The plane had to sustain flight above 70,000ft, have a 3,000-mile (4,800km) range and carry 700lb (212kg) of equipment. The U-2 flew for the first time only eight months later, on 1 August 1955, in a remote location in Nevada now known as Area 51. It was clear that Johnson and his team had come up with something special.
“The U-2 marks the start of a shift towards technical intelligence that is solving these intelligence problems not by John le Carré-style spies on the ground, but through advanced technology,” says Peter J Westwick, director of the Aerospace History Project at the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West. He also wrote Stealth: The Secret Contest to Invent Invisible Aircraft and says, “the U-2 is really kind of the first big technological jump into technical intelligence”.
The U-2s in operation today can carry nearly three times as much twice as far and fly for three times as long as the original aircraft
The U-2’s story could have been very different. In 1966 its future looked bleak; only 15 of the original 55 U-2s built were still in operation. Crucially, the decision was made to restart production in the 1980s, a tricky business when many of the original engineers had retired. The planes that flew off the rebuilt production lines certainly looked similar to the original, but they were nearly 40% bigger and had a new modular design in order to carry more – and heavier – equipment, and switch it more easily for different kinds of missions.