Lockheed pitched arming the U-2 with anti-ship missiles
In the later years of the Cold War, Lockheed proposed arming their high-flying U-2 spy plane with experimental long-range anti-ship missiles that would have made it a terror over the…
This mysterious desert air base could be China’s new ‘Area-51’
What started out as a lone dusty airfield in the middle of a remote desert in China is being built up at a furious pace. The airstrip raised eyebrows when…
A Soviet pilot claims he brought down Francis Gary Powers – not a missile
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the United States had near-perfect intelligence photos of the entire Soviet Union. In the days before satellite imagery, the Air Force had to go out and get this kind of intel the old-fashioned way, using a camera …
Here’s how this historic spy plane keeps an eye on the battlefield
The 64th anniversary of the U-2 spy plane’s historic, and accidental, first flight came in early August 2019.
While much about the Dragon Lady has changed in the past six decades — most of the 30 or so in use now were built in the 1980s, an…
U-2 spy plane took its first flight 64 years ago, but it was an accident
On Aug. 1, 1955, a prototype of the U-2 spy plane sprinted down a runway at Groom Lake in Nevada, and its massive wings quickly lifted it into the sky.
That wasn’t exactly how it was supposed to go. It was meant to be a high-speed taxi test, …
Flying for more than 60 years, today’s Dragon Lady is nothing like the past
Since the mid-1950s, the US Air Force’s U-2 Dragon Lady has been cruising the upper reaches of the atmosphere, snooping almost totally unnoticed.
While the mission is pretty much the same, the aircraft doing it are much different.
“The…