Reconnaissance

The plane

Early in the Cold War, veterans of World War II reconnaissance argued the need for “pre-D-Day” knowledge of enemy capabilities, installations and movements. They proposed a program of high-altitude photography, expecting that the ceiling of safety from Russian intercept by combat plane or radar was 65,000 feet. If they could fly planes at that altitude, planes equipped with high-resolution photographic equipment, it would be possible to know in near-real time what the Soviets were up to.

Both the technical and the political hurdles to developing and using the plane that became the U-2 were significant.

At the time the project was proposed, the highest altitude aircraft were converted RAF Canberra planes that could reach 48,000 feet, not nearly high enough. The planes envisioned not only had to be able to fly high, they also had to be long-range — the Soviet Union covered a vast territory and any spy flight would have to reach altitude, and thus be beyond detection or interception, before leaving friendly airspace. The dual needs for height and range conflicted: range requires a lot of fuel, which is heavy. Altitude requires the lightest plane possible.

The first proposals were to further modify existing designs, but the United States Air Force was not interested — the modifications made to lighten the planes would have stripped them of military capabilities, rendering them useful only for reconnaissance. The Air Force wanted no planes that could not be used in combat. The design that eventually became the U-2 was an unsolicited bid submitted by Lockheed and not so much rejected as ridiculed by the Air Force. No weapons. No wheels. Only one engine. And even too small to hold a camera with a lens of adequate focal length for the task at hand (the cameras were a separate technological achievement; see the essay on the B Camera here).

But the Lockheed design had supporters in high places. They went straight to Eisenhower, who agreed that the project should be housed not in the Air Force but with the CIA. Handing the project to the CIA not only circumvented military bureaucracy and interservice rivalry, it also addressed strong anxieties about plausible deniability. If a plane were to be shot down over Soviet airspace and that plane were a United States military plane, how likely was it that the incident would trigger another hot war? Better to have a plane with no weapons and no direct military connection in that case.

The project was approved late in 1954. The features of the plane that allowed it to be light yet long-range were truly remarkable. Lockheed had designed not a standard plane at all, but a single-engine jet-powered glider. A load factor of only 2.5G saved weight but made the plane fragile and meant its turning radius was wide. The tail assembly was attached to the body with only three tension bolts, saving weight but resulting in further fragility. The wings were separate pieces attached to the fuselage sides, not a single span through the plane: yet again, weight saving, and necessary to make space for the cameras, but a factor introducing fragility. There was no proper landing gear, making take off and landing extremely difficult. At take-off there were jettisonable wing-support wheels. After landing, the plane tipped to one side as it came to rest. The wings were the hardest part to design. Hollow to hold fuel, they were very long and narrow and thin. The U-2 was extremely difficult to fly — a single pilot (saves weight) in a non-powered cockpit pressurized to 29,000 feet (saves weight) had to wear astronaut gear and perform feats of endurance on real missions. Pilots could lose up to 5% of their body weight over a standard 8-12 hour mission, largely through dehydration.

Margin for error in flying was tiny; there was a range of only 6 knots between low-speed engine stall and high-speed breakage of the plane at maximum altitude. Fragile and difficult to fly as it was, the first U-2 had a range of 2,950 miles and a maximum altitude of 72,000 feet. The goal had been achieved.

The flights

The first U-2 test flights were flown in 1955. The US Air Force was so impressed that less than six months after the first test flight they started ordering their own U-2s through the CIA, though they had shunned the project to begin with. In 1956 the first U-2 squadrons were moved to bases in allied European countries, and the first reconnaissance missions flown.

The U-2 has been used as recently as 2025 for surveillance along the U.S.-Mexico border. It is one of the longest-lived operational planes ever designed, despite the fact that it never achieved its real purpose of being indetectable. Original estimates of how high it would be safe to fly failed to account for rapid developments in Soviet radar capacity, intercept aircraft, and surface-to-air missiles. Eisenhower also had great concern about the value of surveillance information compared to the diplomatic damage done by the U-2 program. Relatively few direct overflights of the Soviet Union were ever made, though the U-2 did play a role in disproving a feared missile gap between the United States and the USSR in the late 1950s. The best-known direct overflight was surely the last; Gary Powers was shot down in 1960. He survived, and so did enough of the plane to allow the Soviets to put it on display.

Despite limited use over the USSR itself, U-2 reconnaissance missions were frequent and often of critical importance over other targets. The two missions that produced images hosted on this website were part of the mission code-named CHESS — you can see on the negatives ‘TOP SECRET CHESS’. This mission occurred from June 1956-May of 1960, and included surveillance of the Suez Crisis in which images shot just ten minutes apart allowed for unprecedented understanding of the destruction of Egyptian forces by the British, French, and Israelis. Flights of CHESS took off from an airbase near Adana, Turkey, and covered sensitive areas not only in Egypt but also Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. Images from many of these flights have not yet been declassified.

Our two flights occurred in 1959, on 10 January (flight B8604) and 30 October (B8649). Neither focused exclusively on Egypt, nor did either cover all of Egypt. Within Egypt the two flights overlapped in their coverage somewhat, particularly in the south in the area from Aswan to Qena. Additionally B8604 overflew the Faiyum and parts, though not all, of Middle Egypt. B8649 occurred while the Nile inundation was receding but still high, capturing the landscape shortly before the construction of the High Dam at Aswan ended the annual flood. That flight had its cameras on as it zig-zagged across the entirety of the delta. Comparing site preservation across time by means of U-2 images, CORONA satellite images, and modern satellite images, has been one of the first research goals of this project.

We are sometimes asked for images of sites that lie in places on the Nile that were not covered by our flights. We wish that gathering archaeological information had been the purpose of those flights — then surely they would not have skipped Middle Egypt, surely they would have flown over Kerma in Sudan. Rich as this data set is for Egyptologists, it was created for other purposes. Both its incredible sharpness and the limits in its coverage reflect that original purpose as military reconnaissance during the Cold War.

Reconnaissance

The plane

The flights

Further reading