U-2 "Dragon Lady" Poster - High-Altitude Strategic Reconnaissance

The Lockheed U-2 Dragon Lady is one of the most remarkable aircraft ever built and, at over 70 years since its first flight, one of the most remarkable still flying. Designed by Kelly Johnson's Skunk Works in the early 1950s in response to an urgent intelligence requirement to photograph Soviet military installations, the U-2 was optimized for a single purpose: flying higher than any aircraft could reach at the time, at altitudes where Soviet interceptors could not follow. Its enormous wingspan, 105 feet on a fuselage only 63 feet long, gives it the aspect ratio of a glider, allowing it to maintain altitude at the thin air of 70,000 feet where the effective atmospheric pressure is less than 3% of sea level. The U-2 was at the center of the most significant intelligence crisis of the Cold War when Francis Gary Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union on May 1, 1960, an incident that collapsed a planned superpower summit and exposed the depth of American overflights. Despite that traum