An interesting look at the peculiar landing procedure of the U-2 Dragon Lady.
The video below shows a U.S. Air Force U-2 Dragon Lady, radio callsign “FORTH 01” recovering at RAF Fairford, that has hosted a semi-permanent deployment of U-2s spyplanes for quite some time now, at the end of a surveillance mission.
The footage, filmed last week by our friend Ben Ramsay of UK Aviation Movies, is worth of remark because it includes radio talkdown and provides a look at the iconic ISR (Intelligence Surveillance Reconnaissance) aircraft and its sensors.
The U-2S #68-10337/BB belongs to the 99th Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron, from Beale AFB, California, and carries the ASARS-2 (Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar System) under the extended radome on the nose that allows the aircraft to catch high-fidelity radar imagery of the battleground out to about 100 miles on either side of the aircraft’s position; a huge the huge Senior Span or Senior Spur dorsal pod, that houses an uplink antenna for satellite communication that allows the U-2S to beam its intelligence (data or imagery) back to any location BLOS (Beyond Line Of Sight) in near to real-time; and the wing-mounted “Senior Glass” superpods housing intelligence gathering sensors.
From 01:10 mark, you also get a pretty cool view at the landing procedure and the role played by the “chase car”: chase automobiles (in this case, a Dodge Charger) are used to supervise take offs, landings (and touch and gos) wherever U-2 Dragon Lady pilots bring their planes. Such sportcars are driven by highly trained pilots who are in contact with and act as ground-based wingmen for the pilot aboard the Dragon Lady: they call out the residual altitude to touchdown and wing attitude, and provide general assistance by radio talkdown. In fact, the U-2 is very difficult to land: its shape is such that the pilot’s view is obstructed by the airframe and there’s also a significant risk of hitting any ground obstacle with a wingtip. Moreover, the bicycle configuration of the landing gear, with a forward set of main wheels located just behind the cockpit, and a rear set located behind the engine, along with the need to drop a wingtip to the ground (on titanium skidplates) to come to a halt, make landings extremely difficult. That’s why Dragon Lady pilots (as well as RQ-4 Global Hawk unmanned planes) rely on chase cars to perform safe landing operations across the globe.
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Interestingly, the aircraft can also be tracked online every now and then, as they launch or return to their deployment base:
U-2 Dragon at 60,000ft over Denmark this afternoon heading back to Fairford, UK. Given it’s role the transponder is off when it doesn’t want to be seen #Dragon #OSINT pic.twitter.com/YZjfSkKQtr
— Saint1 (@Saint1Mil) July 21, 2020
