I ask this with all sincerity, genuinely what went so right? How did it manage to outlive the Blackbird and survive in service despite the shootdown and the problem where it'd basically asphyxiate the pilot and needs a guide car just to land?
>>64455192Compared to the SR-71 it's dead simple and it just works. I mean, it's a tube with long ass wings. Hard to improve on that. I am a big fan of it's distant, twin-engined cousin, however.
>>64455192the U2 was cheaper to operate and with the collapse of the soviet union, there wasnt nearly as much of a point to having a super-fast spy plane that could outrun missilesthe blackbirds were also not really kept up to date in comms equipment, they still needed to land before their data could be uploaded, and no one wanted to pay the cost of giving them a real-time uplinkthe U2 managed to survive by being good-enough, which was good-enough to prevent it from being on budgetary chopping blocksalthough the global hawk is intended to eventually replace the U2, the U2 is still currently able to perform well enough against them
>>64455246>the U2 was cheaper to operatethis right here OP. and drones started stealing pilots jobs long before many of us realize. the SR-71 served as a test bed for the drones that would replace it.
>>64455246>>64455289While that makes perfect sense why the U2 outlasted the SR-71 (it's no secret that thing was a bitch and a half to actually get airborne), I'm still curious why the dragonlady wasn't dropped like a stone as soon as the global hawk came online. I mean it's been over 20 years since it's introduction, you'd think the U2 would've been retired by nowAlso, semi-related but not really, where were the soviets spy planes? Did they just never bother with the concept despite it making perfect sense for them?
>>64455316afaik U-2 still beats out the Global Hawk in terms of payload and max altitude, as well as needing a smaller crew to operate and maintain.
>>64455316the U2 has better sensors than the global hawk and currently isnt any more expensive to operate per hourwhile they are looking to upgrade the global hawk to the same standards as the U2 and global hawk operating costs will eventually drop below the U2s, that still means the U2 has a clear use case as of the moment and so its retirement date was pushed to 2050 and then pushed again to "whenever"
>>64455339Sauce? I thought they were retiring them 2026sauce - https://www.airandspaceforces.com/u-2-record-mission-70-years-retirement/
>>64455192It doesn't cost an arm and a dick per flight hour, and it allows intel gathering that satellites might struggle with or not be in position for.
>>64455246IIRC Congress gave the Air Force a shit ton of money to update the Blackbird but they didn’t want to do that so quietly illegally spent the money on other stuff and then went “whoops looks like we can’t afford to do what you told us without more money” but for once Congress didn’t fall for it and so they got retired like the Aor Force wanted from the start.
>>64455360>https://www.airandspaceforces.com/u-2-record-mission-70-years-retirementnot surprising. Ben Rich kept this thing from getting retired over 40 years ago; probably should've gone to pasture then
>>64455384Likely. It's not going to do well in a shooting war. Shit is useless unless you have total air superiority.It's cool as hell, and the pilots are basically astronauts, but I think the U-2 has had its day.
It must have been a huge burden to build large SAM sites across the country just to counter reconnaissance aircraft.
>>64455192>take an F-104>give it wings
>>64455668>F-104 without wings>crash-o-matic, yet somehow stays with the Italians into the 2000s>F-104 with wings>incredibly difficult, slow, and frankly bad spyplane, yet is somehow still in service with usI think the starfighter and her sister are the actual MCs of aviation, that or they're the main antagonists that the writers are too lazy to write out
>>64455192it delivers results more efficiently than satellites, and that's important to glowniggers
>>64455316as strange as it is to say, soviet spy planes flying over mainland USA just wasn't a goal or a need. the soviets had a GREAT intel network in the US, just not in any of the places the FBI and CIA were looking of course. the KGB was more than willing to shell out big bucks to people who sold them secrets, and it was a pretty open deal that they ran, all while maintaining a solid propaganda façade for a long while at the start of the Cold War that they were indeed first and foremost concerned about the workers of the world. the modern FSB wishes it was a quarter of the agency the KGB before it was, and the CIA has never quite managed to convert organic foreign assets in the field quite as well as the KGB has since the end of the Cold War, and thus has compensated with technology and in-field deniable agents.
>>64455192>>64455228>>64455246>>64455316Neither the U-2 or SR-71 in the long run were used for what their original design role was: photographic overflight(in the case of the SR, it was a 2-seat multisensor recon development of the original photographic overflight cameras-only A-12)Both airplanes were developed for and by the Central Intelligence Agency, not the U.S. Air Forcethe Air Force's 2-seat derivative (of the CIA's A-12) SR-71 first flew in December 1964When you start talking about 'muh fifty years' (<--with respect to the U-2) or 'why did the SR-71 get cancelled' the answer is that both airplanes' design roles, originally, were photographic overflight which was made totally obsolete upon the A-12's entry into CIA operational service 1966 with the NRO's KH-8 GAMBIT-3 low earth orbit vehicle.In other words both the CIA's A-12 and USAF's SR-71 were technologically obsolete by 1967 when they entered service.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_aerial_reconnaissance_of_the_Soviet_Union
>>64458963Satellites are very predictable, and only have a limited number of orbital changes before the fuel is exhausted and it's stuck looking in the same place forever. It's much easier to task a spy plane to take a look at a developing situation.
>>64461981(You) have zero idea of what you're posting about.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeTQhTtrTtsBoth the U-2 and and A-12 were made completely technologically obsolete after the mid-1960s from their design mission of photographic overflight.thereafter the military used the SR and U-2 for multisensor reconnaissance missions, not aerial photography <--Their primary design role
