U-2 Dragonlady info

[Ram]

I'm just happy your memory is still holding up, old timer.

[TreeA10]

How do the airspeeds match up between a U-2 and a T-38, particularly watching that approach?

[HuggyU2]

1 hour ago, TreeA10 said:

How do the airspeeds match up between a U-2 and a T-38, particularly watching that approach?

Not great but the window is adequate  

MOA work was 180-220 KIAS, and I was at 35-60 flaps in the T-38  

I had the U-2 fly 190-200 KIAS on the low approachs with the Gust Up (the flaps are -6 degrees), and I flew with 60 flaps in the T-38. We did it 2 or 3 times, and I had 1500# when we started.  Normally, the U-2 would fly the final turn at 90 KIAS... Slowing to around 75-80 by the time it reaches the threshold. 

I remember getting a good look at the ILS glideslope antenna on each low approach. 

It was filmed over 2 days. All of the T-38 shots and external shots of the U-2 were done on Day 1 with aviation photographer Sagar Pathak in the T-38 with me.  The pilot of the U-2 was Slam.

All shots taken from inside the U-2 were on Day 2, using a two-seat U-2 with Sagar in the backseat.  The magic of video editing allows me to be the pilot of both jets in the video. 

Edited March 26, 2016 by Huggyu2

[Majestik Møøse]

AZ Wildcat: was Huggy's guess of 1800' MSL correct or were you guys lower?

[Spoo]

10 hours ago, Huggyu2 said:

I'll bet my last dollar this is a photo shop. 

Huggy, your ego is writing checks your body can't cash. Photo's legit. 

 

[HuggyU2]

This is one of those time I'm ecstatic that I've been told I'm wrong. Had it been shot with wet film instead of digital, I'd have been more likely to believe it... something any U-2 pilot or Intel officer can appreciate.  

I'll gladly buy drinks to all involved on my next visit to the squadron,...probably this week. I'll drop a bunch of $2 bills in the kitty.  

Kudos to the leadership there for approving it.  Despite the institutional issues in the AF, Beale and the U-2 Program is a great place to be, and a great place to fly. 

Edited March 26, 2016 by Huggyu2

[HuggyU2]

14 hours ago, Huggyu2 said:

Yes... no doubt it's photo shopped.  

I'll bet my last dollar this is a photo shop.  

Just spoke to one of the two pilots that flew the photo op.  Great story... great support by Beale PA (again)... and hopefully they will release some great photos in the near future.  

I'm officially the Doubting Jackass of the Week.  Foot inserted into mouth, and humble pie has been eaten.  

[AZwildcat]

8 hours ago, Majestik Møøse said:

AZ Wildcat: was Huggy's guess of 1800' MSL correct or were you guys lower?

Pretty close :)

4 hours ago, Huggyu2 said:

Just spoke to one of the two pilots that flew the photo op.  Great story... great support by Beale PA (again)... and hopefully they will release some great photos in the near future.  

I'm officially the Doubting Jackass of the Week.  Foot inserted into mouth, and humble pie has been eaten.  

Actually you're partially correct!  The photographer on the beach (just happened to be in the right place/right time) used to work on base and was familiar with the U-2.  When she saw us fly over she had to grab another lens to get the shot and wasn't able to time it perfectly with the jets over the bridge so what you're seeing is a "layered" imaged of two photos that are a few seconds apart.  Still...we had great luck that day. 

Here's some teasers...Once all the official photos come out I'll work on getting the cockpit video edited.  The 2 seater also had a 360 camera in the front seat (where you can watch it on your phone and tilt around to see all angles).

 

 

 

 

 

Edited March 27, 2016 by AZwildcat
Photos

[YoungnDumb]

Awesome photos, can't wait to see the finished products.

I'm a FAIP currently putting in for U-2's and I am finishing gathering all the required materials (currently waiting on WG/CC approval and official photo).  I've been in contact with the recruiters and think I've got everything squared away, but is there any advice anyone wished they had been given when they were applying?  Thanks.

[DEVIL]

16 hours ago, Huggyu2 said:

Just spoke to one of the two pilots that flew the photo op.  Great story... great support by Beale PA (again)... and hopefully they will release some great photos in the near future.  

I'm officially the Doubting Jackass of the Week.  Foot inserted into mouth, and humble pie has been eaten.  

If you look on the facebook that picture came from, the exact same picture without the jets is on there prior...

 

 

[Majestik Møøse]

Devil (and by extension, Huggy) are right.  The picture is a composite of two images she took.  In the photo description she says "I had to run to grab the right lens, so this is a bit of layering."  In other words, the two pictures were taken from almost the same angle with the same lighting, but the U-2s were much farther away (and higher) than they appear.  From the composite they look like they're south of the bridge at about 200' and ready to fly right over the Marina.  Sorry dudes, I wanted to believe.  We'll have to wait for the other pics.

[Spoo]

[YoungnDumb]

In the midst of compiling all the required items for my U-2 application just awaiting Wg/CC letter right now.  Any advice on things to avoid or common mistakes anyone has seen on the application?

[HuggyU2]

2 hours ago, YoungnDumb said:

In the midst of compiling all the required items for my U-2 application just awaiting Wg/CC letter right now.  Any advice on things to avoid or common mistakes anyone has seen on the application?

- Avoid a Wing CC letter that is a regurgitated OPR. The letter needs to have only two sentences. 1, "I fully support Capt Smith's application to the U-2 program".  2. "Capt Smith is available to PCS after 1 December 2017."  Anything else he writes is pretty much ignored. So save everyone the time that will be wasted on crafting a literary masterpiece. 

- Print your OPR's head-to-foot, like the directions say. They are put in a folder by punching holes at the top. To read the back, they are flipped up.  As such, we like to be able to read them that way. 

- Official Photo. Don't know what that is?  Ask around. It is NOT taking a selfie in your flight suit. It is NOT a flight line photo in front of your jet. 

- Why I want to be a U-2 pilot letter. Don't email me or anyone else and ask for advise in writing this. This is YOUR letter.  

- If the directions tell you to redact your SSN from OPR's, do it. 

As with everything, check with Shooter and NoMo for the latest expectations on the application.  DSN 368-4447. 

Edited April 10, 2016 by Huggyu2

[Spoo]

What Huggy won't tell you: NoMo likes an additional UNOFFICIAL photo of the candidate in a speedo as well.

[YoungnDumb]

Huggy, thanks for the advice.  Spoo, will a Borat style speedo work?

[HossHarris]

The technical term is a mankini. And you can't beat them for freedom of movement and tanning!

[HuggyU2]

1 hour ago, HossHarris said:

...you can't beat them for freedom of movement and tanning!

News you can use. 

[AZwildcat]

On 4/10/2016 at 3:49 PM, YoungnDumb said:

Huggy, thanks for the advice.  Spoo, will a Borat style speedo work?

Extra points if there is a Global Hawk on the crotchal region

[Kuma]

On 4/10/2016 at 3:49 PM, YoungnDumb said:

Huggy, thanks for the advice.  Spoo, will a Borat style speedo work?

This guy sounds promising...

[HuggyU2]

More good video and narrative... and Lt Gen "Matic" Otto in an interview. He's a great American and military officer. 

For those considering a career in the U-2, enjoy the following:  

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-air-force-reveals-new-360-degree-video-of-u-2-pilot-perspective/

Edited August 2, 2016 by HuggyU2

[Spoo]

A legend went west yesterday, Godspeed Mike. Hail Dragons.

Article Link

Dragon Lady Down

Mike Hua’s airplane was leaving a silvery streak of vaporized jet fuel in its wake, as its tanks slowly drained through a fractured fuel line. The thin trail was barely visible in the starlight of a summer night; only a chase plane could have seen it. Hua had no idea his gas was bleeding away. But on August 3, 1959, the only chase plane in the world that could have paced him would have been another Lockheed U-2, since that’s what Hua was flying at 70,000 feet over Utah.

Mike Hua was actually Major Hsichun Hua, an experienced F-86 Sabre pilot of the Republic of China Air Force, based on the island of Taiwan. He had been sent to Laughlin Air Force Base, in Texas, as one of a select group of Nationalist Chinese pilots appointed to train on the then super-secret spy plane so they could overfly mainland China. All of them had been arbitrarily given Western handles—Pete, Jack, Charlie, Sonny, Spike, Terry, Mickey, Mike—by their U.S. Air Force instructors. Hua, today a retired ROCAF general living in Mary­land with an aeronautical engineering doctorate from Purdue, has retained Mike as part of his name ever since.

That night in 1959, however, he was 34 years old and on just his seventh U-2 training flight. His assignment was to fly from Laughlin to overhead Big Spring, Texas; then northwest to his turnaround point at Ogden, Utah; southwest to Delta, Utah; and finally southeast for the long, lonely slog home. Hua wasn’t flying from VOR to VOR as any private pilot of the time could have done with his simple Narco VHF radio, and of course there was no such thing as GPS. He was navigating with the U-2A’s built-in sextant, taking star sights like a 19th-century mariner, albeit through a hooded cockpit scope. He was doing this while wearing a pressure suit and helmet, in a cockpit the size of a 1952 VW Bug driver’s seat, at night, in an airplane that required remarkably precise speed control. Five knots too fast meant Mach overspeed and possible failure of the fragile airframe, and 5 knots too slow meant a stall upset and equally destructive airframe failure.

All of Hua’s U-2 flights had been solos, since no two-seaters existed as yet. To have survived this far was a sign of substantial Chinese aviation talent, for the “Dragon Lady” was the hardest-to-land airplane in the Air Force’s inventory, and perhaps the hardest-to-land aircraft in living memo­ry. (Those who have piloted restored and replicated Gee Bee racers might disagree.) But Hua had landed solo six times, and his seventh U-2 touchdown was about to go down in aviation history.

The spy planes were usually landed with the help of an experienced U-2 pilot stationed at the approach end of the runway, like an aircraft carrier’s LSO, to tell the pilot how many feet above the ground he was. Assuming the pilot had at least nailed the over-the-fence airspeed, every extra foot of altitude meant 1,000 more feet of runway would be needed. Eventually—and to this day—U-2s began to be landed with the help of “mobiles.” These are U-2 pilots driving muscle cars that can easily accelerate to 100 mph from a taxiway to catch up with a landing U-2 so the driver can call out precise altitudes, even in inches, to the pilot.

Mike Hua had no mobile. In fact he didn’t have a friend in the world when his Pratt & Whitney J57 went silent 13 miles above Utah. U-2As had no fuel-quantity gauges—assumedly a weight-saving measure. A low-fuel warning light was supposed to come on when just 40 gallons remained, but Hua doesn’t remember seeing it. Since a glowing red instrument panel warning light would be impossible to ignore at night, apparently it had failed. It was 2258 local time when the big Pratt checked out and left Hua with nothing but the sound of the slipstream.

Actually, Hua did have one friend: his long-winged Lockheed jet sailplane. From 70,000 feet, a U-2 could glide 250 nautical miles to sea level—make that 200 nm in Hua’s case, since he would ultimately land at 5,900 above sea level. For every 23 feet it traveled, an engine-out U-2 sank just one foot, a glide ratio identical to that of the ubiquitous Schweitzer 2-33 two-seat sailplane.

Not far behind Hua was Hill Air Force Base, at Ogden. Crystal-clear hindsight 55 years later suggests that Hua could easily have turned around and glided to its 13,000-foot runway, where the U-2 would quickly be dragged into a hangar, its secrets intact. But below him was an unbroken undercast with tops at 40,000 feet, and Hua had watched the cloud buildup gradually obscure all ground lights during his leg from Texas to the Ogden turnaround point. Shooting an unfamiliar, dead-stick, single-­pilot instrument approach into Hill would not have been fun.

There was a better reason why Hua confidently held his southeast heading toward home. “We were told during ground school that the engine was not stable at high altitudes and would occasionally flame out,” he noted in a recent e-mail. “It could easily be relit below 35,000 feet, though. Before the first training flight, we were told to shut down the engine at altitude and to glide down to 35,000 feet to practice an air start, which we did. That night, I was frankly overconfident that the engine was having one of these ‘normal’ flameouts, so I maintained my course. When my air-start attempts failed, I was too low to reach any major field.”

Below 35,000 feet, there was enough oxygen to support a relight, but Hua had no way of knowing his tanks were dry, and nothing in the world would restart his engine.

As he entered the undercast, Hua called Hill AFB to try to get a steer away from the mountains that he knew were hidden below him. No answer. He transmitted a mayday on the guard frequency that was supposedly monitored by the military. Still no answer. Was there nobody flying late at night over Utah? Possible. Did nobody understand Hua’s Chinese-accented English? Maybe.

Life was getting complicated. He’d lost the autopilot when the engine failed and the generator went offline, and a U-2A was a full-time job to fly manually at altitude. Hua’s pressure suit had also automatically inflated, which left him in solid clouds and turbulence trying to read a chart, working radios and hand-flying the airplane while blown up like the Michelin Man. The pilot’s classic mantra “aviate, navigate, communicate” may sound simple, but not when each step requires his full attention.

Once Hua reached combustion-sustaining air at 35,000 feet, he tried three engine relights. He even got out the emergency procedures checklist to make sure he was doing it right, but of course he was trying to relight air, not jet fuel. Now he was down to 17,000 feet.

His continued involuntary descent in the clouds must have seemed a butt-clenching eternity, but at 7,000 feet above sea level the U-2 broke into the clear and Hua could see how lucky he’d been. He was flying southeast in a dark valley, with mountains to each side, their tops still in the clouds. Hua was actually just 1,000 feet or so above the ground, perhaps less. At his 11 o’clock, he saw the lights of civilization, which turned out to be the small city of Cortez, Colo. And Cortez had a municipal airport.

Luck continued to ride with Hua. He spotted the airport’s rotating beacon several miles southwest of town, and then the runway lights. The Cortez city council had recently decided that leaving the runway lights on at night was an unnecessary expense for a cash-strapped town. But as midnight neared, an inbound Frontier Airlines flight was running late. So on this night of all nights, the lights had been left on.

Hua glided across Cortez Runway 21 from west to east, then made a broad 270-degree turn to the left and gently rolled out on a long final to the 7,200-foot runway. (Don’t be fooled by that seemingly ample length. Cortez Municipal is at 5,900 feet above sea level, and at that density altitude on a warm August night, the runway was probably equivalent to a sea-level strip roughly half that length. It was also only 10 feet wider on each side than the U-2A’s 80-foot wingspan.)

In a remarkable demonstration of precision approach-speed control under extreme pressure, Hua put his big U-2A down, if not on the numbers, certainly close enough for government work, as the classic and appropriate expression has it.

The extreme challenge in landing an early U-2 was created by a combination of high-aspect-ratio wings fat with low-speed lift, particularly in ground effect, and a lack of effective lift-dumping devices. Sailplanes with U-2-like wings have powerful spoilers that are as effective as a throttle: Pop the spoilers and the glider decelerates like a Cessna with its throttle pulled to idle. Retract the spoilers and the glider reacts as though you had added power.

The only way to bring a U-2 to earth, however, was to bleed away every ounce of lift short of a stall while at the same time avoiding a stall, since dropping a U-2 onto a runway from 2 or 3 feet could terminally damage its fragile airframe. Try to land a U-2 in a level attitude on the main gear—to “wheel it on” with its wings still anxious to fly—and the spy plane would bounce back into the air and float the length of the longest runway the Air Force owned. Touch tailwheel first just as the airplane loosed its grasp on the air and a U-2 would call it a day.

Major Hua got it exactly right that night. To his surprise, the U-2’s landing gear collapsed during rollout because the airplane had lost its hydraulic pump after the engine failure, so the gear extended but lacked the hydraulic pressure to engage the downlocks. “I felt like I had made a nice landing, but then the belly scratched the runway,” Hua wrote. This put the wingtips close enough to the runway that a ground loop was inevitable. The left wing touched, and the big Lockheed spun out like an old Porsche 911, ending up facing backward in the sagebrush alongside the runway.

“I so lucky. I so lucky,” a bystander recalls Hua muttering after the landing. But luck be damned, the Cortez incident was a textbook example of how to handle a nighttime, IFR, single-engine, in-flight engine failure calmly and skillfully. Give that man a medal, the Air Force said, and awarded Hua the Distinguished Flying Cross.

From the Denver Post:

After receiving a Distinguished Flying Cross from the U.S. Air Force for his feat, Hua went on to become a four-star general in the Republic of China Air Force. He earned a master’s degree and doctorate in aeronautical engineering at Purdue University and was in charge of Taiwan’s aerospace program. Now living in Maryland, he has written or been a source for several articles about the landing. Hua also wrote a book, “Lost Black Cats: The Story of Two Captured U-2 Pilots”, about two of his comrades who were captured in mainland China after their spy planes went down.

[Day Man]

holy shit, what a story...  to Mike

[AZwildcat]

Imagine being the airfield manager at a small town Colorado airport when a 5 ft' something Chinese guy knocks on your door in a partial pressure suit in the middle of the night.

IYAABYAS!

Edited January 29, 2017 by AZwildcat

[Clark Griswold]

30k and going strong...

https://www.af.mil/News/ArticleDisplay/tabid/223/Article/1070623/u-2-breaks-30000-hour-barrier-in-fight-against-isil.aspx