Word: pilots
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Last Inch. The tapered, square-tipped wings, reaching for 45 ft. to either side of a slim 40-ft. fuselage, gave the U-2 the look of a high-performance sailplane. They suggest a range far beyond that circumscribed by the fuel supply. Editor Sekigawa, a glider pilot himself, speculated that the U-2 was built to climb under its own power, soar with its engine cut, for long, valuable miles in the thin upper atmosphere. Its Pratt & Whitney J57 turbojet engine could kick it along at speeds just under the speed of sound, and its light frame could almost...
...idle to think it is not being used for other reconnaissance while it goes about researching air conditions. Otherwise, why was it necessary to threaten Japanese with guns to get them away from the crippled plane? And why did the plane have no identification marks? Why did the pilot have no identifying marks on his clothes...
Plane-Happy. Editor Sekigawa guessed more than most brass in Washington. Once the U-2 was test-flown, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) set up a pilot training unit ostensibly under control of Lockheed-but most of Lockheed's top officials made it a point to know very little about it. Everything was turned over to Vice President Clarence L. ("Kelly") Johnson, who is in charge of Advanced Development Projects. The training unit recruited select U.S. pilots, and presumably they were drilled in the same rigorous survival training as Strategic Air Command pilots. Presumably they got long...
...finished high school in Grundy, Va., got a B.A. at Milligan College in Tennessee, and enlisted in the Air Force. In 1951 he was accepted for aviation cadet training, got his wings a year later. But even during the Korean war, when he was a full-fledged jet fighter pilot. Powers never saw service overseas. The Air Force did not seem to hold enough excitement for him, and in 1956 he resigned "to seek employment with civilian industry...
That employment meant the U-2 program at Lockheed. It meant the rigorous training of a modern-day espionage intelligence agent who had first of all to be a fine pilot, whose intricate instruments would do the actual work for him. Powers learned the tightlipped, laconic line of the secret agent. After he and his wife moved to Turkey, he convinced his parents that he was doing only weather work, that he never flew closer than 100 miles to the borders of Russia, that life in Adana was long repetitious periods of boredom between infrequent flights...