Lockheed U-2A

The U-2A was the realisation of Lockheed's CL-282 proposal, which the USAF had first turned down, among other reasons because it used a J73 engine rather than the more proven Pratt & Whitney J57. The USAF's Seaberg helped persuade the Air Force to back the project provided it adopted the higher-performance J57, and final approval for a joint USAF-CIA programme came in November 1954. Richard Bissell ran the project with covert funding; in March 1955 Lockheed received a $22.5 million contract for the first 20 aircraft. Design and manufacture took place at the Skunk Works in Burbank, California, with engineers embedded on the shop floor to fix problems as they arose. Because the aircraft could not be tested from Burbank Airport, the Groom Lake dry lake in Nevada was chosen. The aircraft was named U-2 in July 1955, the same month the first example, Article 341, was delivered to Groom Lake.

Article 341 was the original prototype and never received a USAF serial. On 1 August 1955 it left the ground during what was meant to be only a high-speed taxi test: the sailplane-like wing lifted it at about 130 km/h while test pilot Tony LeVier had no intention of flying. The lake bed had no markings and the brakes were weak, so he bounced the aircraft once before it stopped, with only minor damage. On the first intentional flight three days later landing was still the hard part until LeVier found, on his sixth attempt, that touching down on the rear wheel first worked best; ground effect held the aircraft off the runway for long distances. On 8 August the prototype reached 9,800 metres, proving that Kelly Johnson had met his promised specification and deadline; by 16 August it was flying at 15,800 metres, an altitude never before held in sustained flight, and by 8 September it reached 19,800. High-altitude flameouts were cured with a new low-volatility fuel that Shell developed for the J57. In April 1956 U-2s made eight flights over the United States that convinced the project's overseers the aircraft was ready; on one of them an aircraft flamed out over Tennessee and glided more than 480 km to land at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico. Not everything was so benign: there were three fatal accidents in 1956 alone, the first on 15 May.

The U-2A was powered by a J57-P-37A of 11,200 lb static thrust (about 5,080 kg). To hold their operational ceiling of about 21,000 metres, the U-2A and U-2C had to fly very close to their never-exceed speed, and at that height the margin above the stall was only 19 km/h: the so-called coffin corner. Cameras and electronic equipment were carried in the nose and in a large fuselage bay, and large fuel tanks allowed missions of about six hours covering almost 4,600 kilometres at more than 18 km altitude.

In January 1956 the impressed USAF decided to obtain its own aircraft and eventually bought 31 U-2s through the CIA; the transaction's code name, Project DRAGON LADY, gave the aircraft its nickname. With the approval of NACA director Hugh Dryden, Bissell's team built a cover story presenting the aircraft as a high-altitude weather research platform, which is why the first CIA unit, Detachment A, was publicly known as the 1st Weather Reconnaissance Squadron, Provisional (WRSP-1). Such high flights had an unexpected side effect: the U-2 and later OXCART account for more than half of all UFO reports of the late 1950s and much of the 1960s.

The British government approved deployment to RAF Lakenheath in January 1956 but, after the Lionel Crabb affair, asked for a postponement, so in June 1956 Detachment A moved to Wiesbaden, Germany, while Giebelstadt was prepared. On 20 June 1956 a U-2 flew over Poland and East Germany. On 4 July 1956 a U-2A completed the first overflight of the Soviet Union, Mission 2013, in Article 347 with Hervey Stockman at the controls; its targets were the Leningrad submarine yards and a count of Myasishchev M-4 Bison bombers. The second, the next day, was flown by Carmine Vito and took the programme's only photographs of Moscow. The film showed MiG-15s and MiG-17s trying and failing to reach the aircraft. After the Soviet protest of 10 July, Eisenhower halted flights over Eastern Europe, but the eight overflights already made had shown that the bomber gap did not exist: no Bison was found at the nine bases visited. In May 1956 Turkey approved Detachment B at Incirlik, near Adana, whose missions went on to cover the Suez Crisis.

The J57 was soon replaced by the J75 of later models, and A airframes were rebuilt: according to Wikipedia, 13 became U-2Cs with the J75-P-13 and enlarged intakes, and others became air-refuellable U-2Fs or carrier-capable U-2Gs. The aircraft the Soviets shot down on 1 May 1960 with Francis Gary Powers aboard was already a U-2C, Article 360. Article 347 itself, the seventh U-2 built, delivered on 9 February 1956 with serial 56-6680, flew as a U-2A before becoming a U-2C; the National Air and Space Museum acquired it from the USAF on 30 August 1982. Another original U-2A, Article 389, is displayed at the National Museum of the USAF. Production figures disagree: Wikipedia gives 49 U-2As built, while the Federation of American Scientists gives 30, all converted to later models and retired by April 1989.