extended wings and lack of visibility means that a chase car is almost always used even after landing the wide wingspan means still very hard to control when the aircraft comes to a complete stop it will naturally tilt one way or the other and rest on one of its wings only once the burgers are reattached can't the plane taxi off the runway with a wingspan of 31 meters 103 feet it is considerably larger than almost anything with the same sized fuselage the f-14 Tomcat as an example has a wingspan of just 20 meters 65 feet a full 11 meters 36 feet shorter than a YouTube but in terms of length they're almost identical at around 19 meters or 62 feet the u2 is also incredibly light at just seven thousand two hundred fifty seven kilograms at sixteen thousand pounds which is pretty much a third of the weight of the f-14 Tomcat and it's powered by a single General Electric f1 one eight 101 turbofan engine providing it with 17,000 pound feet of thrust the Tomcat has a similar engine and thrust but with two of them it packs considerably more power than the u2 in the early days you two pilots were kitted out with primitive pressurized space suits that designs of which would go on to be used on the early space shuttles this partial pressurization in the cockpit created the effect of being at 8,500 meters that's 28,000 feet on earth which is just 348 meters short of the summit of Mount Everest the suit supplied a steady flow of oxygen throughout the flight but even so there were cases of pilots blacking out and crashing even in modern you to supply that can expect to lose around 5% of their body mass during an eight-hour mission and many continue to report suffering from decompression sickness which is caused when the pressure around you decreases more rapidly than the body can acclimatize to the camera equipments has of course always been vital and though it has changed over the years it might not have changed as much as you think the first duties were equipped with a tribe dragon a camera with three 610 meter 24-inch focal length cameras and a vast 1800 meters 6000 feet worth of film reel now you I think that in today's age it would all be digital now well that's actually not the case u2's continue to use analog equipment as it is still considerably crisper than the alternative digital cameras newer cameras have meant that the coverage a YouTube can photograph in a relatively small amount of time is nothing short of extraordinary at twenty-one thousand three hundred meters that seventy thousand feet a pilot and the cameras onboard can see up to two hundred and fifty miles in all directions meaning it would be possible to photograph the entire state of California in just a few hours [Music] President Eisenhower was adamant that the military would not fly the plane to begin with as it was feared that if the aircraft was downed and military personnel were found on board it could be seen as an act of war there was also a reluctance to use American pilots so that if there was a crash the military could say now deny not Americans were you talking about originally seven Greeks and one pole we used to test the u2 aircraft bus the language barrier as well as unsuitable flying experience meant that this was quickly reversed by 1955 Air Force pilots who wish to participate in the program were required to resign their military commissions before joining the CIA as civilians a process known as sheep dipping the first flight over Soviet airspace took place on the 20th of June 1956 departing from the u.s. airport base at Wiesbaden in Germany and traveling over East Germany and Poland on the 4th and 5th of July u2's flew much deeper photographing the new Soviet submarine as a Leningrad present-day st. Petersburg as well as counting the number of new my assist chef M for bison bombers the second day also saw the one and only time allegedly that a u2 flew above and photographed Moscow though it was not seen as a primary objective however the belief that the u2's would remain undetected proved to be well completely unrealistic how much the Soviets knew is hard to say but YouTube pilots from those early missions have said that multiple MiG's were scrambled below them to try and shoot down the reconnaissance aircraft at this early stage only it's extraordinary altitude saved it the Soviets were furious but at first kept the fact that their airspace had been breached total secret a week later the Soviet Union made a formal complaint with regards to what they considered to be an American high-altitude bomber traveling above the Soviet Union the u.s. took advantage of the u2's unique status to state that no military aircraft had traveled over the Soviet Union which I guess was technically right but also it wasn't right at all having thoroughly annoyed the Soviets the u.s. shifted the use of the u2 at least for a short time to the Middle East through YouTube pictures American intelligence was able to predict the British French and Israeli action during the Suez Crisis three days before it occurred over the next few years many of the u2's operations came in that region with multiple flights over Israel also over Lebanon during the 1958 crisis in the country the resumption of flights over or near the Soviet Union began in 1957 and led to what can only be described as a game of cat and mouse Eisenhower insisted on personally approving any mission above Soviet airspace but with increasing diplomatic pressure coming from further Soviet complaints it was like walking a bit of a tightrope but the president clearly believed that the benefits of such flights were worth the risk over the next few years the US was able to photograph the Baikonur cosmodrome near Tora time in Kazakhstan for the first time the CIA had been completely unaware of the world's first space launch facility before these pictures emerged photographs of the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site and the sargan missile test site both in Kazakhstan were also taken as the US began building up a clearer understanding of what lay inside Soviet borders but just in case you thought it was only the US the Soviets began deploying the Yak 25 also in 1955 this was a reconnaissance aircraft that couldn't match the u2 but so proved to be useful to the USSR for surveillance all around the world [Music] by 1960 the u.s. knew full well that the Soviets had improved their surface-to-air missiles but the flight still continued any guesses about what might happen next well an operation originally scheduled for the end of April and codenamed Grand Slam would prove to be the most infamous flight in the u2's history the flight from Peshawar in Pakistan Bodo in Norway would traverse the USSR for the first time on previous routes that u2's had always entered and exited along the same path operation Grand Slam would allow the u.s. to photograph a whole host of sites including turret am spurred lost Kirov caught last several Vince and mom asked it was an incredibly ambitious nine-hour flight plan and one that was almost doomed from the outset the pilot that day was Francis Gary Powers the most experienced u2 pilot with 27 missions due to delays the flight was pushed back to the 1st of May a decision the US would soon live to regret like many countries may the first was a public holiday in the Soviet Union meaning that there were considerably fewer flights in the air making the u2 easier to track by radar the Soviets began tracking the u2 15 miles outside the border it's not entirely clear how many attempts to shoot a Down were made prior but four and a half hours into the flight and over spurred love skin central Russia an sa-2 missile detonated behind the u2 at 21,000 metres up that seventy thousand five hundred feet the explosion sent the YouTube hurtling downwards had that altitude it was always assumed that the impact would just completely destroy the aircraft but what crashed that day remained surprisingly intact powers survived the crash after bailing out and parachuting to the grounds but he was quickly captured while the Soviet authorities began carefully examining this strange American plane that had dropped out of the sky I guess there exists no it's not a war plane it's not a military plane so that we found this military dude on board who works with the CIA and you know lots of film the Americans had a cover story for such an occasion of course they did and the tell-tale of a NASA research flight having crashed was quickly spun no one believes this at this point the USA was fairly certain the powers hadn't survived and the plane was most likely destroyed while the Soviets held their to see what the US reaction would be on May the 7th Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev announced the world that not only had the u.s. been caught spying red-handed but that the Soviet Union now had the u2 wreckage and the very much alive pilot it was a deeply embarrassing moment for all involved with the u.s. program and Eisenhower eventually admitted that the CIA had been operating spy planes above Soviet territory for several years Frances Powers was eventually sentenced to three years in prison but on the 10th of February 1962 the USSR exchanged ten and American Frederic Pryor a student who had been wrongly arrested for Rudolf Abel Soviet intelligence officer at Clinic Bridge which connected East and West Berlin and if you haven't seen that Tom Hanks movie but I can't remember the name Hoff where they do lots of stuff on that bridge that's worth seeing this wasn't a helpful blush what can I look for the pow'rs incident proved hugely damaging for the US intelligence agency but despite plenty of reorganization and tweaking of protocols normal service resumed over the next couple of years predominantly staying clear of the USSR the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 saw the YouTube used numerous times to photograph the Soviet mrb M missiles in San Cristobal and on the 27th of October one was shot down over Cuba killing its pilot this was an event which proved to be a huge coup for America's enemies u2's were also used frequently during the Vietnam War in which modified versions were launched from aircraft carriers for the first time they were later heavily involved during both Gulf Wars and by early 2010 the 99th expeditionary reconnaissance squadron had flown over 200 missions during Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom u2's would they'd help to enforce the no-fly zone over Libya in 2011 while also providing much-needed imagery of the Japanese nuclear reactor that was damaged by the earthquake and tsunami on the 11th of March 2011 [Music] the current u2's came into service in the 1980s but the first of August 2020 will signify 75 years since this bold little plane first took to the skies in total a hundred and nine u2's were built between 1955 and 1989 this is almost unparalleled longevity especially in the age of satellites and drones but the u2's ability to change surveillance objectives at short notice sets it apart from other surveillance techniques at 75 you'd probably imagine that the u2 is creeping towards retirement age and well maybe it is but also maybe not the date that these great spies of the skies were due to be put out to pasture so to speak has been continuously pushed back again and again first 2012 then 2004 and now it seems they'll be around till at least 2023 although Lockheed asset that the u2 is viable until 2050 there is something truly classic about the u2 story groundbreaking engineering mixed with tales fit for a good old-fashioned Cold War spy novel this plane broke so many barriers both mechanically and geographically but it is a testament to their extraordinary design that they are still operating on the front lines of modern espionage today so guys I really hope you enjoyed this mega projects I did I think these warplanes that serve or might serve for a hundred years are incredible if you've got other ones that you'd like me to cover please do let me know in the comment section below about the ones you like I really do go there to find topic ideas for mega projects so that would be great if you smash that like button if you liked it smash that dislike button if you didn't don't forget to subscribe tell our friends and thank you for watching [Music]
