Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [68]
Jones would not be traveling into space. But at the height the U-2 reached, he would skirt the edge of the earth’s atmosphere, and his special orange flight suit would keep the gases in his intestines from expanding and bursting like overinflated balloons if the U-2’s cabin pressure suddenly failed or if he had to parachute out of the plane. Unfortunately, there were no further contingency plans for either of those unpleasant scenarios. To save weight, the early versions of the U-2 were not equipped with an ejection system or a burdensome second engine. The plane had to travel light to reach its lofty objectives, and redundancy systems would weigh it down. Nor had the designers bothered to install a long-range radio, because in case of a mechanical malfunction deep in enemy territory, no aid would be forthcoming. The U-2’s only defense was altitude; no other aircraft could fly as high. As long as the plane stayed at its ceiling of 70,000 feet, it was untouchable. But if its single J57 turbo-jet engine malfunctioned, stalled, or flamed out, as it had a nasty habit of doing, and the pilot had to dip below 40,000 feet to restart it, he would be exposed and completely helpless. The men who flew U-2s understood that if something went wrong, there were no backup systems. They themselves were not expected to survive. In fact, they were under instructions not to survive, and already five had died during training exercises.
“I was assured that the young pilots undertaking these missions were doing so with their eyes wide open,” Eisenhower later wrote, “motivated by a high degree of patriotism, a swashbuckling bravado, and certain material inducements.”
It took a special breed of person to accept the U-2’s peculiar conditions of employment. The high hazard pay—three times regular air force salary, plus bonuses—could not have been the principal motivation for volunteering into the airborne espionage service. To be sure, the money was nice. Some U-2 pilots drove Mercedes convertibles, and Jones earned more than twice the annual wage of a senior technocrat like von Braun, another Mercedes aficionado. But risk rather than reward was the primary recruiting tool. At the Lovelace Clinic near Albuquerque, where pilot prospects were sent, Bissell had devised a very elaborate psychological profile of the sort of men he sought: patriots, naturally, but people who liked living on the edge, for whom death was not a deterrent.
Bissell’s pilots had to meet one other critical criterion: they had to be exceptionally gifted airmen, because the U-2 was among the most difficult aircraft to fly. Simply positioning the plane for takeoff required great skill. Its turning radius of 300 feet was nearly ten times that of a regular fighter jet, and visibility from the cockpit was virtually nonexistent. The plane had another troublesome characteristic. At high altitude, where even the U-2’s 200-foot wingspan barely generated lift in the thin air, its 505-miles-per-hour stall speed and 510-miles-per-hour maximum speed converged in what pilots called the “coffin corner,” leaving a scant margin of error. On landing, the massive wings—three times longer than the sixty-foot plane itself—also required deft handling. To get the U-2 down safely, the pilot had to stall the plane precisely two feet off the tarmac, exactly on the center line, and keep the massive wings off the ground by flying the aircraft down the runway in perfect equilibrium. If the U-2 tilted a few feet to either side, a wing tip could slam into the concrete and sheer off or send the plane cart-wheeling. The balancing act was all the trickier