Documents / FOIA release
This is a 1992 CIA History Staff monograph by Gregory W. Pedlow and Donald E. Welzenbach, originally classified Secret NOFORN and approved for release in 2013. It covers the CIA's manned overhead reconnaissance program from 1954 to 1974 and the two aircraft it developed, the U-2 and the A-12 OXCART. The history covers the U-2 overflights of the Soviet Union, the 1960 downing of Francis Gary Powers and later operations in Asia and Latin America. It also includes a section on U-2s, UFOs and Operation BLUE BOOK.
“Headquarters”25 pages
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
Secret NOFORN
Chapter 2
Koon, call the commander of Kirtland AFB near Albuquerque. General Koon told the base commander about the sealed orders and explained that an unusual aircraft would make a deadstick landing at Kirtland within the next half hour. The general then instructed the base commander to have air police keep everyone away from the craft and get it inside a hanger as quickly as possible.
After a half hour passed, the base commander called the Pentagon to ask where the crippled aircraft was. As he was speaking, the officer saw the U-2 touch down on the runway and remarked, "It's not a plane, it's a glider!" Even more surprised were the air police who surrounded the craft when it came to a halt. As the pilot climbed from the cockpit in his "space" suit, one air policeman remarked that the pilot looked like a man from Mars. The pilot, Jacob Kratt, later reported to Cunningham that, from the beginning of the first flameout until the landing at Albuquerque, the U-2 had covered over 900 miles, including more than 300 by gliding. $ ^{58} $
Aside from this extraordinary gliding ability, however, the U-2 was a very difficult aircraft to fly. Its very light weight, which enabled it to achieve extreme altitude, also made it very fragile. The aircraft was also very sleek, and it sliced through the air with little drag. This feature was dangerous, however, because the U-2 was not built to withstand the G-forces of high speed. Pilots had to be extremely careful to keep the craft in a slightly nose-up attitude when flying at operational altitude. If the nose dropped only a degree or two into the nose-down position, the plane would gain speed at a dramatic rate, exceeding the placarded speed limit in less than a minute, at which point the aircraft would begin to come apart. Pilots, therefore, had to pay close attention to the aircraft's speed indicator because at 65,000 feet there was no physical sensation of speed, without objects close at hand for the eye to use as a reference. $ ^{59} $
## THREE FATAL CRASHES IN 1956
The first fatality directly connected with flying the U-2 occurred on 15 May 1956, when test pilot Wilburn S. Rose, flying article 345A, had trouble dropping his pogos, the outrigger wheels that keep the Not linked to a story yet.
FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 406 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.