James Joyner notes that a U2 Spyplane recently crashed while returning home from a misson over Afghanistan. Do you remember the last time you read such a headline? It was over 40 years ago!
There are several questions at once that attend such an event. One wonders, for example, what the mission was, and why it crashed. As James notes, one also wonders why we’re still using 40+ year-old spyplanes.
I had no idea the U2 was still in our inventory, let alone in service. And no, Bono and crew did not name their band after the plane.
Rick Moran
Both the U-2 and Blackbird had been retired but brought back into service after 9/11.
The nextgen hypersonic space plane (name escapes me) will have stealth capability and be able to travel at speeds exceeding Mach 7. There’s some evidence (Jaynes) that its been spotted flying in formation with Stealth bombers. It’s evidently very weird looking.
Mithrandir
Blackbird, too?!? I thought our current raft of “weather” satellites had better resolution than anything carried by these dinosaurs, and there are enough of them now to make operation of ‘spy planes’ cost IN-effective.
Yup, when I heard it on the radio, I thought it was some kind of “Today in History…” piece! :)
Marcus Wellby
Yeah, this story made me flashback to high school social studies — the ol’ USSR and U2 pilots with suicide devices in pens. I actualy built a model U2 back in the day – think it was an “Airfix”, forgot the other big model maker when i was a kid. There were some great model kits coming out of Japan at the time.
Man, I remember a whole aisle at the toy store being nothing but model kits and the required paints, glues, etc. Pretty sad commentary on the world kids are growing up in — no model kits! I guess too much imagination is required, not as easy to market bullshit to kids who aren’t pasted in front of the TV. Kind of sucks — was a whole right of passage from my youth, one year your a little nerd building model planes, the next year you are discovering the joy that is girls and are blowing up those very same models with assorted fireworks — though in my case, still very much a nerd.
ppgaz
I don’t think we have anything else that can fly the mission profile that the U2 can handle. It has mainly to do with the extremely high altitudes involved in these missions. The U2 is a freakish airplane, as airplanes go, but it is fitted exactly to the mission. I haven’t kept up with the latest military aerospace developments like I once did, but I don’t think we have anything to replace the U2 with. Age of the machines is probably not a huge factor … I’m guessing that takeoff and landing cycles for these birds are relatively few compared to total hours, and it’s the cycles that really put the wear and tear on the airplane, not the hours.
sidereal
Midnight is where the day begins
Midnight is where the day begins
Midnight is where the day begins
Lemon
See through in the sunlight
tom
The U2 is a very sophisticated spy plane. While the plane itself is a very old design all the systems on it are top of the line from spying to defensive systems.
There is not a replacement for the U2. Satellites can’t do the same job as the U2. You can’t move a satellite around space like you can an airplane in the atmosphere.
I think the name one of the posters was looking for is the Aurora… but that’s classified. Supposedly, one crashed and it was easier and quicker to bring the Blackbird out of moth balls than to build another Aurora. It was believed that the Blackbird was fine for Iraq, but we needed something better for the Soviet Union. I think we discovered that the Blackbird is sufficient any where these days and we don’t really need the Aurora as bad as we thought we did.
Gary Farber
“James Joyner notes that a U2 Spyplane recently crashed while returning home from a misson over Afghanistan. Do you remember the last time you read such a headline? It was over 40 years ago!”
Yes, I do! No, it wasn’t! Sheesh! Crashes I particularly recall reading in newspapers include:
jerry
I don’t think there are any blackbirds in the inventory anywhere, even after 9/11. I wish there were and would appreciate a link somewhere saying we are using them.
Bob
I think it was THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH or some other JFK book that went into detail about Lee Harvey Oswald’s defection, Francis Gary Powers’ capture and the possibility of intelligence manipulation, to help develop Oswald’s legend as a Communist traitor. It also was alleged to have been a means of breaking up US-USSR negotiations (Ike & Krushshev) that were about to happen. Since the US had publicly promised to end flights over the Soviet Union, theory has it that Dulles did it to queer the negotiations.
I only mention it here because if the U-2 went down in, say, Iran, it could be used as a reason to create some kind of international incident. Not that the current administration would have any intentions of hostile military adventurism.
Slartibartfast
Nope. Satellites have to look through ALL of the atmosphere, and are a lot further away, and are, as stated upthread, much less responsive to new tasking. With U2 and SR71, you can pick and choose what time of day and angle you photograph from, both of which aren’t feasible with satellites. Time of day selection is important, because atmospheric turbulence affects effective image resolution.
me
the u2 plane was not retired and was not brought back because of 9/11. The U2 plane was being used in South Korea before 9/11. I was stationed there so I should know.
Damion
Yeah, most of the info about the U-2 on here is wrong. I was an avionics tech on the plane for 6 yrs at Beale, just got out in 2007. It has served continuously since it was first introduced in the 50’s. It was NOT brought back for 9/11. Nor was the SR-71 (also stationed at Beale), it has been retired since ’96, due purely to operational cost considerations.
They do crash a lot, but only because we fly the crap out of them. Seriously. The 99th RS has been at a wartime ops tempo since the first gulf war back in ’91. No other military unit in the U.S. can say that. Especially since the -71 went away, no one can do what we do, so we have to do it all. I’m not exagerating when I say that the national security advisor looks at our product every single day.
I left U.A.E. a few weeks before Maj. Dively was killed coming home. That was a bad time for everyone in the program. He was on approach, and his PTO shaft went out, killing everything in the cockpit except radios and some emergency nav instruments. He thought it was a repeat of the 2003 korea crash where an engine bearing siezed so he killed the engine and subsequently crashed. The bitter irony was, the engine was actually fine, he probably coulda made it home. He just didnt have the altitude to work it out.