Lockheed U-2C by AFV Club

1/48 scale
Kit No. AR48114
Cost: $62.00
Decals: Three versions – Two aircraft of No. 35 Squadron, Republic of China Air Force (Taiwan), September 1967; one of the 100th Strategic Reconniassance Wing, USAF, 1975
Comments: Engraved panel lines, detail cockpit and camera bay, option to display cameras on separate trolley, detailed landing gear, separately mounted wing flaps, ailerons, and dive brakes

History

The Lockheed U-2 is a single-engine, high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft built by Lockheed Aircraft Corporation specifically for the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1950’s — with the express goal of providing the CIA with aerial surveillance capability over the former Soviet Union, enabling more accurate assessments of its military strength. Initially operated only by the CIA, but now flown by the Air Force, the Navy, and NASA, the U-2 provides day and night, at very high-altitude (70,000 feet / 21,000 m), and with all-weather intelligence gathering capability. Today, in addition to military uses, the U-2 is also tasked with electronic sensor research and development, satellite calibration, and validation of data from both weather and reconnaissance satellites.

In the early 1950s, with Cold War tensions on the rise, the U.S. military as well as the CIA desired better strategic reconnaissance to help determine Soviet capabilities and intentions. The existing reconnaissance aircraft, primarily bombers converted for reconnaissance duty such as the Martin B-57, were vulnerable to anti-aircraft artillery, missiles, and fighters. It was thought an aircraft that could fly at 70,000 feet would be beyond the reach of Soviet fighters, missiles, and even radar. This would allow high altitude reconnaissance flights to be conducted safely.

Under the code name “Bald Eagle”, the Air Force issued contracts to Bell Aircraft, Martin Aircraft, and Fairchild Engine and Airplane to develop proposals for the new reconnaissance aircraft. Officials at Lockheed heard about the project and asked aeronautical engineer Clarence “Kelly” Johnson to come up with a design. Johnson was a brilliant designer, responsible for the P-38 Lightning, the P-80 Shooting Star (America’s first operational jet fighter), and the F-104 Starfighter. He was known for completing projects ahead of schedule, working in a separate division of Lockheed jokingly called the Skunk Works.

Johnson’s design, called the CL-282, married long glider-like wings to the modifed fuselage of an F-104. To save weight, his initial design lacked conventional landing gear, taking off from a dolly and landing on skids. The Air Force rejected the design, but the CIA snapped it up, as it caught the attention of several civilians on the review panel, notably Edwin Land, the father of instant photography (Kodak). Land proposed to then-CIA Director Allen Dulles that the CIA should fund and operate this aircraft. After a meeting with President Eisenhower, Lockheed received a $22.5 million contract for the first 20 aircraft. It was renamed the U-2, with the “U” referring to the deliberately vague designation “utility”. The CIA assigned the cryptonym “Aquatone” to the project, with the Air Force using the name “Oilstone” for the support facilities accorded the CIA to operate the aircraft. The U-2 made its first flight at the Groom Lake test site on August 1, 1955, during what was only intended to be a high-speed taxi run. The sailplane-like wings had so much lift that the aircraft jumped into the air at 70 knots (81 mph; 130 km/h).

Once U-2 units became operational, two units were deployed to Europe and one to the Far East. The first U-2 overflight of the Soviet Union occurred on July 4, 1956. The U-2 helped disprove the existence of a “bomber gap” between the Soviet and American air forces, and, in a coup for the CIA, provided the first photographs of the Baikonur Cosmodrome, the Soviet launch complex which sent the first Sputnik satellite into orbit. Because of the high operating altitude, U-2 pilots must wear the equivalent of a space suit with its own oxygen supply in case cabin pressure is lost at altitude. To decrease the chance of decompression sickness, pilots don the full pressure suit and begin breathing 100% oxygen one hour prior to launch to remove nitrogen from the body.

“Coffin Corner”

The unique design that gives the U-2 its remarkable performance also makes it a difficult aircraft to fly. Designed and manufactured for minimum airframe weight, it is an aircraft with little margin for error. To maintain their operational ceiling of 70,000 feet, the U-2C had to fly very near its maximum speed. Its stall speed at that altitude is only 10 knots (12 mph) below its maximum speed. This narrow window was referred to by pilots as the “coffin corner.” For 90% of the time on a typical mission, the U-2C was flying within only five knots above its stalling speed, which could cause a decrease in altitude likely to lead to detection, and also ran the risk of overstressing the lightly built airframe.

“Dragon Lady” No Term of Endearment

While the U-2’s flight controls are very responsive at high altitude – the flight envelope and altitude at which it was designed to fly — at lower altitudes, the higher air density and lack of a power-assisted control system makes the aircraft very difficult to fly. Control inputs must be extreme to achieve the desired response in flight attitude, and a great deal of physical strength is needed to operate the controls this way. The U-2 is very sensitive to crosswinds and notoriously difficult to land; the enormous lift provided by its wings gives it a tendency to float over the runway. Typically, as the U-2 approaches a runway, the cushion of air provided by the high-lift wings is so pronounced that the U-2 will not land unless the wing is fully stalled. To assist the pilot in landing, a chase car (yes, a car, not a plane) — usually a “souped up” Ford Mustang SSP, Chevrolet Camaro, or Pontiac GTO – paces the U-2 on final approach with an assistant (another U-2 pilot) talking the pilot down by calling off the declining height of the aircraft as it loses airspeed.

Equipment

The new cameras developed for the U-2 had a resolution of 2.5 feet from an altitude of 60,000 feet. Balancing is so critical on the U-2 that the camera had to use a split film, with reels on one side feeding forward while those on the other side feed backward, thus maintaining a balanced weight distribution throughout the entire flight.

The aircraft carries a variety of sensors in the nose, camera bay behind the cockpit, and wing pods. The U-2 is capable of simultaneously collecting signals, imagery intelligence and air samples. Imagery intelligence sensors include either wet film photo, electro-optic or radar imagery – the latter from the Raytheon ASARS-2. The U-2 can use both line-of-sight and beyond-line-of-sight data links. One of the most unusual instruments in the newest version of the U-2 is the off-the-shelf Sony video camera that functions as a digital replacement for the purely optical viewsight (an upside down periscope-like viewing device) that was used in older variants to get a precise view of the terrain directly below the aircraft, especially during landing.

U-2 Incident

The U-2 did not come to the attention of the American public until 1960, when a U-2 flown by CIA pilot Gary Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union on May 1, causing an international incident which wrecked the Paris Summit between President Eisenhower and Soviet Premier Khruschev, scheduled for June of that year. Eisenhower, who had been assured by the CIA that the Soviets did not have the capability to shoot a U-2 down, initially denied the existence of Powers’ spy flight. Within days, the Soviets produced Powers, alive, and subjected him to a show trial which sentenced him to ten years imprisonment for espionage. This incident embarrassed Eisenhower, damaged U.S. prestige internationally, and led to a spike in Cold War tensions that did not ease until after the signing of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 in the temporary thaw between the U.S. and the Soviet Union in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Powers was ultimately released in 1962 in exchange for Rudolf Abel, a Soviet spy who had been apprehended in the U.S.

The Cuban Missile Crisis

The U-2 again made history on October 14, 1962, when a machine from the 4080th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing, based at Laughlin Air Force Base near Del Rio, Texas, and piloted by Major Richard S. Heyser, photographed the Soviet military installing nuclear missiles near San Cristobal in Cuba, precipitating the Cuban Missile Crisis. Additional U-2 flights were ordered, but were sometimes postponed or cancelled due to weather conditions or concern that one would be shot down, as it was by then known to be vulnerable to Soviet-made anti-aircraft missiles, the prescence of which had been verified in Cuba.

In perhaps the most dangerous moment of the crisis, on October 27,1962, a U-2 from McCoy AFB was shot down over Cuba by two SA-2 Guideline surface-to-air missiles, killing the pilot, Major Rudolf Anderson, Jr. President Kennedy resisted calls for immediate retaliation, even a limited strike on the Soviet surface-to-air missile sites in Cuba. As of October 27th, the U.S. invasion of Cuba was scheduled for Monday, October 29, 1962. On October 28th, Soviet Premier Khrushchev announced on Radio Moscow that the missiles would be withdrawn from Cuba. Major Anderson was posthumously awarded the first Air Force Cross. U-2 reconnaissance flights over Cuba continued at least until the 1970s under the code name OLYMPIC FIRE.

Other Surveillance Uses of the U-2

While there is not much evidence of U-2 overflights of the Soviet Union after 1960, the U.S. continued to use it for reconnaissance over North Vietnam from 1966-1970, and over China at least until 1972. It has also been used to monitor military action in the Middle East, specifically conflicts between Israel and Egypt. NASA has made use of the U-2 to photograph space shuttle launches, in one case identifying the cause of tile loss during launches discovered in the initial post-Challenger missions. More recently, it has been deployed to Afghanistan and Libya to assist intelligence-gathering in those regions.

Retirement?

The U-2 continues to live up to its “utility” designation as it remains in frontline service more than 50 years after its first flight, despite the advent of spy satellites. This is primarily due to the ability to direct flights to objectives at short notice, which satellites cannot do. The U-2 has outlasted its Mach 3 SR-71 replacement, which was supposedly retired in 1998. Like many highly useful aircraft before it, the U-2’s retirement has been scheduled and postponed at least twice. In December 2005, the Pentagon called for the termination of the U-2 program by 2012, with some aircraft being retired by 2007. In January 2006, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld announced the pending retirement of the U-2 fleet as a cost-cutting measure, and as part of a larger U.S. Air Force reorganization including the elimination of all but 56 B-52s and a reduction in the F-117 Nighthawk fleet. Rumsfeld asserted at the time that this would not impair the Air Force’s ability to gather intelligence, given the availability of satellites and a growing supply of unmanned RQ-4 Global Hawk reconnaissance aircraft.

Retirement of the U-2 was subsequently delayed at least until 2015 due to the gaps in reconnaissance capability that would result, but since that time, the Air Force announced plans to end the RQ-4 Global Hawk Block 30 program and extend the U-2 fleet in service until 2023. At this writing, 26 U-2S aircraft are maintained in operational readiness. It seems this airframe is still just too useful to be sent to the boneyard….

The Kit

AFV Club’s is a new release and the first newly tooled kit of the Lockheed U-2 in 1/48 scale since the old Hawk kit from the 1960’s. It is injection molded in grey and consists of 187 parts, including 20 clear parts, including a choice of clear main instrument panels, as well as a choice of clear belly panels containing the camera apertures – although the instruction sheet only acknowledges one of each. The cockpit features a detailed injection seat, main instrument panel with raised relief and a bomber-style control yoke. The instrument panel features a separate part for the cone-shaped hood over the monitor in the center of the panel, essential for navigation and both detection and evasion of surfce to air missiles. The cockpit tub contains side instrument panels with raised detail.

The highly detailed camera assembly consists of 15 parts, and includes and option to mount it in the camera bay or on a separate trolley. The fuselage assembly includes not only the cockpit and camera bay, but parts for internal intake trunking along with the obligatory nose gear bay. The U-2 also has a separate tail wheel, so there is a rear bay for that as well. There is a separately mounted dorsal electronics bay running from just aft of the intakes all the way to the tail for the late U-2C models, and a rear view mirror to be cemented in one of three positions on the windscreen frame. The kit features dive brakes which can be positioned open or closed, and if open, there is additional detail to be seen within the dive brake bays.

In a final bit of detail, the kit features a sun shroud which can be positioned over the cockpit. The kit also features two “slipper” tanks that can be mounted on the leading edge of the wings. These tanks were retrofitteed to U-2C’s to improve their range, with the total fuel capacity being 1,530 gallons (6,956 liters). Range with these tanks was over 4,520 miles (7,275 km). The slipper tanks should not be confused with the larger electronics pods, which extended from both the leading and trailing edge of the wings and did not appear until the introduction of the U-2R/TR-1 in 1967-68. The kit also includes a suitable-for-framing print of the box art, a Nationalist Chinese U-2C flying at the edge of space, high enough to discern the curvature of the Earth.

Markings

The kit includes decals for three aircraft: Two aircraft are from No. 35 Squadron, Republic of China Air Force (Taiwan). The first is painted in a scheme of overall Flat Black (hence the nickname “Black Cat”) with rather diminutive Nationalist Chinese markings on the fuselage only, circa September 1967; the second is painted in a scheme of overall Midnight Blue and bears larger Nationalist Chinese markings, again on the fuselage only. It also features Light Grey panels on each side of its nose, no doubt for some kind of avionics for electronic intelligence gathering. The third set of markings is for a machine of the U.S. Air Force’s 100th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing, circa 1975, and is painted in a two-tone camouflage scheme of Grey and Light Grey upper surfaces with Light Grey undersides.

Conclusion

This kit is a quantum leap over the Testors/Hawk kit, a highly detailed example of the early U-2. But at over $60.00, this modeler has to admit that the asking price is a bit steep, even for a kit as fine as this one. Highly recommended nonetheless.

References

• Mayday: Eisenhower, Khruschev and the U-2 Affair by Michael R. Beschloss; Copyright 1986 Harper & Row Publishers, New York
• Blue Moon Over Cuba: Aerial Reconnaissance during the Cuban Missile Crisis by Captain William B. Ecker USN (ret.) and Kenneth V. Jack; Copyright 2012 by Osprey Publishing; Oxford (United Kingdom)
• www.wikipedia.org