U-2: All About America's Secret Spy Plane • FULL DOCUMENTARY | Forces TV

[Music] we're in a zone that humans don't survive it it is an elite program we don't just take sprouts for reason because it's dangerous you really feel a part of this airplane it's an iconic aircraft flown by a select few a jet has played a pivotal role in post-war history I'm heading to Beale Air Force Base in Northern California home since 1976 to America's spy plane program and its longest serving aircraft the YouTube less than 1,100 men and women have flown solo in the dragon lady it's an exclusive club only open to experienced pilots and for the ones that make it this is the ultimate flying job [Music] [Applause] there's always been a fascination of mine you know but getting into the program is a bit tricky so I started off flying a much different other airplanes and once you get enough experience become an instructor in another airplane then you apply to the YouTube program we call it the Brotherhood you know but it's definitely this this tight-knit group of people with a common focus and that that's probably the reason that people stay in this program more than any other is the people every single pilot since the very first guy that took off we know their names we know kind of that history that lineage it is a very small group of people it's really really cool to be a part of and what an honor to be a part of something like that the idea for the angel itself was born when Lockheed started a design study on the maximum altitude possible from a jet airframe for reconnaissance purposes the u2 story began more than 60 years ago at the height of the Cold War this unique aircraft was originally built for the CIA back in the mid-1950s by a team of visionary engineers here in California it was designed to do one thing to fly extremely high and undetected behind the Iron Curtain to monitor the Soviet military threat it was built in secret and it was simply referred to as the article the new spy plane was the brainchild of Lockheed chief engineer Kelly Johnson his team worked at night covertly assembling what they pretended was a new weather reconnaissance plane to minimize weight the plane was fitted with just two wheels the engine modified to work in the thin air of high altitude and onboard a revolutionary camera that could capture images of Soviet missile batteries from the edge of space as well as the CIA the US Air Force also took delivery of this new jet renaming it utility aircraft number two soon to become simply the u2 at 31 meters the u2's wingspan is just short of a Boeing 737 and provides the huge lift the plane needs to climb above 70,000 feet power comes from the same general electric engine as the one fitted to America's to stealth-bomber while dotted around the plane and dozens of electronic sensors able to soak up vast amounts of signals and imagery which can then be beamed back in near-real-time to a network of ground stations around the world u2 pilots are actually known as drivers they start by qualifying on the t-38 companion trainer before they progress to a dual cockpit spy plane so really it's that viewing that pilots aircraft you're in control hooked up to the cables that are directly hooked up to flight controls you can feel it it talks to you it's a challenge no matter how many hours you have in this airplane it still finds a way to challenge you everyday and that's what keeps you coming back and keeps going man I can do better you really feel a part of this airplane Lieutenant Colonel Neil Hinson goes by the call-sign ping and he's the chief test pilot at Beale well a lot of the earlier guys described it as like wrestling the dragon and so what I describe it is it's like trying to fly a dump truck with with wings right you're carrying a load of whatever and the airplane is just completely non-compliant a lot of the times especially low altitude that's a fallacy at high altitude that it doesn't fly well it actually flies incredibly well at high altitude because that's where it's designed to fly initially we want to make sure that the young students can learn to land the airplane and as soon as they're good at landing the airplane we take them straight to the max altitude just so they can you know familiarize themselves with the spacesuit its function and how the airplane behaves up at altitude and most of the time there's two things that everybody says number one the airplane flies great at altitude it's amazing it behaves itself really well and the other thing is the space suits a little uncomfortable at first Bobby Brown is a newly qualified u2 pilot and today he's preparing to set off for some low-level circuits on every YouTube sortie a second backup pilot is on hand in case the first falls ill or has a problem they also perform another very important task driving the chase car that helps the you to land safely salute him and then we'll chase it Emily it makes it feel like youth as the aircraft takes off Pogo wheels that support its massive wings fall away and within seconds the dragon lady is airborne 20 minutes later the u2 reappears on approach for its first landing in the chase car the mobile officer sets off in pursuit what any u2 flight this is the most difficult moment getting this huge jet-powered glider to come back down to earth so the pilot effectively has to stall the aircraft completed [Music] right rudder in this aircraft the wheels behind you you have limited visibility anyways you put on a full pressure suit helmet and that further restricts your vision you have to get it right down just a couple inches above the ground and hold it right there and as you're holding it the airplane is changing air speeds which means this pitching and it's moving and there's all this stuff that's moving but the whole time you have to hold that tire just a couple inches off the ground and it's another thing that mobile officer is helping me off with he's watching that and making sure that that that critical landing of letting it stall from a few inches above the ground with that tail wheel tailwheel perfectly in line he's back there kind of coaching and guiding on that and at the end of a long story that's you know it's critical to have it back there so it's kind of this like all right it's it's game time you know let's go it's it's a pretty exhilarating feeling if you ever see cockpit footage it is I mean you just hole you know it's just moving working so it's kind of you know almost a gym workout every time you come back [Music] not only are you fighting the plan on the way down once he lands there's kind of a few things to do so you're trying to keep the plan straight and level because obviously no balancing wheels and so he's gonna bring the flaps up the speed brakes in he's reached the plane once he does all that then he throws the power in and that's what you heard and felt after an hour of touch and goes the sorties over that is good break tower article in mobile or after Delta the u2 is actually designed to tip over titanium skids protect the wings from damage the aircraft comes to a stop ground crew quickly refit the Pogo wheels allowing the jet to taxi home [Music] you were fine and then I thought you're gonna correct that but you kind of kept going to trade well yeah it wasn't the initial turn it was it was two things yeah whatever reason I felt compelled to try and follow the yellow line yeah athletics is tricky it's just tricky if it's windy so today it wasn't fun particularly it can be some days because the wind was pretty much constant so so long as you know how to account for the fact that you've got a constant crosswind that's gonna make it parotid that you put in the Crossman control so that you're not like drifting one side or the other the program has not been without other casualties one angel crashed at Watertown development of the u2 came at a high cost more than a dozen pilots were killed in accidents missions over the Soviet Union were long and dangerous and one little known fact is that among the men flying them were a small band of RAF pilots based in Turkey British pilots like the American pilots they feel a lot of flights from Turkey over the Middle East the last five Soviet overflights from July 59 two of them were flown by British pilots and the RAF remained in the u-tube program until the CIA stopped flying it in 1974 the first u two pilots were true pioneers the astronauts of their day no one had ever flown this high and the survival clothing they wore was basic things have come a long way modern u2 flight suits are made by the same company that supplies NASA the pilots looked after by a large physiological support team the suit by itself is roughly about $125,000 altogether a fully dressed pilots about a quarter of a million dollars the suit has 12 standard sizes and then it also comes in a thirteenth sides which is like the custom so if a pilot can't fit one of our standard sizes that we do custom fit the suit to the pilot and he does have a pressurized cabin but if that pressurization system were to fail this is the only thing that's going to keep that pilot alive if he's at those higher altitudes in the event the pilot were to lose pressurization within the aircraft this is how firm the suit will get and like I said with that webbing material kind of keeps the pilots arm bent if he were to bend his arm and then if you were to flex the arm it keeps it in that flex position another life-saving item is the pilots helmet because aren't you two pilots fly high sorties and then fly for long periods of time we got to keep them hydrated we got to keep them fed so once the full pressure suit is locked down they cannot open it again until they recover from their sortie if by instance they were flying at the altitudes that they fly at and they would open their helmet up to like scratch their nose if at that instant they were to lose cabin pressure the blood in their body would instantaneously boil and the instantaneous death so we have other pilots we tell them once they close down do not open until they land a helmets range is about $60,000 on its own it's very expensive because it's their last line of defense flying in a YouTube modified water bottles gravity-fed and it goes through food there so they can drink I also make you like to think they can scratch their nose if need be I know if I was closed down and be it'd be very very tough not to scratch my nose it's exactly what it is gravity fed a hamster bottle with you two missions sometimes lasting more than nine hours the pilots need to eat these fridges have stopped with what they call tube food everything from beef stroganoff to chocolate pudding there some metal tubes this was caffeinated and in that other different flavors too hot and cold options there's actually a heater inside the aircraft that can actually heat up their beef stew or beef stroganoff or truffle mac and cheese and even so it's the same people that make the MREs or to food us up and then they're put in these tubes and they'll take anywhere from one to six of them at a time up to depending on how long their flight is now square everything let's go the pastry mm-hmm let's go apple cinnamon nutmeg yeah yeah yeah we caffeine do this keep some awake yeah those are they strategically use caffeine where it's like right before or like a landing yeah Scott for the end of the flight yeah I guess or whatever they need is a little pep in the middle of one to two hours before any high flight they pressure test everything one more time before the pilot begins the long process of suiting up we're in a zone that humans don't survive it we get up there we get above Armstrong sign above Armstrong's line is where the fluids in your body left you start to boil off and that's not ideal so we have a lot of precautions that we take against that so that's why we're wearing a full pressure suit and that's to keep keep that from happening so if the cockpit does depressurize then we keep our body below Armstrong sign and keep us safe we're getting pumped 100% oxygen into the helmet so we can breathe but even then you still have the physiological factors of sitting in a seat for that amount of time your body's so exposed to a high off you know a pretty high altitude all day long as well so it's always kind of good to have the day off after to sort of recover flying at such high altitude is so physiologically demanding the YouTube pilots will usually only do it once every four days they're also supposed to rest for at least 48 hours after they return just like astronauts their shuttle to their waiting jet in a vehicle nicknamed the bread van for each of them this is why they joined the program it's a lot of fun and the reason is is because nobody's perfect and I talked to golfers I'm not a golfer but I talked to golfers and the reason they like to go back and play golf is because it's so difficult to do it right and we have the same relationship with this airplane there are some days when I hate it I mean it just absolutely hate it but then there are other days when you go out it's a gorgeous day like today you go fly it and you just feel like you know you're the best pilot in the world because you flew the most difficult airplane it did what it said you know it did what you wanted it to do and it makes you feel good and accomplished because you know how difficult it can be to fly on those days that aren't so nice it is a very small group of guys we like to brag that there's there's more guys wearing Superbowl rings than there are wearing you to solo patches so that's something that we're pretty pretty proud of exactly how high the u2 flies is top secret all the US Air Force will say is that it's above seventy thousand feet but the modern u2 jet can cover 7,000 miles without refueling thrust is massive down low because you're taking in all that air and once you get above about 50 or above 60 all of a sudden they just gets quiet and it just it just kind of dances up there that experience never gets old there's never been a time that I've been up in the u2 and not just gone wow you know just oh my gosh I can't believe that I get to do this it's never lost it's not something that loses its shine over time you see the world in such a different way you see it from such a different perspective and you've ever seen it before and that will never get old secret reconnaissance of Russia by high-flying American Newton jets ended when one was down deep in Soviet territory the most famous episode in u2 history happened in 1960 when Francis Gary Powers was shot down on a mission behind the Iron Curtain as Russia began massive exploitation of this propaganda win immediately we saw the flash behind him he was very lucky the plane he began to descend it was out of control but he managed to get out there was a show trial and he was sentenced to a long prison term he wasn't tortured he was treated relatively well and in 1962 he was exchanged in a spy swap for a Soviet spy who had been detected and arrested in the u.s. two years later in 1962 came another defining moment of the Cold War two Cuban Missile Crisis this government as promised has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet military buildup on the island of Cuba within the past week unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned Island much of the evidence President Kennedy presented to the nation was captured by u2's and the 13 day crisis they sparked brought the US and Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war it also cost the life of a YouTube pilot major Rudolf Anderson shot down and killed by a Soviet missile on a mission over Cuba those famous photos were captured on the u2's high-resolution camera using film specially developed by Kodak and an updated version of that wet film camera is still in use today on the u2 so these are the we call the first met these are what actually process the film that we work with all of the film we get from the u2's has to pass through one of these machines and these are the same machines that we've been working with since about the 1950s so there's a very strong potential that the film from the Cuban Missile Crisis could have gone through one of the ones in this van roughly two miles of film is run continuously through the machine takes roughly nine hours and it cannot be stopped at any time so once we start we have to run for nine hours and this is all done in the dark the reason why we're still using it is because the resolution is so good it's much better than digital imagery you could continue to zoom in for as long as you want and you would have maintained that quality much longer than you would with pixelated imagery on digital cameras and your young generation on your phones to be working with old film and how to do this it took me about I'm gonna say three or four months it's all on-the-job training so you learn as you go the US Air Force operates around 30 u2's as well as Beale summer station in South Korea others in places they don't really talk about the Jets they're flying now were built in the 1980s but still retained the original aeroplanes straightforward design its push pull the cable driven everything high percent mechanical right so if you compare this to an f-35 a modern aircraft only comparison that there would be was it's got wings and applies and hello that there's not really much comparison so what's the future for the dragon lady in 2005 the u2 program was cancelled UAVs or drones seemed to be the future and in 2014 that was reversed and 65 years after this aircraft first flew it's still in operations around the world on the tarmac at Beale are the UAVs or drones many saw as the natural successor to the u2 the Global Hawk each one costs two hundred and twenty million dollars they carry similar sensors and have a longer range but in other areas the u2 still has the technological edge so commanders have decided that for now they'll operate them both a lot of people ask why aren't satellites are drones or anybody else doing this job and there's a really big reason the first is this airplane when you compare it to a satellite obviously we don't have to obey orbital mechanics right I can I can stand up over a location and I can be that unblinking eye for hours on end a satellite obviously has to obey you know the laws of orbit right and if it's a low Earth orbit you might get a stare at a certain location for 15 to 20 seconds and that's it whereas compare that to my 10 plus hours being on station the other thing is is I can incorporate all different kinds of things into my payload really quickly for a low cost a satellite just to get it into orbit you know it's incredibly expensive there are other capabilities out there that are maybe 80% there but what the combatant commanders have repeatedly said is 80% of the u2 is still not a replacement for the youtube the u2 flew extensively over Afghanistan and over Iraq during both the Gulf Wars and just flew more recently over Syria it's getting a picture that sensors on aircraft at a lower level cannot achieve they are moving very fast if they're a fighter or very close to the ground if there are an attack helicopter and they are equipped with very good sensors but they can't dwell in the way that a u2 can a typical u2 mission might involve a racetrack pattern offshore from a country so that they can remain in an area of interest and they might have to wait for for instance a missile site to start emitting it's that kind of capability that the u2 uniquely offers but with that capability comes danger since the 1990s six you two pilots have been killed most recently Lieutenant Colonel Steve edy a father of six with 20 years experience shooter as he was known died in a training accident near Beale in 2016 we always wear mementos and remember those that came before us and a lot of times the lessons that they learned we just didn't know we pay close attention to the rules especially the rules that are written in blood that our comrades learned unfortunately the hard way and that's the way our flight manuals written and a lot of us that have been in the program for a long time we know the verbage that that's been put into our flight manual because of the accidents that have had been in the past inside Beal an original u2 stands as a reminder of just how long this famous spy plane has been around for now it seems she'll be flying well into the next decade and despite the dangers these pilots will tell you this remains the greatest job in the world the chance to live out the u2 motto soaring to the edge of space alone unarmed and unafraid [Music] if you enjoyed this video don't forget to Like and subscribe to our Channel

Channel: Forces News

Views: 2,439,444

Keywords: Forces News, Forces TV, British Armed Forces, British, Forces, military, serving, military personnel, Ministry of Defence, British defence, British military, U-2, Simon Newton, aircraft, history, defence, plane, airplane, United States, US, USA, America, documentary

Id: Q4ctWtvb7aA

Length: 23min 24sec (1404 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 19 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/neoengel]

Popping in with a related video, in two parts. Joan Lunden and Behind Closed Doors did an episode where she flew along in a U2... where they lost electrical and had problems with the landing gear while she was on board. Interesting to watch how all the emergency services went into action.

Part 1

Part 2