The U-2 might be 57 years old, a geriatric in military-technology years, but is slated to keep going until the 2020s as the Air Force reduces funding for surveillance drones in favor of the updated, Soviet-era aircraft.
Only nine months ago, Northrop Grumman, the company responsible for constructing the Global Hawk, told NYT reporter Christopher Drew that they expected to have enough Global Hawks in the air for the air force to retire its fleet of U-2’s by 2015.
But the U-2 flies more missions than ever and has racked up over 95,000 hours in the last 9 years, Air Force spokeswoman Staff Sgt. Heidi Davis said in the L.A. Times.
First flown in 1955 and first acknowledged in 1960 when U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers crashed in the U.S.S.R, the U-2 has been kept relevant with new engines, cockpits, cameras, sensors, and wings, costing $1.7 billion since 1994, according to the same L.A. Times article
“It’s still the same machine — it’s just better,” said Doug Lantry, a historian with the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, in a May 28 NPR article.
Apparently, even better than the Global Hawk drones designed to replace it, at least in some respects.
While the Global Hawk can stay in the air twice as long as the U-2, has more automated sensors to collect information, and can be flown by pilots stationed in front of computers in California, the U2 can do the same job more reliably.
The downside is that landings are more complicated and the U-2 has to fly in 12-hour spurts with a space-suit-clad pilot in the cockpit, prepped for the 70,000 ft. climb by an hour breathing pure oxygen.
But the biggest factor that went into making the decision is that each Global Hawk costs around $215 million, as compared to the U-2’s that were paid off decades ago, said the Air Force Times.
Reuters reports that the Global Hawk is only one of many programs facing cutbacks or elimination in the Pentagon’s fiscal 2013 budget as part of plan intended to cut $487 billion in over the next decade.
There are complications, of course, including a NATO decision to purchase a version of the Global Hawk and a U.S. House committee’s vote to restore the Global Hawk funding. But the U-2, is still holding its own and flying true.
“This thing loves to fly,” Col. Steve Rodriguez, the head of the U-2 training program, told NPR.
