Exactly, if I remember right they "grew" about 18' in length when hot, maintenance guys used to run out as soon as one landed to look for leaks, if there was smoke steamers dripping out anywhere then that meant a fuel or hydraulic leak.
What it's like to spend 125 days flying the U-2, according to the only active-duty pilot to ever do it
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Took me a while to dig these out and scan them. Taken from the boomer's position in a KC-135 out of Mildenhall in 82 I think...somewhere over the Berents Sea well off the western coast of Novaya Zemlya.
I had a video I took over Korea but it got lost somehow in my move from Okinawa…aaarrg
There were lots of tankers around the Island I was on in the Navy. Trust me the photos of the way it looks now and when I was there are 180 degrees off.Funny the way things turn out. At one time as an E-4 I had 9 guys working under me and I was the link between them and the Chief. I also had quality assurance control stamp to sign off on work performed. I was 19 years old. I'm proud of my service and do think about our Veterans. I worked at a Veterans center for 11 years . I cleaned their rooms and did their laundry. I talked to them while I was in the room. I've seen patient abuse. I tried to convey that to the ones that came later. I salute all veterans. I could go on.
I lived in Santa Clara, CA, in the mid '70s. The place I rented was right in the flight path of Moffat NAS. It was quite common to hear and see the P-3s, and other Navy jets come and go, but every now and then, if you were outside, you would hear a very strange, quiet "noise" overhead, and it would be a U2 coming in. One Beautiful bird!
When they landed they were so hot that the crews couldn't exit until the FD crew misted the aircraft with water to cool it down as told to me by an AF guy that was was in Great Britian.
Ties in to DRC458 expansion joints explanation. My friend said that the plane would shrink by almost a foot after cool down.
Thank you for supporting the Veterans at the Center.
More SR-71 fun facts. They had to light one afterburner to complete aerial refueling ...
theaviationgeekclub.com
Former SR-71 Pilot Explains why the Blackbird had to Light one Afterburner during Aerial Refueling - The Aviation Geek Club
Former SR-71 Pilot Explains why the Blackbird had to Light one Afterburner during Aerial Refueling
theaviationgeekclub.com
I got involved in rebuilding the U2 landing gear housings. We'd get them in and do a complete teardown and inspection. I'd write up and submit the dimensional reports to Lockheed and their engineering dept. would write up the rebuild plan. Then we did it. IIRC when they came in in fairly good shape and we only had to go one oversize increment on the hydraulic cylinder areas, we could get 12 rebuilds out of each housing. The front housing was just a 7075 aluminum forging. The rear housing was some sort of a special titanium alloy.
We also had orders building new gear as I was leaving that company and had received the raw forgings from Lockheed. It took Lockheed years to redevelop the titanium metallurgical specs on the titanium gear housing. The German metallurgical engineer that worked up the specs had retired many many years prior and was no doubt deceased by that time. They built a crap ton of gear initially for each plane in the fleet so they were kind of stuck, I doubt they thought they'd ever need more. Kind of hard to believe that they would lose that info, but it was done in the '50s, so there's that. We finally got the forgings after they got them the way they wanted metallurgically and got the order to build more. It was damned interesting work. Pretty tedious too knowing you were dealing with a multi-thousand piece of material that could only be sourced from one place and it took a year or more to get.
We also built cooling carts for the U2. Tons of ground equipment and A/C unit in a roll around "cart" they used when stationed in desert locations which was the norm generally. The electronics and cameras when in the plane were so sensitive the entire aircraft had to be cooled 24/7 and was always hooked up to these unless being prepped for flight. Interesting times!
ETA: These are all rebuilds.
We also had orders building new gear as I was leaving that company and had received the raw forgings from Lockheed. It took Lockheed years to redevelop the titanium metallurgical specs on the titanium gear housing. The German metallurgical engineer that worked up the specs had retired many many years prior and was no doubt deceased by that time. They built a crap ton of gear initially for each plane in the fleet so they were kind of stuck, I doubt they thought they'd ever need more. Kind of hard to believe that they would lose that info, but it was done in the '50s, so there's that. We finally got the forgings after they got them the way they wanted metallurgically and got the order to build more. It was damned interesting work. Pretty tedious too knowing you were dealing with a multi-thousand piece of material that could only be sourced from one place and it took a year or more to get.
We also built cooling carts for the U2. Tons of ground equipment and A/C unit in a roll around "cart" they used when stationed in desert locations which was the norm generally. The electronics and cameras when in the plane were so sensitive the entire aircraft had to be cooled 24/7 and was always hooked up to these unless being prepped for flight. Interesting times!
ETA: These are all rebuilds.
